Casanova: philosopher, gambler, lover, priest

Frances Wilson reviews Casanova: Philosopher, Gambler, Lover, Priest by Ian Kelly

What is Casanova's biographer to do? The retired libertine did the job so well himself in his Histoire de ma vie that no one could possibly improve on his story, just as no one setting out to describe his extraordinarily restless life could have read, travelled or written more than Casanova, or thought more about the business of living than he did, or lived as bravely or as excessively.

Casanova
Casanova preferred his women to smell of cheese

The Histoire, which Casanova wrote at the end of his days when he was working as a librarian at Dux Castle in Bohemia, details with such wit, candour and style his peripatetic years as a priest, con-man, cabbalist, violinist, soldier, alchemist, prisoner, fugitive, gambler, intellectual, writer and lover, while inadvertently giving such a vivid picture of mid-18th-century Europe, that not only is there little for anyone to add but due to its sheer bulk - over 3,800 pages, making up 12 volumes - the beleaguered biographer must rather choose what to take away in order to make his own version a reasonable length.

Casanova has baffled and thwarted many of those writers who, while trying to describe and evaluate his experiences, have succeeded only in repeating in edited form the events as he tells them, but in Ian Kelly he has at last found his Boswell. Himself an actor, Kelly is immediately alert to the theatricality of his subject.

Born the illegitimate son of a Venetian actress in a city where it was mandatory to be masked from October to Ash Wednesday, Casanova lived a life shaped by the slipperiness of the masquerade and the playfulness of the theatre. It is as a player of parts on the great European stage that he describes himself in his Histoire.

Accordingly, Kelly shapes his biography around not chapters but dramatic acts and scenes, with refreshing intermezzi where he pauses to discourse, in true Enlightenment fashion, not only on Casanova's involvement in the Cabbala, the 'fusion of Gnosticism, Egyptian mathematics, neo-Platonism, Judaic mysticism and personal revelation' by which he was so mysteriously intrigued; but also on his means of travel (important in terms of sex-on-the-road), his love of food (equal and analogous to his love of women), and his attitude to women (most appreciated when they smelt of cheese).
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To focus on the women. Between the age of 16, when he lost his virginity, and his late forties, when he lost his potency, Casanova slept with around 130 of them, which works out at an average of four a year. This may or may not seem a great deal for a man who never married or stayed in one place for too long, but Kelly argues that Casanova deserves his place in history not because of the quantity of bodies he enjoyed but because of the guilt-free quality of the enjoyment as he describes it in his memoirs. The Histoire 'posited firmly, for the first time in the Western canon, the idea that an understanding of sex - with all its irrationality and destructive potential - is key to an understanding of the self'.

Behind the masks, Casanova's 'self' emerges as a complex affair. His first sexual encounter was with a pair of sisters whom he enjoyed simultaneously; much later he would enjoy his own daughter in the same bed as her mother. While he was uncharacteristically cagey about his genuine homosexual encounters, he was particularly drawn to women who dressed as men - at one point embarking on a dizzying affair with a girl disguised as a castrato disguised as a girl.

The manner of Casanova's affairs suggest that he was busy avoiding pain as much as pursuing pleasure; he behaved, as Wordsworth would say, 'more like a man /Flying from something that he dreads, than one Who sought the thing he loved'. He would become emotionally attached and then sharply detach himself: his need to leave was as strong as his need to love. What is striking is how repetitive his affairs were, as though he were performing the same scene again and again. At one point, years after a liaison with a nun he calls by the pseudonym MM, he meets another nun and he calls her MM too.

An unexpected pleasure is the book's focus on food. Casanova loved eating; 'sex is like eating and eating is like sex', he wrote, and Kelly speculates that he may be the originator of the reputation of oysters as an aphrodisiac. He was born into the 'last great age of Venetian cooking', he liked his macaroni sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar, and during his final years, while he mouldered away in Dux Castle, 'A day did not go by', a friend observed, 'that he did not have a quarrel, over his coffee, over his milk, his plate of macaroni on which he insisted…'

Kelly's narrative loses its momentum only once, in his disappointingly flat account of Casanova's spectacular escape over the leads of the Doge's palace, where he was imprisoned for 'a question of religion'. But because this particular scene was Casanova's party piece - even his enemies admitted that he told the story brilliantly - and the crowning achievement of his life, perhaps it is best that the biographer does not steal the show.

Ian Kelly has taken on a tremendous challenge and produced a great blast of a book, packed with energy and information, marinated in sympathy and understanding, and rippling with enthusiasm right down to the final footnote.

George Carlin's Last Interview

By Jay Dixit
Ten days ago, on Friday, June 13th, 2008, I had the extraordinary privilege of talking to George Carlin. As far as I know it was the last in-depth interview he gave before he passed away yesterday at age 71. Originally it was slated to run as a 350-word Q&A on the back page of Psychology Today. But I was so excited to talk to him—and he was so generous with his time—that I just kept on going. By the end I had over 14,000 words.

On stage, George Carlin came across as a grouch, often vulgar and sometimes misanthropic. But with me he was patient and warm, happy to talk through the minutiae of his creative process and eager to share stories about his childhood, his evolution as a comic, and his influence. What struck me most was the joy in his voice as he talked about the wonderful feeling he got in his gut while writing. I was also moved by the gratitude he expressed for his mother, who he said “saved” him and his brother—leaving her bullying, alcoholic husband when George was just two months old, getting a job during the worst years of the Depression, and raising two boys on her own.

He spoke about the pride he took in his work. As a ninth-grade dropout, he said, it was gratifying to see his words quoted in textbooks, classrooms, and courtrooms. And he was proud to have inspired other comedy greats, who routinely called him to say, "If it weren't for you, I wouldn't be doing this." As he looked back on his astonishingly prolific 50-year career—which includes 130 Tonight Show appearances, 23 albums, 14 HBO specials, three books, and one Supreme Court case—the interview became a sort of retrospective of his life.

Finally, after two hours, he gently mentioned that his arm was getting tired from holding the phone. “I really appreciate all the thought you’ve put into all these questions. Really, it’s the most complete interview I’ve ever done,” he said. “Is it tomorrow yet? I think it is.”

“It feels like it is,” I said, struggling to keep up with his wit.

“All this is for a quote unquote back page?” he said.

“This is for the back page, but, I don’t know, I just love you and your work so much!” I gushed. “I just had so much I wanted to ask.”

At the time, I was embarrassed by what I’d said. But when I heard the sad news this morning, my feelings changed instantly. I’m honored that I got to speak to him, and I’m grateful that I got to tell him how much I admired him before he died.

It would be impossible to overstate George Carlin’s contribution to standup comedy. Along with Richard Pryor and a few others, he essentially created the genre as we know it today. But he was more than just a comedy pioneer. He was a freethinker who never backed down, and he truly changed the course of American culture. He will be missed. —Jay Dixit
The Interview

What follows are edited highlights. They represent a little over half of the interview.

How do you think about comedy and self-expression? Expressing what’s within vs. looking at the outside world and making observations?

Self-expression is a hallmark of an artist, of art, to get something off one’s chest, to sing one’s song. So that element is present in all art. And comedy, although it is not one of the fine arts—it’s a vulgar art, it’s one of the people’s arts, it’s the spoken word, the writing that goes into it is an art form—it’s certainly artistry. So self-expression is the key to even standing up and saying, "Hey, listen to me." Self-expression can be based on looking at the world and making observations about it or not. Comedy can also be based on describing one’s inner self—doing anecdotes, talking about your own fears. Woody Allen taps into a lot of self-analysis in his comedy. But I don’t think these things are mutually exclusive. I think self-expression is present at all times, and whether or not you’re talking about the outside world or your responses to it depends on the moment and the subject.

Do you go around observing and trying to collect funny things? Or do you just live your life and then say how you feel about what you happen to have seen?

I’m 71, and I’ve been doing this for a little over 50 years, doing it at a fairly visible level for 40. By this time it’s all second nature. It’s all a machine that works a certain way: the observations, the immediate evaluation of the observation, and then the mental filing of it, or writing it down on a piece of paper. I’ve often described the way a 20-year-old versus, say, a 60- or a 70-year-old, the way it works. A 20-year-old has a limited amount of data they’ve experienced, either seeing or listening to the world. At 70 it’s a much richer storage area, the matrix inside is more textured, and has more contours to it. So, observations made by a 20-year-old are compared against a data set that is incomplete. Observations made by a 60-year-old are compared against a much richer data set. And the observations have more resonance, they’re richer.

So if I write something down, some observation—I see something on television that reminds me of something I wanted to say already—the first time I write it, the first time I hear it, it makes an impression. The first time I write it down, it makes a second impression, a deeper path. Every time I look at that piece of paper, until I file it in my file, each time, the path gets a little richer and deeper so that these things are all in there.

Now at this age, I have a network of knowledge and data and observations and feelings and values and evaluations I have in me that do things automatically. And then when I sit down to consciously write, that's when I bring the craftsmanship. That's when I pull everything together and say, how I can best express that? And then as you write, you find more, 'cause the mind is looking for further connections. And these things just flow into your head and you write them. And the writing is the really wonderful part. A lot of this is discovery. A lot of things are lying around waiting to be discovered and that's our job is to just notice them and bring them to life.

Do you think that the richness you described comes from just being able to access more experiences, having information on file? Or is it judgment?

Well, that's true, too. The machine that does all this learns what it is you want—it learns what it is that serves your purpose and it begins to tailor the synthesis. It synthesizes these observations and these comparisons. Comedy’s all about comparisons and contrasts and congruities and incongruities and heightenings and understatement and exaggeration. The mind has all of that stuff built in, and it learns which ones pay off the best for you. It's probably related to the pleasure center. You get so much pleasure finding good observations and finding which things are the richest things you can say, that probably the brain remembers how that happened and learns to provide the best stuff. Maybe you have a little silent editor in there.

You talked about how comedy's all about incongruities, contrasts, exaggeration. Do you think about those techniques or those principles of humor consciously?

It happens automatically. Sometimes there’s a conscious heightening, you'll recognize you've just chosen an image to make a point. Then your mind will just suddenly throw something at you that's stronger—a heightening, to raise the stakes, a stronger word, a more visceral image, something that lights up the imagination, much better than the original thought. So you’re aware that you’re heightening and exaggerating further but you don't use the word exaggeration or anything like that. All that stuff is just happening. And sometimes, afterward, I’ll look at something and say, “If I were giving a comedy lecture, that would be a good example.” I often think in those terms.

Do you think there are any downsides to having gotten to the point where you are, where all of this is happening automatically? Or are there some advantages a 20-year-old would have?

Well, I would imagine there are some that I can’t put my finger on because I don't remember what it was like. I was a different man. I don't know—the advantage that a 20 year old would have would be more longevity to look forward to.

You talked about how wonderful it is, this feeling of writing. So what is your process like?

I take a lot of single-page notes, little memo pad notes. I make a lot of notes on those things. For when I'm not near a little memo pad, I have a digital recorder. Most of the note-taking happens while I’m watching television.

Because the world is undifferentiated on the television set. You may be watching the news channel, but it’s going to cover the breadth of American life and the human experience. It's gonna go from suicide bombings to frivolous consumer goods. It's a broad window on the world, and a lot of things are already established in my mind as things I say, things that I'm interested in, things that are fodder for my machine. And when I see something that relates to one of them, I know it instantly and if it's a further exaggeration and a further addition, or an exception—if it plays into furthering my purpose, I jot it down.

When I harvest the pieces of paper and I go through them and sort them, the one lucky thing I got in my genetic package was a great methodical left brain. I have a very orderly mind that wants to classify and index things and label them and store them according to that. I had a boss in radio when I was 18 years old, and my boss told me to write down every idea I get even if I can't use it at the time, and then file it away and have a system for filing it away—because a good idea is of no use to you unless you can find it. And that stuck with me.

And what's your filing system?

There’s a large segment of it devoted to language, which is a love of mine. And a rich area for my work talking about how we talk. One of the files is called “The Way We Talk.” And it's about certain voguish words that come into style and remain there. But then there are subfiles. Everything has subfiles. There's one that says "Crime." There's "Crime" and there's "Law," there’s "Sex" and there’s "Race." And there’s "Humans"—that’s obviously a big folder with a lot of smaller folders in it, it’s about the human race and the human species and experiences and observations I have about that, or data that I've found about it. You know, 6 million people stepped on land mines this year. Those things interest me.

And there's "America," and America is a major category, of course. It breaks down into the culture, and the culture breaks down into further things. It’s like nested boxes, like the Russian dolls—it's just folders within folders within folders. But I know how to navigate it very well, and I’m a Macintosh a guy and so Spotlight helps me a lot. I just get on Spotlight and say, let's see, if I say "asshole” and “minister," I then can find what I want find.

What's the process of going from something that's true about the world—observing it—to actually making people laugh?

I begin with the knowledge that my audience knows me thoroughly. I know the things they will trust coming from me, and I know they'll allow me to do exposition that’s necessary to set the stage for the piece of material. The funny—that’s part of the genetic package. The genetic marker for language came through my family. My grandfather, whom I didn’t know, was a New York City policeman. I did not know him. During his adult life, he wrote out Shakespeare’s tragedies longhand just for the joy it gave him. And he asked questions about language at his dinner table, my mother told me. My mother had a great love of language, and a great gift for language. The Irish have a genetic tradition, it seems, an affinity for language and expression. And so I got that. The Irish say: "You don’t lick it off the rocks, kid." It comes in the blood. So, I have that and I don’t have to do anything about it.

As Noel Coward said, “All I ever had was a talent to amuse.” I have a talent to amuse and I have a way of finding the joke, a way of expressing things through exaggeration, interesting images, whatever goes in, whatever the parts are that go into making these things work.

I try to come in through the side door. One of the voguish terms, which is so repellant to me, “thinking outside the box.” To settle for that kind of language is embarrassing. But that's a very useful picture. I try to come in through the side door, the side window, to come in from a direction they’re not expecting, to see something in a different way. That's the job that I give myself. So, how can I talk about something eminently familiar to them, on my terms, in a new way, that engages their imagination?

The jokes come. You don’t look for them. It’s all automatic, and, I think, genetic. My father was an after dinner speaker, was a great raconteur. He was an ad salesman for space in newspapers during the 1930s, when that was the primary medium of advertising, and my mother was in advertising her whole life. They both were very funny, and they both were very gifted verbally. So, those things come to you automatically. It's like being a child prodigy with the violin or the piano. It's not something you try for or you have to do too much about except work at it. And that's what I try to do.

How is it that you find things that are unexpected?

I don’t know. But I want to add an element I overlooked. Psychology. We're talking about a magazine called Psychology Today.

As a child, my father was gone. I had no grandparents; they were all dead. Had no real cousins to play with, and I didn’t give a shit, frankly. I experienced my life in a very happy way, but, what I want to say to you is, I was alone as a child. My father was dead. My mother left him when I was 2 months old and he died when I was 8 years old. He drank too much and he was a bully and she had the courage to take two boys, one of them two months old and one of them 5 years old and to leave him in 1937 and get back into the business world and get a job and raise us through the end of the Depression and through the Second World War. She did a great job, but she was at work until 7 or 7:30 at night many nights.

So I spent a lot of time on my own. In the house or out around the neighborhood or sneaking in the subway, going down to 42nd street, traveling around Manhattan Island, learning it as a youngster. And I experienced that—because psychologists ask you not if something's good or bad, but how do you experience it—I experienced that as freedom, independence, autonomy. And I was brought up on that feeling. That’s what made me, I think, able to quit school, and go out and try to start my life and career early, because I had that strength.

And my mother had that strength. I witnessed it. I mean, what she did was she took us away from him and saved us. So, those qualities of being alone like that fostered in me a need for adult approval and attention. Now they say that it's kind of a common cliché that comedians just want attention. But it's an element that's very important. The job is called "look at me." That's the name of this job. “Look at me. Ain't I smart? Ain't I cute? Ain't I clever?"

I needed to be—not the center of attention—but I needed to be able to attract attention when I wanted it, through my stunts and my fooling around physically with faces or postures or voices I would do. Then it became funny the things I would say, and I became more of a wit than simply a mimic and a clown. And so, those things were all important in this. The fact that I didn’t finish school left me with a lifelong need to prove that I’m smart, prove it to myself, maybe to the world. “Ain't I smart, ain't I cute, ain't I clever.” “Listen to me, listen to what I got to say.” So, those things are important elements in the drive behind all of this.

You made an analogy to playing the violin. I wanted to ask you about mastery. You’ve been doing this for, as you said, over 50 years, and it seems like you've only gotten better with time. So I'm wondering what you think has enabled you to do that. Is it like playing the violin? Is it just practice? Is it getting good feedback? Is it—you know, what is it that allows you to hone your craft?

The feedback that I’ve gotten has been through the success of the career. That’s a reinforcing factor. I say: Oh, that works, oh that’s what I do, I see. I think with anything you do over a long period of time, you should be getting better at it. I'm talking about craft, art, or drive that comes from inside.

What is your philosophy about physical performance? You walk around a lot, you make a lot of gestures.

It’s just second nature, you don’t think about it at all. And I don’t pace as much on stage as I used to, maybe it’s my age, I don’t know. I don't feel limited physically, in that respect, but it's just something I’ve grown into.

Were you always making people laugh, sort of automatically, just because of your personality?

Yeah. As I was describing, this is a job for a showoff. In those 8 years of grammar school that I had—the 9th year was kind of a it was a Irish catholic Christian brothers, and it was a much more brutal setting than these lovely nuns we had. So I think of those 8 years as my education. I got the work very easily, I didn’t have any trouble grasping the work, and so I had time to clown, time to signal to my buddy, make a face, make a fart under the arm, I was a bit of a class clown, I was a neighborhood cut-up.

I eventually started doing routines when I was about 14, 15 16. I would do routines on the street corner for my buddies on the stoop. My mother wanted me to finish high school, go to college, be an advertising man, be a businessman like the men at her office whom she admired. But she couldn’t stop this other machine that was revving up.

I had an 8th grade graduation from the grammar school—it was the only graduation I ever had. And in 9th grade, while I was at that school, I had a Brother, one of the brothers who taught, his name was Brother Conrad. My mother had said to me, now George, I didn't get you a graduation present, and this was June 1951, this was now the fall of 1951, when I'm in first year of high school. She said, “I didn't get you a graduation present, so you be thinking about what you might want.”

Brother Conrad was telling the class one day that because he had a clergyman's discount rate, he could get cameras for people. Then he mentioned tape recorders and man, the bell went off in my head! Tape recorders at that time were virtually unknown to the average person. They may have heard about them here or there. They were not consumer items.

She bought me a tape recorder, a Webcor. And that became a tool for me to put some of these verbal impulses to work. I began to produce little radio shows on it at home by using the phonograph. Playing a record on the phonograph, like playing the Dragnet theme. Dun da dun dun. Dun da dun dun duuun.

Then I would fade the phonograph down and I would come in and I would do my make-believe announcer. I did newscasts, I did sports. A lot of the things that I ventured into professionally in my first stage of comedy I was doing on that tape recorder. I recorded a whole half hour of story—it was like a vignette, like a series of vignettes, a drama, about my neighborhood. And guess what: I made fun of authority figures.

So my mother—in spite what she wanted me to do for her, to be a great reflection on her, go to college and be a businessman—she knew this was something I needed. And she got that for me, and it helped accelerate the beginnings of my putting this dream together that I had. I was 14 when I got that tape recorder. They were the size of a Buick. They were not little handy things. And she was smart enough to get me one. That's an important part of my development.

Can you remember the first joke you ever told?

No. But I do remember the first time I ever made my mother laugh. And unfortunately, it’s lost on me what it was I said. But I noticed the moment, I knew something had happened, this was when I was very young. My mother laughed fairly frequently. But I knew the difference between her social laugh and her really spontaneous laugh when she was caught off guard—which is the key to laugher, being off guard. And I said something to her, and I saw that in her and it registered with me. And it made the point. I wouldn’t have remembered it as well as I do if it hadn’t meant a lot to me. It was a kind of a little mark along the way, a little badge of honor. It meant I had said something witty. I didn’t clown, I wasn’t making a face or standing in a funny angle. I had said something witty. I had probably turned some situation around, exaggerated one element, and made a joke.

I want to talk about the transformation that you did in the 60s when you went from what you once termed the “middle-American comic” to this different persona—it was much more subversive. How did that happen and why did that happen?

I was always swimming against the tide. I was always out of step. Not only did I quit school, but I got kicked out of three schools along the way. I eventually got asked to leave the air force a year early—it wasn’t dishonorable, but it was a general discharge, which is a step down—because I did not shape up, I didn’t like authority, I had three court-martials. I was kicked off the alter boys, I was kicked off the choirboys, I was kicked out of the boy scouts, I was kicked out of summer camp. I never fit and I didn’t like conforming. And sometimes it just broke through the membrane, and I was out.

By the end of the 60s, all of my friends, the musician friends of mine, had gone through a transition in their dress, and especially in their music, and what I noticed was that all of these great artists—Bob Dylan, Buffalo Springfield, Joan Baez—all of these people were using their art to express themselves politically and socially. And I was not. I was still doing people-pleasing.

I was 30, and I resonated much more truly with the 20-year-olds. I was more in line with them than I was with these people I was entertaining in nightclubs. I began to notice that. I began to be affected by it, and along the way, the judicious use of some mescaline and some LSD managed to accelerate the process. It gave me more of an insight into how false the world was I was settling for, and to see that there was something much richer and better and more authentic. And those changes happened, they just—they happened naturally and organically. It took about 2 years for the total changeover to occur.

My beard got a little longer, the hair got a little longer, the clothing changed, and then I suddenly found myself being as—the best combination of both, this person I really was who was kind of out of step, antiauthoritarian, who also had these skills and talents that he was honing to express himself. And so I started expressing those feelings.

In what way did the mescaline and LSD give you the insight and the confidence to make this transformation? What role did the drugs play?

Well, It was just passive, I don’t know. See, I had always been a marijuana smoker, a pretty heavy user of marijuana, all these years I’m talking about when I was in this other world of mainstream television, nightclubs. So marijuana is a hallucinogen and it is also a value-changing drug, as are acid and mescaline. They are hallucinogens and they are value-changing drugs. They alter, assist in shifting one’s perspective on the world which usually is informed by your values. And so I had already, my body, my mind, and myself—I already had a kind of a thick layer of this out-of-stepness.

And so I was already across that street. And I just hadn’t, you know, bought a house on that side yet. So, the LSD was a much stronger experience, and the mescaline, and I don’t know what they did or how they did it, I just know that going through that gave me the confidence in these changes I was feeling, in this direction, this metamorphosis, I was in the middle of. I gained confidence in it and I took strength from it, feeling that I was right that I was really on the right path, that I was being true to myself. And that was what counted to me, to be true to myself—my mother had always said that. To thine—Shakespeare—“To thine own self be true.” She loved quoting the classics, and she quoted Emerson or Shakespeare or whoever it was she thought was appropriate for her lesson. And to thine own self be true. And I just—I just had to be who I felt like I was, not who I had led them to believe I was.

So after that transformation, to what extent is the persona that you have on stage—to what extent is it your real personality? I know you’re making jokes and some of that involves exaggeration, but do you feel that you’re acting angrier, more bitter, more caustic on stage? Or are you just being yourself as accurately as possible?

I’ve addressed this before when the question is asked more bluntly: Are you an angry man? What are you angry about; what are you so angry about? I don’t live an angry life, not an angry person. I rarely lose my temper, can’t remember the last time, never had a physical fight in my life, don’t carry grudges, don’t carry resentment either. Very very lucky in those respects. But I feel a very strong alienation and dissatisfaction from my groups.

Abraham Maslow said the fully realized man does not identify with the local group. When I saw that, it rang another bell. I thought: bingo! I do not identify with the local group, I do not feel a part of it. I really have never felt like a participant, I’ve always felt like an observer. Always. I only identified this in retrospect, way after the fact, that I have been on the outside, and I don’t like being on the inside. I don’t like being in their world. I’ve never felt comfortable there; I don’t belong to that. So, when he says the “local group,” I take that as meaning a lot of things: the local social clubs or fraternal orders, or lodges or associations or clubs of any kind, things where you sacrifice your individual identity for the sake of a group, for the sake of the group mind. I’ve always felt different and outside. Now, I also extended that, once again in retrospect, as I examined my feelings.

I don’t really identify with America, I don’t really feel like an American or part of the American experience, and I don’t really feel like a member of the human race, to tell you the truth. I know I am, but I really don’t. All the definitions are there, but I don’t really feel a part of it. I think I have found a detached point of view, an ideal emotional detachment from the American experience and culture and the human experience and culture and human choices.

But even if I am a cynic, they say if you scratch a cynic, you find a disappointed idealist—that’s what’s underneath. That’s the little flicker of flame, has a little life in it, the idealist: I would love to be able to entertain that side of me, but it doesn’t work like that. I don’t see what’s in it yet, I mean I just like it out here.

I’m not an angry person, just very disappointed and contemptuous of my fellow humans’ choices—and on stage those feelings sometimes are exaggerated for a theatric stage—you’re on a stage you have an audience of 2500 or 3000 people: you need to project the feelings, the emotions it’s heightened, and people mistake it for a personal anger but it’s more dissatisfaction, disappointment and contempt for these things we’ve settled for.

So it sounds like it is your true personality, but it’s heightened for the stage.

It is my true personality, but it’s not an angry personality. Anger is a handy term and boy words are tricky, as we know. What one man perceives as anger, another person—in my case the deliverer of material—is, “Don’t you see it, don’t you see how badly you’re doing?” It’s like shaking a child—which you’re not supposed to do.

So let me latch onto that feeling. You’re grabbing somebody and you’re saying, “Don’t you see it?” But if you really don’t care about America, then why are you doing it? Why are you on stage? Is it just because you want to express yourself? Do you hope you can influence people in some way?

You’ve hit on the contradiction, and it’s one I don’t understand the resolution to, if there is one. Sometimes people say, do I try to make audiences think? I say: No no no, because that really would be the kiss of death. But what I want them to know is that I’m thinking. It’s part of that showoff and dropout syndrome. I think I need to show them that I have brought myself to a cleverer, smarter spot than they have. In doing so, “Can’t you see this? can’t you see?” And a lot of them do. I get amazing things said to me. And they’re frequent enough that I know these things are multiplied by those who have never encountered you. One person who says, “You really changed my outlook on things or the way I view X Y or Z,” for everyone who says that to you, there are a thousand, ten thousand who’ll never get to tell you that. There are people who take something away form what I do, and I know that and it pleases me and I am proud of that. And it means the student is a bit of a teacher.

But yeah, of course I care. Of course I care. My daughter has pinned me on that. She says of course you care, can’t you hear it? And I say yeah yeah yeah, but they gotta prove it to me first. Show me you care people and then I’ll let some of it out; right now I just want to scold you a little bit.

So how would you say that you feel towards people? You say on the one hand you are sort of contemptuous but on the other hand you want their approval in some way? Is that not a contradiction?

Yeah, it sounds like it has the makings of a contradiction; I guess by definition it does. I am contemptuous of the mass. That’s the thing I need to explain. One on one with people, I have great capacity and great compassion. I don’t like standing around 20 minutes talking to somebody, but when I see individuals, I see their individual beauty. I’m aware of the potential—and I don’t mean this happened every time I meet someone—but when I see people, I sort of see the potential for the whole species. When you look in their eyes, you can see a hologram of the human species and you kind of know what we could have been. It’s the group behavior that I’m talking about on stage.

Let’s switch gears a little bit and let me ask you about religion. I mean you were talking about it decades ago. Now, atheism and religion bashing have gone mainstream: Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris. You were way ahead of the curve. What’s it like hearing them saying many of the things you said in the 1970s?

I’ve read some of the books you’ve mentioned and some of the reasons of existence and God and what a bad name religion has given God. I just kind of do this, I just keep moving along. I don’t really judge it… I reserve my evaluations and judgments for the parts that I do, the lines I add. I don’t think about myself in the larger world very much.

Richard Dawkins did use an excerpt of mine for a chapter heading. I noticed that. It’s nice. Not to overdo this thing, but when you’re a dropout and the culture accepts you and begins to quote and they teach some of your stuff in communications class and communications law and I hear this all the time and professors ask to use things in their textbooks, this is kind of my honorary baccalaureate. When these things happen I think good, well, there’s a little thumb on my chest, feather in my cap. I notice those things, and I feel good about what I’ve chosen and how I do it. As Lily Tomlin once said, and I am going to get this wrong so it’s a paraphrase, she said to be considered a success in a mediocre culture doesn’t say a lot for you.

You were central in the Supreme Court case in which justices affirmed the government's right to regulate your “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” act on the public airwaves. How do you think about the role of vulgarity in your humor?

I used to point out that when I was a little boy in the 40s, I was told to look up to and admire solders and sailors, policemen, firemen, and athletes, were objects of childhood hero worship. We all know how they talk. So apparently these words do not corrupt morally. This was the thing I couldn’t put together.

I use the words because I’m from that ethos. I’m from the street in New York, hung around in a tough neighborhood. It was common to curse, you make your point. It’s a very effective language. I try not to overdo it. It’s never to shock. I know where it fits, it’s never to shock. There’s no shock value left in words. Humor is base on surprise, and surprise is a milder way of saying shock. It’s surprise that makes the joke.

What’s the funniest bit you’ve ever heard?

Sometimes jokes have a wonderful logic to them. I’ll give you one that, even to people that don’t mind mild cursing, bothers some people—especially women. Short joke. The wonderful thing about it is the logic of the joke, the ingenuity.

Father and son, little son are out on the back porch, passing the day, father says to son, “Do you have perhaps any questions for me about sex?” And he says, “Well, yeah Dad, what is that hairy area on Mommy?” And the father says, “Well, that’s her vulva.” And the boy says, “Well then what’s a cunt?” And the father says, “That’s rest of Mommy.”

And that joke strikes a nerve, hits a chord—men who’ve been divorced more than twice really like that. It makes beautiful use of that man’s thought. To arrive at that distinction—to take it from the real to the figurative. From cunt as a sexual part to cunt as a term of derision for women, just as men are called assholes by certain women—and they deserve it. It’s funny how we use words. The fact that a mean woman is called a cunt and a mean man is called a prick. I have a long thing I’d like to write someday about language and the way we address each other.

How has your comedy changed over the years?

You know for a guy who didn’t do homework, the thing that’s happened is this: that 6th grade showoff that kid who had to sing a song at meetings, who won the medal at camp for being funniest guy at amateur night 5 years in a row. He didn’t do his homework then. I didn’t do book reports, but now what’s happened is that showoff has a partner who does his homework and the left/right brain are allied, united, now in a way they weren’t. I’m using my organizational ability, and my writing ability which is careful process, informed by art, but still a craft of putting things together, I’ve somehow become more integrated. I do my homework now but I stand up and show off. So I got both, I got the best of both sixth grade worlds.

You asked me to remind you to tell me about Arthur Koestler.

That was another impact. I was doing nightclub comedy down in the Village. I was down there in ’63, ’64, and my friend told me about Arthur Koestler’s book about the act of creation and it had a section on humor.

He was talking about the creative process. There was an illustration on the panel that showed a triptych. On the left panel, there were these names of artistic pursuits. There were poets, painter, composer. And one of them was jester. I was only interested in the jester. What he said about each of these, he said these individuals on the left hand side can transcend the panels of the triptych by creative growth.

The jester makes jokes, he’s funny, he makes fun, he ridicules. But if his ridicules are based on sound ideas and thinking, then he can proceed to the second panel, which is the thinker—he called it the philosopher. The jester becomes the philosopher, and if he does these things with dazzling language that we marvel at, then he becomes a poet too. Then the jester can be a thinking jester who thinks poetically.

I didn’t see that and say, “That’s what I am going to do,” but I guess it made an impression on me. I was never afraid to grow and change. I never was afraid of reversing my field on people, and I just think I’ve become a touch of each of those second and third descriptions and I definitely have a gift for language that is rhythmic and attractive to the ear, and I have interesting imagery which I guess is a poetic touch. And I like the fact that most of my things are based on solid ideas, things I’ve thought about in a new way for me, things for which I have said “Well, what about this? Suppose you look at it this way? How about that?” And then you heighten and exaggerate that, because comedy’s all about heightening and exaggerating. And anyways I guess I was impressed that there was another thing from my early life that probably at least influenced me to some level.

It sounds like you think of yourself much more as a writer than a performer—is that true? How do you think about performing?

It’s my primary delivery system. I used to, in my early years, when I would do an interview I was always proud to tell the writer that I wrote my own material, if they asked me or even if they didn’t. I wanted to be distinguished from the ones who didn’t do that, and I was proud of it, so I would say I am a comedian who writes his own material. And then at some point, I discovered what I really had become was a writer who performs his own material.

This was a really important distinction for me to notice—it happened way after the fact. I’m a writer. I think of myself as a writer. First of all, I’m an entertainer; I’m in the vulgar arts. I travel around talking and saying things and entertaining, but it’s in service of my art and it’s informed by that. So I get to write for two destinations. The writing is what gives me the joy, especially editing myself for the page, and getting something ready to show to the editors, and then to have a first draft and get it back and work to fix it, I love reworking, I love editing, love love love revision, revision, revision, revision.

And computers changed my life, the fact that you can move text as easily as you can move text, and say, “Wait a minute, these two things belong together, these two things go together, page 2 and page 5: similar ideas, put ’em together!” But the person who is most a part of me is the performer, is the standup, the guy who says, “Hey look at me, listen to this!” I do that because that’s what I do, I love doing it.

And I love the feeling I get in my gut when I’m watching on the computer screen that is close to being realized the way I would like it to be. the feeling I get in my gut is “Wait’ll they hear this, wait’ll I tell them this, I can’t wait to tell them!” It’s like the guy on the end of the bench: “Put me in coach, put me in!” They call to me, I can tell which ones are pregnant, which ones need to be moved up to a higher level of readiness, and it’s because I can’t wait to say them, I can’t wait to share them with people.

You know, you get 2500 people, acting as a single organism: the audience is a single organism and it’s you and it. And to have that feeling of mastery up there—it’s an assertion of power: here I am, I have the microphone, you came here for this express purpose. You’re sitting not in tables at nightclubs with waiters and glasses, you’re seated all facing forward in order to enjoy this and here I am, and wait till you hear this! There’s nothing like it in my experience that I could aspire to. It has as much a payoff as writing, which has a big payoff.

So, sitting in front of a computer, “Wait till they hear this, this is great material.” What’s the difference between that and actually standing on stage hearing the audience roaring with laughter?

The difference is, at the computer you can stop, think back, think forward, look around, turn the page as it were, you can see the whole world all at once. On stage you’re only in a single moment ever—your mind can hear what you just said. This is a funny thing that happens for me: when I’m up there doing something I’ve memorized perfectly, and it has pauses in it—and of course the laughs are all the pauses. As you’re going along, you’re thinking of what you’re saying, you want to give it the proper vocal values, so you are kind of thinking about it, not reaching for the words, but kind of thinking about them. You’re also aware of the echo of what you just said, and whether it worked or not, and what that might mean. It’s all part of the trigonometry, I guess. And then there is the faint anticipation of what comes next.

It’s like the feeling of conducting an orchestra. It’s like conducting an orchestra, this group of people who already like you, predisposed to appreciate you, at your service, at you’re command, and you’re just waving the baton and bringing them in, leading them forward and it’s just a nice kind of feeling.

Let me ask you about your influence—how do you feel that you have influenced other comedians?

I hear that from some of them, who say, “I wouldn’t be doing this were it not for you.” I talked to a very prominent name in comedy today who wanted to pay me some kind compliments about the recent HBO show, he hasn’t been able to catch up with me, I won’t mention him, but everybody would know his name. He said also in passing, “You know, I wouldn’t be doing this without you.” There have been people, who, I don’t know, because I came along at a certain time. Richard Pryor and I went through our changes at the same time, he became prominent at the same time. I had this kind of reemergence. I’m sure Richard Pryor would hear those things. I’m sure Woody Allen hears those things. I don’t take them as singular to me. But I know they’re true when I’m told, I realized I could be myself, could talk about this and that and not be afraid; I’m sure all artists hear similar things, especially ones who have lasted a while.

[Note: Jerry Seinfeld has since identified himself as the prominent comedian who spoke to George Carlin just before I did. "I called him to compliment him on his most recent special on HBO," writes Seinfeld in a New York Times op-ed. "Seventy years old and he cranks out another hour of great new stuff. He was in a hotel room in Las Vegas getting ready for his show. He was a monster." —JD]

Do you mentor other comedians?

No. I’m not collegial, I don’t hang out. I’m soloist, I like my solitude, I don’t really hang around with comedians—this person I talked to today, I now have his phone number. I have maybe five phone numbers. I’m not in show business because I don’t have to go to the meetings, I’m just not a part of it, I don’t belong to it. When you “belong” to something. You want to think about that word, “belong.” People should think about that: it means they own you. If you belong to something it owns you, and I just don’t care for that. I like spinning out here like one of those subatomic particles that they can’t quite pin down.

Has your sense of humor helped you in other areas of your life, besides your career as a professional comedian? Meeting people? Making friends? Dealing with loss?

I don’t know about any of those aspects. But I know that the art of not taking things seriously often bleeds over into the self, to not take yourself too seriously. You can tell from my answers that I take what I do very seriously, and I think about it. But I don’t really take myself that seriously.

I know that I’ve accomplished a good deal. I was just nominated for this year’s Mark Twain prize at the Kennedy Center, so these things over the years mean, "Yeah, good job, George.” I don’t take myself very seriously, though, at least I don’t think so. I try to see the reality and not get carried away with the emotion. What’s the reality? What's going on here? What’s the ground floor? What’s the reality? Let’s look at the situation: "So he’s dead, she’s hurt, and you don’t feel good." OK, so let’s figure this out.

I like to say two things in life that mean the most: genetics and luck. When you look at it realistically, genetics is luck too. Because you could have been born in some really terrible situation and never had a chance to realize yourself or see who you were. And so the luck of genetics and then after that, circumstances, those are the two guiding things. Knowing what to do about it, taking advantage of it, that’s fine, that's good, good for you. But still, those two elements mean everything.

My arm is getting tired here. The crook of my arm.

I guess I'm pretty much done. We've been talking for a long time and I really appreciate your taking all this time. Was there a good question you thought people should ask that never got asked?

No, because you covered some of the ones, as they came along. As I looked at the list yesterday, I thought the list gave me an opportunity for several places where I want, need to be heard—such as the anger thing, development, and the changes I went through in the late 60s. They were all in there so I feel good.

So the last question is: What are you working on now?

I have a piece of material that I’m doing on stage these days. I'm in Las Vegas now. I do weekends here, I do four nights on weekends as part of my year of touring. I go mostly to concert halls and theaters, around 80 or 90 of 'em a year. But I come down here around three or four. So I’m down here. This piece of material called, “There’s Too Much Fucking Music,” which is my way of looking at… how much music there is, I guess. It’s just my way of looking at the world and saying something that people don’t notice and figuring out a new way. And it’s filled with exaggeration and stuff. I'm doing that on stage a little bit. I’m not giving myself any pressure.

The lady in my life Sally Wade and I are waiting for our house to be finished remodeling. We’re in temporary quarters. It's kind of onerous. We’re lucky we found a place right down the street but the price we pay for being right down the street is that it’s not really suitable in terms of space and structure for our needs. So we’re really in combat duty. It’s been a tough time. Not so tough you can’t work it out, you know, but just enough so it’s broken some of my work habits. And I’m enjoying my break from them and I know where I have to go on the next book, I have a book that I'm going to start organizing the files, reorganizing, renaming, reclassifying, putting things together, taking things apart. And there’ll be another HBO show as these pieces on stage begin to take form.

7 Famous Executioners

Public executions used to be a form of entertainment and executioners were like rock stars. A good executioner was one that had flair but could kill a victim quickly. This is a look at 7 executioners that became famous for their abilities to dispatch their victims.
7 ) Souflikar


During the Ottoman Empire the job of Bostanci was a prestigious one. The title translates to “Gardener”, and he was one… but he was also expected to prune the Emperor’s court through strangulation. They added another twist to it: the condemned raced the executioner through the gardens to the execution spot. If he managed to beat him, his sentence was reduced to banishment. If he lost, he was strangled on the spot and his body thrown in the river. None were as fast as Mahomet IV’s head executioner, Souflikar, as over the course of 5 years he strangled at least 5,000 people - a rate of almost 3 people a day.
6 ) Richard Brandon


The English were always very picky about who could become an executioner. It had to be someone from a family of executioners that knew how to kill someone quickly but also knew how to vamp for the crowd. Brandon was one of the most famous Common Hangmen of London and became the yardstick against which other English executioners (even Albert Pierrepoint) were measured. He was extremely proud of his ability to sever a head with a single blow, something that was very popular with the crowds - and appreciated by people getting executed - since it generally took a few chops for the average executioner to get through. He refined this skill after years of practice on cats and dogs. He is best known for executing King Charles I, but did so under heavy disguise out of fear of retaliation.
5 ) William Marwood


While Brandon was popular for his skill, Marwood became popular for developing a process that instantly killed his victims. He started out as cobbler but got a job as executioner after showing that a person died instantly if his “long drop” method was used. Before Marwood, people getting hanged would slowly strangle to death and the executioner would have to use his own weight to seal the deal. Marwood added a snapping motion that would instantly break the neck. It wasn’t perfect though, the first few executions often ended with decaptiation.
4 ) Fernando Alvarez de Toledo



The “Iron Duke of Alva” was the chief executioner for King Philip of Spain during the Spanish Inquisition. Stories about his approach would send towns into a panic - and rightfully so: he once executed 8,000 people in a single session at Antwerp. He boasted that he had managed to hang 18,000 Dutchmen in the Netherlands. These stories and his brutal methods - he would brand his victim’s tongue until it couldn’t be taken back into the mouth and would then burn them at the stake - only helped spread rumors that Spaniards were savage radicals.
3 ) Giovanni Battiste Bugatti



“Mastro Titta”, a corruption of “Master of Justice”, is considered a national hero in Italy for performing 516 public executions for the Papal States. While other executioners on this list would show off for the crowds, Bugatti considered it to be a side job. Well known for his brutality - using hammers to crush heads and then quartering the bodies - he approached each execution in a casual and religious manner: he would go to confession and take communion before each victim, offered them a pinch of snuff, and then ended their lives. His blood stained cloak can still be seen in Rome’s Criminology Museum.
2 ) Charles Henri-Sanson



Unlike Bugatti, Henri-Sanson enjoyed working up a crowd before performing executions. He attracted record numbers and was one of the most efficient public executioners in Paris. He once executed 300 people during 3 days of the Reign of Terror and was asked to slow down because residents of a nearby street were complaining that the stench of blood would drive house prices down. He was so skilled that he could guillotine 12 people under 13 minutes. He famously made Marie Antoinette one of those people in front of 200,000 cheering fans.
1 ) Grover Cleveland


The only American president to serve two nonconsecutive terms also carried out two executions while sheriff in Buffalo, New York. He hanged a man that stabbed his own mother and a few months later hanged a murderer. During the 1884 elections his rivals called him “Buffalo’s Hangman” and tried to use the executions against him. Neither the allegations that he had a child out of wedlock, nor the nickname hurt his candidacy. In fact, some historians believe that personally executing criminals made him appear tough on crime.

A few of our favorite George Carlin facts:

The Great Escape

Carlin’s first big adventure occurred when he was a mere two months old. His mother had had enough of her alcoholic, abusive husband and fled the family apartment via the fire escape with infant George in her arms and his five-year-old brother close behind. Since his mother had to work to support the family, George spent much of his childhood home alone. He listened to radio programs and invented his own characters and stories in his imagination.
He was a 9th grade dropout

George dropped out of school in ninth grade and eventually joined the Air Force in 1954. He was court martialed three times, including one charge of falling asleep on guard duty. He was discharged in 1957, 11 months before his tour was officially up.
Lenny Bruce changed his career

While working as a disc jockey after leaving the Air Force, Carlin met and teamed up with Jack Burns, a Texas newscaster who had an interest in comedy. The duo performed stand-up as Carlin and Burns and had a fairly successful run, including several appearances on The Tonight Show. The duo split up in 1962 when George attended a Lenny Bruce performance and decided that he, too, wanted to veer away from traditional suit-and-tie joke-and-punchline comedy and pursue a more countercultural path. (Jack Burns would later replace Don Knotts on The Andy Griffith Show as Deputy Warren Ferguson.)
He was the first host of SNL

Carlin was the host of the first episode of NBC’s Saturday Night Live back in 1975. His albums were million-sellers and Grammy winners during that era and his live performances were always sold out. Yet he seemingly “disappeared” in 1976, at the height of his fame. It wasn’t revealed until many years later that Carlin had suffered a heart attack (his first of three). In addition to his drug and alcohol abuse, heart disease was hereditary in his family. His father, he revealed in an interview, had died at age 57 due to heart trouble. As George succinctly put it, “His first symptom was a trip to St. Raymond’s Cemetery.”

ALAN MATHISON TURING

Today would have been the 96th birthday of cryptologist, mathematician and father of almost everything digital Alan Turing. That he was persecuted for his homosexuality to the point of suicide is a crime and a tragedy.

Remember today the man who, more than Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, is the reason you are now sitting at a computer, reading this very sentence.

ALAN MATHISON TURING
23 June, 1912 - 7 June, 1954
Alan Mathison Turing was born on 23 June 1912, the second and last child (after his brother John) of Julius Mathison and Ethel Sara Turing. The unusual name of Turing placed him in a distinctive family tree of English gentry, far from rich but determinedly upper-middle-class in the peculiar sense of the English class system. His father Julius had entered the Indian Civil Service, serving in the Madras Presidency, and had there met and married Ethel Sara Stoney. She was the daughter of the chief engineer of the Madras railways, who came from an Anglo-Irish family of somewhat similar social status. Although conceived in British India, most likely in the town of Chatrapur, Alan Turing was born in a nursing home in Paddington, London.
Alan Turing's father
In four inadequate words Alan Turing appears now as the founder of computer science, the originator of the dominant technology of the late twentieth century, but these words were not spoken in his own lifetime, and he may yet be seen in a different light in the future. They are also words very remote from the circumstances of his birth and infancy.

The name of Turing was best known for the work of Julius' brother H. D. Turing on fly fishing, and had no connection with the scientific or academic worlds. The name of Stoney however was notable for a remote relative, the Irish physicist George Johnstone Stoney (1826-1911), today best known for his identification of the natural units of physical quantities. Possibly the engineering base of his mother's family, with its respect for applied science, had some influence, but if so it was subordinated to the demands of class, church and Empire. Certainly the elder brother John F. Turing, who became a London solicitor, showed no sign of it. Alan Turing's story was not one of family or tradition but of an isolated and autonomous mind.

Alan Turing shared with his brother a childhood rigidly determined by the demands of class and the exile in India of his parents. Until his father's retirement from India in 1926, Alan Turing and his elder brother John were fostered in various English homes where nothing encouraged expression, originality, or discovery. Science for him was an extra-curricular passion, first shown in primitive chemistry experiments. But he was given, and read, later commenting on its seminal influence, a popular book called Natural Wonders Every Child Should Know.

Alan Turing with his mother His boyhood scientific interests were a trial to his mother whose perpetual terror was that he would not be acceptable to the English Public School. At twelve he expressed his conscious fascination with using 'the thing that is commonest in nature and with the least waste of energy,' presentiment of a life seeking freshly minted answers to fundamental questions. Despite this, he was successfully entered for Sherborne School. The headmaster soon reported: "If he is to be solely a Scientific Specialist, he is wasting his time at a Public School." The assessment of his establishment was almost correct.
Turing's private notes on the theory of relativity showed a degree-level appreciation, yet he was almost prevented from taking the School Certificate lest he shame the school with failure. But it appears that the stimulus for effective communication and competition came only from contact with another very able youth, a year ahead of him at Sherborne, to whom Alan Turing found himself powerfully attracted in 1928. He, Christopher Morcom, gave Turing a vital period of intellectual companionship — which ended with Morcom's sudden death in February 1930.
Turing's conviction that he must now do what Morcom could not, apparently sustained him through a long crisis. For three years at least, as we know from his letters to Morcom's mother, his thoughts turned to the question of how the human mind, and Christopher's mind in particular, was embodied in matter; and whether accordingly it could be released from matter by death.

This question led him deeper into the area of twentieth century physics, first helped by A. S. Eddington's book The Nature of the Physical World, wondering whether quantum-mechanical theory affected the traditional problem of mind and matter.

Alan Turing, 1931

As an undergraduate at King's College, Cambridge from 1931, he entered a world more encouraging to free-ranging thought. His 1932 reading of the then new work of von Neumann on the logical foundations of quantum mechanics, helped the transition from emotional to rigorous intellectual enquiry. At the same time, this was when his homosexuality became a definitive part of his identity. The special ambience of King's College gave him a first real home. His association with the so-called anti-War movement of 1933 did not develop into Marxism, nor into the pacifism of his friend and occasional lover James Atkins, then a fellow undergraduate mathematician, later musician. He was closer in thought to the liberal-left economists J. M. Keynes and A. C. Pigou. His relaxations were found not in the literary circles generally associated with the King's College homosexual milieu, but in rowing, running, and later in sailing a small boat.

Turing's progress seemed assured, A distinguished degree in 1934 followed by a Fellowship of King's College in 1935 and a Smith's Prize in 1936 for work on probability theory, and he might then have seemed on course for a successful career as a mildly eccentric King's don engaged in pure mathematics. His uniqueness of mind, however, drove him in a direction none could have foreseen.
By 1933 Turing had already introduced himself to Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica and so to the then arcane area of mathematical logic. Bertrand Russell had thought of logic as a solid foundation for mathematical truth, but many questions had since been raised about how truth could be captured by any formalism. In particular, in 1931 Gödel had shattered Russell's picture by showing the incompleteness of mathematics: the existence of true statements about numbers which could not be proved by the formal application of set rules of deduction. In 1935, Turing learnt from the lecture course of the Cambridge topologist M. H. A. Newman that a further question, posed by Hilbert, still lay open. It was the question of Decidability, the Entscheidungsproblem. Could there exist, at least in principle, a definite method or process by which it could be decided whether any given mathematical assertion was provable?
Alan Turing in 1934
To answer such a question needed a definition of 'method' which would be not only precise but compelling. This is what Turing supplied. He analysed what could be achieved by a person performing a methodical process, and seizing on the idea of something done 'mechanically', expressed the analysis in terms of a theoretical machine able to perform certain precisely defined elementary operations on symbols on paper tape. He presented convincing arguments that the scope of such a machine was sufficient to encompass everything that would count as a 'definite method.' Daringly he included an argument based on the transitions between 'states of mind' of a human being performing a mental process.
This triple correspondence between logical instructions, the action of the mind, and a machine which could in principle be embodied in a practical physical form, was Turing's definitive contribution. Having made this novel definition of what should count as a 'definite method' — in modern language, an algorithm — it was not too hard to answer Hilbert's question in the negative: no such decision procedure exists.

In April 1936 he showed his result to Newman; but at the same moment the parallel conclusion of the American logician Alonzo Church became known, and Turing was robbed of the full reward for his originality. His paper, On Computable Numbers with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem, had to refer to Church's work, and was delayed until August 1936. However it was seen at the time that Turing's approach was original and different; Church relied upon an assumption internal to mathematics, rather than appealing to operations that could actually be done by real things or people in the physical world. Subsequently, the concept of the Turing machine has become the foundation of the modern theory of computation and computability.

Turing worked in isolation from the powerful school of logical theory centred on Church at Princeton University, and his work emerged as that of a complete outsider. One can only speculate, but it looks as if Turing found in the concept of the Turing machine something that would satisfy the fascination with the problem of Mind that Christopher Morcom had sparked; his total originality lay in seeing the relevance of mathematical logic to a problem originally seen as one of physics. In this paper, as in so many aspects of his life, Turing made a bridge between the logical and the physical worlds, thought and action, which crossed conventional boundaries.

His work introduced a concept of immense practical significance: the idea of the Universal Turing Machine. The concept of 'the Turing machine' is like that of 'the formula' or 'the equation'; there is an infinity of possible Turing machines, each corresponding to a different 'definite method' or algorithm. But imagine, as Turing did, each particular algorithm written out as a set of instructions in a standard form. Then the work of interpreting the instructions and carrying them out is itself a mechanical process, and so can itself be embodied in a particular Turing machine, namely the Universal Turing machine. A Universal Turing machine can be made do what any other particular Turing machine would do, by supplying it with the standard form describing that Turing machine. One machine, for all possible tasks.

It is hard now not to think of a Turing machine as a computer program, and the mechanical task of interpreting and obeying the program as what the computer itself does. Thus, the Universal Turing Machine embodies the essential principle of the computer: a single machine which can be turned to any well-defined task by being supplied with the appropriate program.

Additionally, the abstract Universal Turing Machine naturally exploits what was later seen as the 'stored program' concept essential to the modern computer: it embodies the crucial twentieth-century insight that symbols representing instructions are no different in kind from symbols representing numbers. But computers, in this modern sense, did not exist in 1936. Turing created these concepts out of his mathematical imagination. Only nine years later would electronic technology be tried and tested sufficiently to make it practical to transfer the logic of his ideas into actual engineering. In the meanwhile the idea lived only in his mind.

In common with other outstanding young scientists, Turing spent two years at Princeton University enrolled as a graduate student. He arrived in September 1936. On Computable Numbers... was published at the very end of 1936 and attracted some attention; by the time he left, the idea had come to the attention of the leading Hungarian-American mathematician John von Neumann. But Turing certainly did not shoot to fame. He worked on on algebra and number theory; on showing that his definition of computability coincided with that of Church; and on an extension of his ideas (Ordinal Logics) which provided a Ph.D. thesis.

The work on 'ordinal logics', probably his most difficult and deepest mathematical work, was an attempt to bring some kind of order to the realm of the uncomputable. This also was connected to the question of the nature of mind, as Turing's interpretation of his ideas suggested that human 'intuition' could correspond to uncomputable steps in an argument. But Turing never pursued this line of development after 1938. Instead, he was increasingly preoccupied with more immediate problems which demanded logical skills.

True to the concreteness of the Turing machine, he also spent time at Princeton making a cipher machine based on using electromagnetic relays to multiply binary numbers. Even then he saw a link from 'useless' logic to practical computation. Although not one of the political intellectuals of the 1930s, Turing followed current events and was influenced in studying ciphers by the prospect of war with Germany.
In 1938 Turing was offered a temporary post at Princeton by von Neumann but instead returned to Cambridge. He had no University lectureship; in the year 1938-9 he lived on his King's College fellowship, as logician and number theorist. Unusually for a mathematician, he joined in Wittgenstein's classes on the philosophy of mathematics; unusually again, he engineered gear-wheel parts for a special machine to calculate the Riemann Zeta-function.

The Enigma cipher machine Publicly, he sponsored the entry into Britain of a young German Jewish refugee. Secretly, he worked part-time for the British cryptanalytic department, the so-called Government Code and Cypher School. His appointment marked the first scientific input into a hitherto arts-based department. That revolution was caused by the failure of pre-scientific methods to penetrate the mechanical Enigma cipher used by Germany. No significant progress was made, however, until the gift of vital ideas and information in July 1939 from Poland, where mathematicians had been employed on the problem much earlier.
Upon British declaration of war on 3 September, Turing took up full-time work at the wartime cryptanalytic headquarters, Bletchley Park. The Polish work was limited as it depended upon the very particular way the Germans had been using the Enigma. One of their ideas was embodied in a machine called a Bomba. The way forward lay in Turing's generalisation of the Polish Bombe into a far more powerful device, capable of breaking any Enigma message where a small portion of plaintext could be guessed correctly. Another Cambridge mathematican, W. G. Welchman, made an important contribution, but the critical factor was Turing's brilliant mechanisation of subtle logical deductions.

From late 1940 onwards, the Turing-Welchman Bombe made reading of Luftwaffe signals routine. In contrast, the more complex Enigma methods used in German Naval communications were generally regarded as unbreakable. Happy to work alone on a problem that defeated others, Turing cracked the system at the end of 1939, but it required the capture of further material by the Navy, and the development of sophisticated statistical processes, before regular decryption could begin in mid-1941. Turing's section 'Hut 8', which deciphered Naval and in particular U-boat messages, then became a key unit at Bletchley Park. By the end of 1941, as the United States entered the war, the battle of the Atlantic was moving towards Allied advantage. On 1 February 1942, the Atlantic U-boat Enigma machine was given an extra complication and this advantage was suddenly wiped out: nothing could be decoded and catastrophe loomed.

Besides illustrating the always razor-edge state of the war of wits, this crisis brought about a new ingredient in Alan Turing's experience: electronic technology made its first appearance at Bletchley Park as telephone engineers were pressed into an effort to gain ever higher speeds of mechanical working. As it turned out, however, the electronic engineers found themselves called upon to mechanize the breaking of the 'Fish' material: messages enciphered on the quite different system used for Hitler's strategic communications. Here again Turing's statistical ideas underlay the methods employed, though it was M. H. A. Newman who played the organising role. The conjunction of Turing's thoughts with the practicality of large-scale electronic machinery, arising from this technical U-boat Enigma change, came to have momentous consequences.
By 1942 Alan Turing was the genius loci at Bletchley Park, famous as 'Prof', shabby, nail-bitten, tie-less, sometimes halting in speech and awkward of manner, the source of many hilarious anecdotes about bicycles, gas masks, and the Home Guard; the foe of charlatans and status-seekers, relentless in long shift work with his colleagues, mostly of student age. To one of these, Joan Clarke, he proposed marriage, and was gladly accepted. But then he retracted, telling her of his homosexuality.

Turing crossed the Atlantic in November 1942, for highest-level liaison not only on the desperate U-boat Enigma crisis, but on the electronic encipherment of speech signals between Roosevelt and Churchill. Before his return in March 1943, logical weaknesses in the changed U-boat system had been brilliantly detected, and U-boat Enigma decryption was effectively restored for the rest of the war. With the battle of the Atlantic regained for the Allies, crisis resolved, chess champion C. H. O'D. Alexander, hitherto Turing's deputy, took charge of Hut 8.

Turing became an all-purpose consultant to the by now vast Bletchley Park operation. As such he saw the 'Fish' material cracked by the Colossus machines, brought into operation just before D-Day, demonstrating the feasibility of large-scale digital electronic technology. Turing himself devoted much time to learning electronics: ostensibly for creating his own, elegant speech secrecy system, which he effected with the aid of one assistant, Donald Bayley, at nearby Hanslope Park. But he had another and more ambitious end in view: in the last stage of the war (for his part in which he was awarded an OBE) he planned the embodiment of the Universal Turing Machine in electronic form, or in effect, invented the digital computer.

In 1944, at the invasion of Normandy that Allied control of the Atlantic allowed, Alan Turing was almost uniquely in possession of three key ideas:

* his own 1936 concept of the universal machine
* the potential speed and reliability of electronic technology
* the inefficiency in designing different machines for different logical processes.

Combined, these ideas provided the principle, the practical means, and the motivation for the modern computer, a single machine capable of handling any programmed task. He himself was as eager as anyone in the world to bring them together, and was spurred even more by a fourth idea: that the universal machine should be able to acquire and exhibit the faculties of the human mind. Even in 1944 he spoke to Donald Bayley of 'building a brain'.

Turing was captivated by the potential of the computer he had conceived. Although his 1936 work had shown the absolute limitations of the computable, he had become fascinated by what Turing machines could do, rather than by what they could not. He had long abandoned his youthful expectations of finding free will or free spirits through quantum mechanics. His later thought was strongly determinist and atheistic in character. And by the end of the Second World War he had turned against the tentative idea that there were steps of 'intuition' in human thought corresponding to uncomputable operations. Instead, he held that the computer would offer unlimited scope for practical progress towards embodying intelligence in an artificial form.

For the second time, he experienced being pre-empted by a parallel American publication, in this case the EDVAC plan for an electronic computer, with Von Neumann's name attached. Nonetheless, this publication when it appeared in June 1945 worked in practice to Turing's advantage, American competition stimulating the National Physical Laboratory to plan a rival project, to which he was appointed a Senior Principal Scientific Officer. Turing despised his nominal superior J. Womersley, but at least initially this applied mathematician showed a rapid appreciation of the scope of Turing's ideas, and with a eye for acronyms steered Turing's design towards formal approval in early 1946 as the Automatic Computing Engine, or ACE.
Turing's detailed computer scheme was drawn up in a continuation of wartime spirit: as a plan that could be effected immediately with the memory storage (cumbersome acoustic delay lines, as used in radar) that was to hand. Turing knew that superior technology would soon transform design: his emphasis was on speed in every sense, and in the exploitation of the universal machine concept. This meant, in particular, implementing arithmetical functions by programming rather than by building in electronic components, a concept different from that of the American-derived designs.

The hardware design was short-term; but his prospectus for the use of the machine was visionary. Turing projected a computer able to switch at will from numerical work to algebra, codebreaking, file handling, or chess-playing. Methods for handling subroutines included a suggestion that the machine could expand its own programs from an abbreviated form, ideas well ahead of contemporary American plans. A later talk (February 1947) depicted a national computer centre with remote terminals, and the prospect of the machine taking over more and more of its own programming work. In 1947 his Abbreviated Code Instructions marked the beginning of programming languages. But not a single component of the ACE was assembled, and Turing found himself without any influence in the engineering of the project. The lack of cooperation, very different from the wartime spirit, he found deeply frustrating.

From October 1947, the NPL allowed, or perhaps preferred, that he should spend the academic year at Cambridge. Rather than publish these fundamental principles of computing, he spent his time on new study amidst the post-war renaissance of science, not in mathematics or technology but in neurology and physiology. Out of this came a pioneering paper on what would now be called neural nets, written to amplify his earlier suggestions that a sufficiently complex mechanical system could exhibit learning ability. This was submitted to the NPL as an internal report, and never published in his lifetime. Meanwhile the NPL made no advance with the construction of the ACE, and as Turing's position fell back, other computer projects at Cambridge and Manchester took the lead.

Indeed it was Newman, who had been the first reader of On computable numbers, and in charge of the electronic breaking of the 'Fish' ciphers, who was partly responsible for this. On his 1945 appointment to the chair of pure mathematics at Manchester University, he had negotiated a large Royal Society grant for the construction of a computer. Newman strongly promoted Turing's principle of the stored-program computer, but unlike Turing, intended no personal involvement with engineering. He conveyed the basic principles to the leading radar engineer F. C. Williams, who had been attracted to Manchester, and the latter's brilliant innovation made possible a rapid success: Manchester in June 1948 had the world's first practical demonstration of Turing's computer principle.

Although losing in the race to implement a universal machine, and slow to communicate or compete in the game of scientific priority, Turing ran very competitively in a literal sense. After the war he developed his strength in cross-country running with frequent long-distance training and top-rank competition in amateur athletics. He would amaze his colleagues by running to scientific meetings, beating the travellers by public transport, and only an injury prevented his serious consideration for the British team in the 1948 Olympic Games.

The return to Cambridge helped Alan Turing form an agreeable circle of lasting friendships, particularly with Robin Gandy, who began at this period to develop under Turing's influence and would later inherit his mantle as a mathematical logician. Although never secretive about his sexuality, he now became more deliberately outspoken and exuberant, and all thoughts of comfort or conformity were now left behind. A mathematics student at King's College, Neville Johnson, became a lover.
In May 1948, Newman offered Turing the post as Deputy Director of the computing laboratory at Manchester University. Turing accepted, resigned from the NPL, and moved in October 1948. The meaningless title reflected Turing's uncertain status. He had no control over the project whose fate was in fact determined by its sudden necessity for the British atomic bomb project. F. C. Williams had in any case built his own empire, and Newman's original plans were largely swept aside. But Turing did have a clear role to play: as the organiser of programming for the engineers' electronics.

Turing at Manchester could perhaps have led the world in software development. His partly explored ideas included the use of mathematical logic for program checking, implementing Church's logical calculus on the machine, and other ideas which, combined with his massive knowledge of combinatorial and statistical methods, could have set the agenda in computer science for years ahead. This, however, he failed to do; his work on machine-code programming at Manchester, produced only as a working manual, was limited in scope.

Instead, there followed a confused period, in which Turing hovered between new topics and old. He revisited his 1939 calculation of the Riemann zeta-function with the use of the prototype computer; he pursued the question of computability within the algebra of group theory. Out of this confused era arose, however, the most lucid and far-reaching expression of Turing's philosophy of machine and Mind, the paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence which appeared in the philosophical journal Mind in 1950.

This, besides summarising the view he had developed since 1936, absorbed his first-hand experience and experiment with machinery. The wit and drama of the Turing Test has proved a lasting stimulus to later thinkers, and the paper a classic contribution to the philosophy and practice of Artificial Intelligence research. But this was essentially the end of his investigation, and despite this model of communication, supported by his radio talks, he had apparently no influence on the American foundation of Artificial Intelligence later in the 1950s.

At the same time, in 1950, there emerged a clear direction for new thought. Rather than return to classical mathematics, the novel potential of the computer still held his attention, and he became a pioneer of its personal use. For, as he settled in Manchester, buying his own first house at outlying Wilmslow, he had an entirely fresh field in view. It was what he described as the mathematical theory of morphogenesis: the theory of growth and form in biology.

Outwardly an extraordinary change of direction, for him it was a return to a fundamental problem; even in childhood he had been spotted and sketched 'watching the daisies grow'; from childhood Natural Wonders to D'Arcy Thompson's On Growth and Form to a more recent interest in how brains grow new connections, he had sustained an interest in the biological structures so easily taken for granted, yet so complex and bizarre from the viewpoint of physics. Out of all the phenomena of life he fixed on the way asymmetry can arise out of initially symmetric conditions as first thing requiring explanation, and his answer, given without apparent reference to anyone else's work, was that it could arise from the nonlinearity of the chemical equations of reaction and diffusion. He modelled hypothetical chemical reactions on the circle and the plane, and for the repetitive numerical simulation required to test his ideas, became the first serious user of an electronic computer for mathematical research.

He was elected to Fellowship of the Royal Society in July 1951, for the work done fifteen years before, but equal originality was on the way: his first successful work on The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis was submitted as a paper that November. Long overlooked, it was a founding paper of modern non-linear dynamical theory.
Alan Turing was arrested and came to trial on 31 March 1952, after the police learned of his sexual relationship with a young Manchester man. He made no serious denial or defence, instead telling everyone that he saw no wrong with his actions. He was particularly concerned to be open about his sexuality even in the hard and unsympathetic atmosphere of Manchester engineering. Rather than go to prison he accepted, for the period of a year, injections of oestrogen intended to neutralise his libido.
His work on the morphogenetic theory continued. He developed his theory of pattern formation out of instability into the realm of spherical objects, such as the Radiolaria, and also on the cylinder, as a model of plant stems. He set as a particular goal the explanation for the appearance of the Fibonacci numbers in the leaf patterns of plants — most noticeable in the close-packed spirals of sunflower heads and fir cones.
Alan Turing (right) at the
console of the Manchester computer
Besides this he refreshed his youthful interest in quantum physics, studying the problem of wave-function reduction in quantum mechanics, with a hint that he was considering a non-linear mechanism for it. He took a new interest in the representation of elementary particles by spinors, and in relativity theory.

A factor in his life unknown to most around him was that he had also continued to work for GCHQ, the post-war successor to Bletchley Park, on the basis of a personal connection with Alexander, now its director. But since 1948, the conditions of the Cold War, and the alliance with the United States, meant that known homosexuals had become ineligible for security clearance. Turing, now therefore excluded, spoke bitterly of this to his onetime wartime colleague, now MI6 engineer Donald Bayley, but to no other personal friends. State security also seems the likely cause of what he described as another intense crisis in March 1953, involving police searching for a visiting Norwegian who had come to see him. Concern over the foreign contacts of one acquainted with state secrets was understandable, and his holiday in Greece in 1953 could not have been calculated to calm the nerves of security officers.

Although unable to tell his friends about questions of official secrecy, in other ways he actively sought much greater intimacy of expression with them and with a Jungian therapist. Eccentric, solitary, gloomy, vivacious, resigned, angry, eager, dissatisfied — these had always been his ever-varying characteristics, and despite the strength that he showed the world in coping with outrageous fortune, no-one could safely have predicted his future course.

He was found by his cleaner when she came in on 8 June 1954. He had died the day before of cyanide poisoning, a half-eaten apple beside his bed. His mother believed he had accidentally ingested cyanide from his fingers after an amateur chemistry experiment, but it is more credible that he had successfully contrived his death to allow her alone to believe this. The coroner's verdict was suicide.

Germaine de Staël & Benjamin Constant

By Renee Winegarten
(Yale University Press, 343 pages, $35)
Germaine de Staël and Benjamin Constant, champions of liberty and republican government in Paris during the revolutionary tumult of the late 18th century, are superbly captured in Renee Winegarten's "dual biography." But it is unsettling to revisit their lives, even in Ms. Winegarten's eloquent telling.
[An Affair to Remember]

It is dismaying to think, for instance, that the once celebrated literary works on which their fame rests – epistolary, political, historical, philosophical and novelistic – have long since disappeared from the reading lists of all but scholars. And it is frustrating to discover, upon learning more of their biographical detail, that the pair's long-standing friendship – or love affair, or political partnership, or whatever the alliance was – inspires so little sympathy.

Germaine de Staël, the Paris-born daughter of a Genevan banker (Jacques Necker, who would become Louis XVI's finance minister), was throughout her love life "always throbbing with energy," Ms. Winegarten writes. She was "always active, always demanding in her expectations and her quest for reassurance that she was as loved as she wished to be. This mostly futile quest led to her bizarre strategy of juggling two or more love objects, soul mates or suitors at the same time." Benjamin Constant, also of Swiss parentage, was by contrast "usually cautious, a lifelong gambler who calculated the risk." His strategy of threatening suicide with the aim of seducing women was perfectly artificial.

When Constant and de Staël met in Paris in September 1794, two months after the end of the Reign of Terror, both were in their late 20s and both were married, though he was in the process of getting a divorce and she was already notorious for her romantic adventuring. Still, it took Constant some years before he succeeded in becoming de Staël's lover, and thereafter he did not hesitate to plan a mercenary marriage for himself with another heiress, even in the couple's periods of greatest intimacy. Age did not wither nor custom stale his odious self-absorption.

Yet their affair lasted on and off for nearly 20 years. De Staël had other lovers, too, of course: At 46, she had a child by a man young enough to be her son. I doubt that either she or Constant ever knew what real love could be. What bound them together was a shared passion for the ideals of the French Revolution.

Both of them came from an upper-middle-class Swiss background, but they were essentially French in temperament and inclination. When they met, Constant had not suffered any of the Terror's perils; he had sat out the worst of it in Germany, where his military father had obtained for him a court post with the duke of Brunswick. In that far-right milieu, Constant had secretly felt a brief admiration for Robespierre as the necessary fiend to bring on the needed day of social equality.

De Staël, as the cooperative wife of the Swedish minister to France, survived the havoc of the Terror, from which even diplomats were not always secure. During the hectic period that followed, that of the Directoire, she maintained a popular Parisian salon with Constant as her new ally. Both she and Constant hoped for a brief time that Napoleon, when he seized power in 1799, would become the savior of what was good in the Revolution. It did not turn out that way.

Constant was a good friend of the Abbé Sieyès, the perennial constitution drafter who became second consul in Napoleon's first consulate, and Constant was made a member of a group that advised the government on new legislation. Eventually Napoleon soured on even this limited body, though, resenting the mildest criticism of his total executive power. Constant soon lost his only political post.

But he knew when to keep his mouth shut and did not incur the dictator's wrath – unlike de Staël, who in her salon made witty barbs at the expense of the self-appointed emperor and his family, insults that rapidly found their way to the imperial ear. Her lack of self-restraint resulted in her being exiled, not from France, but from Paris, which was just a bad.

Both of the figures in Ms. Winegarten's narrative are confounding, and both, Ms. Winegarten says, came to feel "mature regrets" late in life. But to me Constant presents the harder puzzle. How do we reconcile the many expressions of his "mad" love for the different women scattered through his amorous life? There is the so-called "testament" to de Staël: "I have been the happiest of men during the four months I have spent with her, and that I consider it the greatest happiness of my life to be able to make her happy while she is young, to grow old gracefully along with her and to arrive at the end of it all with the being who understands me and without whom there would be no interest, no feeling on this earth." And yet only two years later he wrote to an aunt of his desire not to let slip the chance of obtaining an heiress to replace de Staël.

Which was the true Constant, so ironically named? I think both. I can believe almost anything of the man who could view the daily horror of the guillotine from the safety of Brunswick and deem, however briefly, Robespierre as the savior of mankind. Plenty of Germans felt that way about Hitler.

My impression of de Staël is altogether different. It strikes me that, in each of her many love affairs, she was totally, if temporarily, in earnest. And certainly from her precarious position in Paris during the Terror she risked her life to assist the escape of aristocratic friends. If her defiance of Napoleon did little to bring him to his ultimate downfall, it was a pleasant example of human fearlessness. She was faithful, at least, to her ideals.

Mr. Auchincloss is the author, most recently, of the novel "The Headmaster's Dilemma."

George Carlin RIP

SANTA MONICA, California -- George Carlin, the dean of U.S. counterculture comedians whose biting insights on life and language were immortalized in his "Seven Words You Can Never Say on TV" routine, died of heart failure Sunday. He was 71.

Mr. Carlin went into a Santa Monica hospital Sunday afternoon complaining of chest pain and died later that evening, said his publicist, Jeff Abraham.

Mr. Carlin, who had a history of heart trouble, performed as recently as last weekend at the Orleans Casino and Hotel in Las Vegas. It was announced Tuesday that the comedian was being awarded the 11th annual Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.
Mr. Carlin constantly pushed the envelope with his jokes, particularly with a routine called "The Seven Words You Can Never Say on TV." When Mr. Carlin uttered all seven at a show in Milwaukee in 1972, he was arrested for disturbing the peace. And when they were played on a New York radio station, they resulted in a Supreme Court ruling in 1978 upholding the government's authority to sanction stations for broadcasting offensive language.

"So my name is a footnote in American legal history, which I'm perversely kind of proud of," he said earlier this year.

Mr. Carlin produced 23 comedy albums, 14 HBO specials, three books, and a couple of TV shows. He also appeared in several movies. He hosted the first broadcast of "Saturday Night Live" and noted on his Web site that he was "loaded on cocaine all week long." When asked about the fallout from the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show that ended with Janet Jackson's breast-baring "wardrobe malfunction," Mr. Carlin said, "What are we, surprised?"

"There's an idea that the human body is somehow evil and bad and there are parts of it that are especially evil and bad, and we should be ashamed. Fear, guilt and shame are built into the attitude toward sex and the body," he said. "It's reflected in these prohibitions and these taboos that we have."

Mr. Carlin was born May 12, 1937, and grew up in the Morningside Heights section of Manhattan, raised by a single mother. After dropping out of high school in the ninth grade, he joined the Air Force in 1954. He received three court-martials and numerous disciplinary punishments, according to his official Web site.

While in the Air Force he started working as an off-base disc jockey at a radio station in Shreveport, Louisiana, and after receiving a general discharge in 1957, took an announcing job at WEZE in Boston.

"Fired after three months for driving mobile news van to New York to buy pot," his Web site says.

From there he went on to a job on the night shift as a deejay at a radio station in Forth Worth, Texas. Mr. Carlin also worked a variety of temporary jobs including as a carnival organist and as a marketing director for a peanut brittle.

In 1960, he left with a Texas radio buddy, Jack Burns, for Hollywood to pursue a nightclub career as comedy team Burns & Carlin. He left with $300, but his first break came just months later when the duo appeared on the Tonight Show with Jack Paar.

Mr. Carlin said he hoped to would emulate his childhood hero, Danny Kaye, the kindly, rubber-faced comedian who ruled over the decade that Mr. Carlin grew up in -- the 1950s -- with a clever but gentle humor reflective of its times.

Only problem was, it didn't work for him.

"I was doing superficial comedy entertaining people who didn't really care: Businessmen, people in nightclubs, conservative people. And I had been doing that for the better part of 10 years when it finally dawned on me that I was in the wrong place doing the wrong things for the wrong people," Mr. Carlin reflected recently as he prepared for his 14th HBO special, "It's Bad For Ya."

Churchill and His Myths

Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat: The Dire Warning
by John Lukacs

Basic Books, 147 pp., $24.00
Troublesome Young Men: The Rebels Who Brought Churchill to Power and Helped Save England
by Lynne Olson

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 436 pp., $27.50; $15.00 (paper)
Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization
by Nicholson Baker

Simon and Schuster, 566 pp., $30.00
Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost the Empire and the West Lost the World
by Patrick J. Buchanan.

Crown, 544 pp., $29.95
1.

At the end of 1936, Winston Churchill's fortunes had sunk as low as he would ever know. His career had long resembled Snakes and Ladders, the nursery board game where a shake of the dice leads to either a brisk ascent or a downward slither. Already famous in 1900 when he entered Parliament at the age of twenty-five, he was home secretary at thirty-four (having nimbly deserted the Conservatives before the Liberals won their landslide in 1906), and went on climbing the ladder until the outbreak of the Great War. Then in 1915 he stepped on a nasty snake. He was saddled with the blame for the Dardanelles debacle and left government to command an infantry battalion on the Western Front. After easing his way back into office, he stealthily returned to the Conservative fold, but in 1931, while the Tories were in opposition, he resigned from the party leadership because of his bitter opposition to Gandhi's release from prison, and to any measure of Indian self-government.

A heroic account of his "wilderness years" in the 1930s, which Churchill promoted and which is current today among his huge American claque, has him as the noble lone voice crying out while his countrymen willfully ignored his warnings about the need to rearm against a resurgent Germany. It's true that most British people understandably had little enthusiasm for another war only twenty years after one in which they had lost three quarters of a million dead (equivalent to nearly six million Americans today). But Churchill's woes were largely self-inflicted, from India to what John Lukacs calls "his impetuous (and, in retrospect, unnecessary) championing of Edward VIII" in December 1936. In the most disastrous parliamentary performance of his life, incoherent and seemingly the worse for drink, Churchill pleaded on behalf of the King until he was shouted down. London bookmakers take bets on anything from sport to the weather to politics; what odds would they have given that December that, within less than four years, he would be prime minister, at the supreme crisis in his country's history?
This will always remain an extraordinary drama; but there is another story, of the degree to which Churchill divided opinion, in his lifetime and—as these books show—to this day. John Lukacs is preeminent among intellectually respectable Churchillians, and he returns yet again to the beginning of Churchill's premiership in May 1940. Lynne Olson complements this with an admiring account of how a number of dissident Conservative MPs helped get him there. But for both Nicholson Baker and Patrick Buchanan—writing from utterly different perspectives—Churchill is the villain of the piece, a warmonger or an incompetent blunderer. Paul Addison has said that in 1945 Churchill won two great victories, one military and the other in the "battle over his reputation that had been going on ever since the turn of the century." That other battle continues beyond the turn of one more century.

And it is intertwined with another argument, about the war in which he led his country. Lukacs takes as his text, and as his title, Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat, the first speech Churchill gave as prime minister on May 13, 1940—three days after the German invasion of France—with its bleak warning of sufferings to come, telling Parliament and people "that immediately ahead of them loomed the prospect not of a Good War," as Lukacs puts it, "of triumphs near or faraway, but the prospect of plight and suffering in the face of disasters." But there was no more haunting passage in that speech than the promise "to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark lamentable catalogue of human crime." With those words Churchill marked out for the future the essential narrative of a noble war fought with a unique moral purpose: the narrative of a Good War that Baker and Buchanan want to challenge.

Despite occasional equivocations, Churchill had recognized the nature of the Third Reich from the beginning; and in the autumn of 1938, still in the political doldrums, he staked all his political chips on opposing the Munich Agreement signed at the end of September. The man who rescued his career and his reputation was Hitler. Although Neville Chamberlain was welcomed home by cheering crowds, many Englishmen felt at heart like Léon Blum, the French Socialist leader, when he greeted Munich "with a mixture of shame and relief," and shame soon predominated. When Czechoslovakia disintegrated in March 1939 and Hitler arrived triumphant in Prague, he stood exposed for perfidy as well as brutality. Chamberlain's entire policy was discredited, and Churchill was vindicated. The London press called for his return to government, which came about when war was declared in September 1939; he was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty eight months before the high drama of the following spring.

Anything John Lukacs writes is worth reading, even if he has now stretched his material to its limit. Evelyn Waugh said (through his alter ego Gilbert Pinfold) that he "had no wish to obliterate anything he had written, but he would dearly have liked to revise it, envying painters who are allowed to return to the same theme time and time again, clarifying and enriching it until they have done all they can with it." Lukacs has done just that, and on an ever-smaller canvas: from The Last European War: September 1939–December 1941 to The Duel: The Eighty-Day Struggle Between Churchill and Hitler to Five Days in London: May 1940 and now this absorbing long essay devoted to a single short speech, longer than the Gettysburg Address (and books have been written about that, after all) though still less than one thousand words. Miniaturism can scarcely go further.

Apart from the famous words "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat" (deftly filched from Garibaldi in 1849: "Non offro nè paga, nè quartiere, nè provvigioni. Offro fame, sete, marce forzate, battaglie e morte"), that speech proposed Churchill's succinct and forthright war aims: "It is victory, victory at all costs, victory, however long and hard the road may be." And it distilled both Churchill's insight into the nature of Hitlerism and his honesty in not promising easy answers. Lukacs has argued that the Third Reich was in many ways characterized by its "modernity"; and it was, in his view, Churchill's sense of history and his high conception of Christian civilization—in a cultural sense rather than from the viewpoint of a believing Christian, which he was not—that gave him his intuition about that heart of darkness, or what, in his "finest hour" speech of June 18, he called the threat "of a new dark age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of a perverted science."

What had brought Churchill to power was the military disaster following Hitler's invasion of Norway on April 8, an irony he wryly recognized, since he bore no little responsibility for that calamity. On May 7–8 the House of Commons debated the failure in Norway, more vigorously than Parliament has recently been allowed to debate the failure in Iraq; although Chamberlain won the vote at its end, his majority fell so heavily that within two days he was replaced by Churchill. The heroes of Olson's Troublesome Young Men (the phrase was Harold Macmillan's) are the forty-two Tory rebels who voted against the government, along with more than forty who abstained.

Some of these MPs had been chafing against party discipline for years, at peril to their careers under Chamberlain, who was notoriously unable to accept criticism, and his imperious chief whip, Captain David Margesson. Some were new boys like John Profumo, aged twenty-five, fresh from winning a by-election, and in uniform like a number of his young colleagues. On the morning after he had courageously joined the vote against Chamberlain he received a glorious dressing-down from Margesson that should be in any dictionary of political quotations:

And I can tell you this, you utterly contemptible little shit. On every morning that you wake up for the rest of your life you will be ashamed of what you did last night.

They don't make chief whips like that anymore; but history would endorse Profumo and not Margesson.

While readable and well researched, Olson's book would have been better with less superfluous color ("Children floated toy boats on the Serpentine in Hyde Park, while young lovers lay on deck chairs nearby"), and fewer slips. Churchill entered Parliament in 1900, not 1901, and the lawyer and politician Sir John Simon went to Fettes (Tony Blair's old school), not Eton. Olson writes in knowing tones that Harold Macmillan was commissioned in 1914 into the King's Royal Rifle Corps but that his mother managed to have him transferred "to the much more prestigious Grenadier Guards, many of whose officers were aristocrats."

For what it's worth, and whatever Mrs. Macmillan (herself American by birth) may have supposed, the KRRC or 60th Rifles was one of the most elegant and patrician regiments in the British army. Lord Randolph Churchill had originally wanted his son Winston to join the 60th, and it was the regiment in which Sir Anthony Eden served with distinction during the Great War. Nicholson Baker has his own regimental difficulties, writing that in May 1940 Churchill "ordered the small British force left at Calais—rifle brigades [sic] and tanks—to fight to the death." He means the Rifle Brigade, sister regiment of the 60th, which served as the forlorn hope at Calais.

Such minor errors serve as a reminder that all of the writers under review are American (Hungarian by birth in Lukacs's case), and are sometimes deaf to the overtones of English life, including political life. Lukacs should know better than to dismiss Stanley Baldwin as "bumbling and provincially British." Playing the simple country squire was Baldwin's shtick, but he was in truth a clever, well-read man (see the address he gave as president of the Classical Association); more to the point, he was prime minister three times, easy victor of two general elections, and altogether "the most formidable antagonist whom I ever encountered," in Lloyd George's rueful words.

To write of Churchill's "exceptional knowledge and comprehension of Europe," as Lukacs does, is far-fetched, and to say that "his prime virtue was magnanimity" is even more wrong. Churchill might visit the south of France for pleasure or Spain to play polo, but showed little interest in local culture, and knew no other language than English, if one excepts his idiosyncratic version of French (by comparison for example with Eden, who spoke excellent German as well as French). When Lukacs quotes the diplomat Alex Cadogan writing "I'm afraid that Winston will build up a 'Garden City'* at No. 10, with the most awful people," the footnote explains "*A cheap modern suburb." But Cadogan was alluding to the nickname for the collection of temporary buildings in the garden at Downing Street put up to house Lloyd George's temporary offices in the previous war and thus, by extension, to any kitchen cabinet.

"The most awful people" were significant words, and they relate to the problem with Olson's story. "People talk of rearming," Anthony Powell's character Widmerpool tells Nick Jenkins over lunch. "I am glad to say the Labour Party is against it to a man—and the more enlightened Tories, too."

Olson's heroes by contrast were a very mixed bunch. Some were politically lightweight, like Harold Nicolson, some were obscure, like Dick Law and Ronald Cartland, and some were thoroughly dubious. Cartland is forgotten for a poignant reason. An amiable, earnest young MP (in a party which didn't care for prigs: Macmillan's earlier group of leftish Tories had been sneeringly known as "the YMCA"), he had bravely criticized appeasement before the war, and then voted against Chamberlain in the Norway debate. Unlike our present-day saber-rattlers at Westminster or on Capitol Hill, Cartland at least practiced what he preached by joining the army, and was killed in action during the retreat to Dunkirk.

One day Churchill would win the Nobel Prize for literature (largely on the strength of The Second World War, much of which, as David Reynolds has shown in his splendid book In Command of History, was ghostwritten), but Churchill the writer also divided opinion. Lukacs mentions several eminent English writers who dismissed Churchill's "sham-Augustan prose," as it was called by Waugh, who added at the time of Churchill's death that he had been "always surrounded by crooks." His phrase comes to mind when Olson attempts to make another hero out of Churchill's hanger-on Robert Boothby, while relating the story of Harold Macmillan's unhappy marriage to Lady Dorothy Cavendish, and her decades-long liaison with Boothby.

If truth be told Boothby was decidedly one of Waugh's "crooks": a bumptious charlatan who had been a parliamentary aide to Churchill, although when he got in trouble through shady financial dealings he was abandoned by Churchill (in a way which didn't say much for any "magnanimity"). A buccaneer himself, Churchill was all his life attracted by others. The fact that so many of his associates verged on the disreputable never did his career much good; in those crucial years, it may have done the nation harm.

Such cronies apart, Churchill had very little personal following in the 1930s; and Lukacs knows enough to be aware that his hero had been one of the most disliked and distrusted men of his age. From an early stage, Churchill had acquired two reputations—as an ambitious, unprincipled careerist and as an impulsive, reckless adventurer—which are the more striking for being on the face of it mutually exclusive. A large anthology could be compiled of the contemptuous things said about him from the 1900s to the 1940s, by colleagues and friends as well as by enemies; at times contempt shaded into hatred. At the 1922 general election, he was defeated in Dundee by two candidates, one of them the only Prohibitionist ever elected to Parliament as such (a nice touch in view of the great man's own habits), and the other the foreign policy radical E.D. Morel, who said, "I look upon Churchill as such a personal force for evil that I would take up the fight against him with a whole heart."

Just as telling in its way was the verdict of Sir Basil Bartlett, well known in theatrical and social London—"the actor baronet" to the popular newspapers—and a very astute observer. "Winston Churchill is making inflammatory speeches again," he wrote in his diary in May 1936, months before the abdication fiasco.

He is a curious character. A sort of Mary Queen of Scots of modern politics. He is bound to emerge historically as a romantic and glamorous figure, but he is surrounded by corpses. No one who has ever served him or been in any way connected to his career, has ever survived to tell the story.[*]

That is what plenty of civilized, intelligent Englishmen thought.

Even after Churchill had become prime minister he inspired alarm. "Chips" Channon, the American-born Chamberlainite MP and social diarist, may have been unusual in thinking Churchill's accession "perhaps the darkest day in English history," but Lukacs cites plenty of other witnesses that spring of 1940 who called Churchill "unscrupulous," "unreliable," and "lacking political judgement." Not only appeasers and pacifists were dismayed about what kind of war he might wage. The situation after the retreat from Dunkirk at the end of May 1940 was desperate; was it not likely that Churchill would resort to desperate measures?
2.

So he did. After the Luftwaffe attacked London in September 1940, Churchill broadcast an eloquent denunciation of "these cruel, wanton, indiscriminate bombings." He always had a capacity for believing what he wanted to believe, sometimes to the point of cognitive dissonance, and that phrase was rich coming from him. Two months earlier he had told Beaverbrook (one more of his disreputable circle) that the only thing that could now defeat Hitler was "an absolutely devastating, exterminating attack by very heavy bombers."

Those words are quoted by Nicholson Baker in Human Smoke, a genuine curiosity (which has already appeared on The New York Times best-seller list, while being denounced as "a bad book" by Lukacs). It is an anthology or collage that the novelist has compiled from contemporary sources—notably the old newspapers he collects—and is made of short items, mostly from the years 1939–1941. One dated "It was June 15, 1940" will tell us that the war cabinet was discussing the merits of poison gas (whose use against "uncivilised tribes" in Iraq Churchill had defended in 1920), another, "It was July 2, 1941," that Reinhard Heydrich had issued murderous instructions to the SS.

These clippings are printed usually without comment, though not without purpose. In reply to the phrase "selective quotation," Conor Cruise O'Brien once observed that all quotation was selective, otherwise it wouldn't be quotation, but Baker's method is not so much selective as openly polemical: his items are presented in such a way as to defend those who opposed the war, and indict those who waged it. This doesn't always work. The admirable Jeanette Rankin, Republican of Montana, the first woman to be elected to the House of Representatives, one of fifty who voted there against the declaration of war in April 1917, and the only one who did so in December 1941, comes out well. As William Allen White of the Emporia Gazette wrote, one may entirely disagree with her vote after Pearl Harbor, "But Lord, it was a brave thing!" Gandhi comes out badly, on the other hand, with his offensive advice to the European Jews to accept their fate: "I can conceive the necessity of the immolation of hundreds, if not thousands, to appease the hunger of the dictators"—fatuous words, admittedly said before millions rather than thousands were immolated.

"Was it a 'good war'?" Baker asks. "Did waging it help anyone who needed help?" He doesn't present a precise or a consecutive argument in reply. But there are really several more distinct questions. Is all war wrong? Was this war wrong? And even if it was justified, was it waged with means which defiled its purpose? In Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War, Patrick Buchanan raises further questions almost more unusual than Baker's, while his thesis is still more provocative, insisting that this particular war was needless.

Although Buchanan's argument isn't stupid, it requires something like a historiographical sleight of hand, and is conducted backward, as it were. He cannot say that there was nothing wrong with Hitler, and he doesn't argue, as some right-wing English historians such as John Charmley and the late Alan Clark have done, that Hitler represented no threat to England and the British Empire and that he should have been given a free hand in Europe. And from his position as an American conservative nationalist, Buchanan is scarcely going to follow Charmley and Clark and say that the real enemy of Great Britain and its empire was the United States.

Instead he says that Hitler would never have come to power had it not been for the previous war followed by the vengeful Versailles settlement, and that the war in 1914 had itself been mistaken, or even provoked by British policy, however little the English ostensibly wanted it (apart from Churchill, needless to say; Buchanan quotes Sir Maurice Hankey: "He had a real zest for war"). This is not new. Between the wars it was regularly asserted by high-minded Englishmen and Americans that no country was ever more responsible than any other for any war; that Germany had been at least as much sinned against as sinning; and that the postwar settlement was a grave injustice. Since these were specifically liberal doctrines, it is amusing to see them reiterated by Buchanan, who is not specifically liberal.

What Buchanan seems unaware of is how much those views have been undermined by recent scholarship. One may well think the whole idea of war guilt foolish, and the clause in the Versailles Treaty attributing such guilt to Germany "caddish," as Harold Nicolson called it. And yet many historians in the field now concur that Germany bears the principal responsibility for the outbreak of war in 1914. As Bernard Wasserstein shows in Barbarism and Civilization, his excellent recent history of the twentieth century, a belief that war was the only way that Germany could achieve its rightful aims had "become deeply entrenched in the collective mentality of the German political elite by 1914."

As to the postwar settlement, Margaret MacMillan in Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World and Zara Steiner in The Lights That Failed: European International History, 1919– 1933 (to take but two recent learned studies) concur that Versailles wasn't really such a vindictive treaty in the circumstances. Buchanan has a point when he indicts the entire Wilsonian creed of self-determination, and its hypocritically partial application after 1918, quoting another critic for whom Versailles "draped the crudity of conquest...in the veil of morality." But it is mere rhetoric for him to say that "France and Britain got the peace they had wanted. Twenty years later, they would get the war they had invited."

Where Buchanan, in his vehement way, is obviously right is that the war to defeat Hitler had largely unintended and immensely destructive outcomes. In a chapter entitled "Fatal Blunder," he condemns as utter folly the British guarantee to Poland in 1939, the proximate cause of the war, thereby allowing himself another swipe at Churchill, who said that "the preservation and integrity of Poland must be regarded as a cause commanding the regard of all the world." These words sounded very hollow after the alliance with Stalin and its consequences, including the repressive Communist regime in Poland. (Buchanan makes free with the word "blunder": he also calls Hitler's horrible Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938 "an historic blunder.")

Whether or not one follows Buchanan's apocalyptic vision of the West in terminal decline—like other conservatives, he doesn't seem to have noticed that communism has been routed—it is of course true that World War II led to the cold war and the forty-year subjection of Eastern Europe. But then much of what he is saying was said more concisely by A.J.P. Taylor long ago, in a throwaway line glossing the very speech that is Lukacs's main text, and the one phrase "victory at all costs." Taylor writes:

This was exactly what the opponents of Churchill had feared, and even he hardly foresaw all that was involved. Victory, even if this meant placing the British empire in pawn to the United States; victory, even if it meant Soviet domination of Europe; victory at all costs.

Here was the nub of the problem. To defeat Hitler meant paying a very heavy political price, and meant waging war, when there seemed no other way in 1940–1941, with methods which would have seemed atrocious not long before. "At all costs" for Churchill also meant the ruthless bombing of German and Japanese cities and the killing of their civilian inhabitants. Nothing is more chilling in Human Smoke than Churchill's language about this, especially since, as Baker puts it, Churchill saw bombing in pedagogic terms:

Let them have a good dose where it will hurt them most.... It is time that the Germans should be made to suffer in their own homelands and cities.... The burning of Japanese cities by incendiary bombs [will bring home their errors] in a most effective way.

Why, it might almost be Hillary Clinton threatening "to totally obliterate" a distant country.

And yet the strangest thing is that Churchill knew what a hateful regression all this was, or a part of him knew that. In My Early Life, his most engaging book, he writes a romantic reverie about cavalry warfare in the good old days, cast aside in "a greedy, base, opportunist" manner by

chemists in spectacles and chauffeurs pulling at the levers of aeroplanes.... War, which used to be cruel and magnificent, has now become cruel and squalid...we now have entire populations, including even women and children, pitted against one another in brutish mutual extermination.

Ten years after writing that, Churchill led the way in cruel, brutish, and exterminatory war-making against women and children, partly thanks to his uncompromising personality, partly thanks to what was seen as the logic of the situation. Three years after he hoped for "devastating, exterminating" attacks on civilians, he was shown blazing German towns filmed from the air, and exclaimed, "Are we beasts? Have we taken this too far?" And two years after that he tried (not very creditably) to dissociate himself from the destruction of Dresden by Bomber Command. He was the same man—the same immensely complex man—in 1930, 1940, 1943, and 1945. He was the same man still when, in his last speech as prime minister before his final retirement in 1955, he wondered sadly, "Which way shall we turn to save our lives and the future of the world?"

Those words are quoted by John Lukacs at the end of his essay, though he doesn't draw any further moral. Lynne Olson does. In the best sentence in her book, about the Suez adventure of 1956, she writes, "Not for the first time, and certainly not for the last, the lessons of Munich and appeasement were wrongly applied to a later international crisis." Likewise, having rightly observed that "there has arisen among America's elite a Churchill cult," Patrick Buchanan devotes a chapter, "Man of the Century," to denouncing the cult, and the man. He not only looks askance at Churchill's saying in September 1943 that "to achieve the extirpation of Nazi tyranny there are no lengths of violence to which we will not go"; he chastises the administration of George Bush the Younger—who installed a bust of Churchill in the Oval Office—for having emulated "every folly of imperial Britain in her plunge from power," and having drawn every wrong lesson from Churchill's career. There is by now an entire book to be written about the way that "Munich," "appeasement," and "Churchill" have been ritually invoked, from Suez to Vietnam to Iraq, so often in false analogy, and so often with calamitous results.

Which of us knows for sure whether any war can ever be "good"? The conclusion one might well draw from the story told in different ways by these books is that there may never be good wars or just wars, but that there may be necessary wars; and that the war in which Churchill led his country, awful and inexcusable as its means sometimes were, and grim as many of its consequences, really was a "war of necessity," just as much as the present war in Iraq was not. We should almost be grateful to George Bush and Tony Blair for illuminating the distinction.

9 Things You Didn't Know About Benjamin Franklin

* He never once sought public office. Benjamin Franklin was well-known and could have certainly achieved public office, but he never once ran for a political office.


* He is related to the famous Folger's Coffee family. Ben's maternal grandfather (his mother's father), Peter Folger, was the ancestor to the founder of Folger's coffee, one of the best-known brands of coffee in the world.


* He produced the first catalog in the U.S. Franklin issued a list of science and technical books that were available from a Philadelphia-based lending library. He is believe to have produced the first catalog and also the first return policy. He was inducted into the Direct Marketer's Association Hall of Fame for these honors.


* He is in the American Mensa Hall of Fame. Because he was such a great thinker and innovative mind, he would have fit right in with today's society for the intelligent, Mensa. Franklin is an inductee into the American Mensa Hall of Fame.


* He coined electrical terms still used today. The terms positive and negative, which signify the electric charge, which is another word he defined. He also gave us the word battery.


* He invented bifocal glasses. Frustrated with having to switch between two pairs of glasses to correct his vision, Franklin cut two sets of lenses in half and mounted them together, creating the world's first bifocals.


* He invented a musical instrument. Franklin invented the glass harmonica, also known as an armonica, which works on the same principle as rubbing one's dampened fingertips over the top of a goblet in order to produce a sound. Mozart and Beethoven even composed music for the armonica.


* He invented prototypical "swimmies". Franklin was an adept swimmer and wanted to help others to swim. He invented crude flotation devices out of wood in order to help teach others to swim.


* He spent half of his life in "retirement". With his self-made wealth, he was able to retire from working at the age of 42, halfway through his 84 years of life. Retirement for him was only the cessation of occupational work, though, as most of his statesmanship and political successes came in the second half of his life.

William Cullen Bryant: Author of America

An 1862 engraving of William Cullen Bryant, the poet and man of letters.

William Cullen Bryant: Author of America
By Gilbert H. Muller
(State University of New York Press, 410 pages, $30)

When poet and newspaperman William Cullen Bryant died in June 1878, the mayor of New York ordered the city's flags lowered to half mast, but the official gesture of mourning was hardly necessary. Bryant's death sparked a spontaneous outpouring of affection. His portrait, one friend recalled, "was displayed in all the shop windows, and his writings were in special demand at every bookstore and library." Walt Whitman, who was in Philadelphia when he read a notice of Bryant's death, left for New York within hours to attend the funeral. So many New Yorkers thronged the Unitarian Church of All Souls, where the memorial was held, that police had to be called in to help force Bryant's coffin into the chapel.
[Bryant on stilts, one of several New York newspaper editors said to be practicing 'Muscular Journalism.']
Print Collection, The New York Public Library
Bryant on stilts, one of several New York newspaper editors said to be practicing 'Muscular Journalism.'

It was the kind of funeral that might have been accorded a statesman in Bryant's day, or a pop star in our own. For 19th- century Americans the 83-year-old Bryant had become something of both. Though he never held a significant public office and wrote poetry that has since disappeared from the American literary canon, Bryant was revered throughout the country and routinely sought out by politicians and writers, from Abraham Lincoln to Charles Dickens. Some six years after his death, New York's Reservoir Square, between 40th and 42nd Streets, was renamed Bryant Park in his honor.

How this now largely forgotten figure came to occupy such a prominent place in the national psyche is the subject of a captivating biography, "William Cullen Bryant: Author of America," by Gilbert H. Muller, a literary critic and cultural historian who would like to see Bryant restored to the stature he once enjoyed.

Bryant's poetry accounted in large part for his popular acclaim. Both at home and abroad he was recognized as the pioneer of a distinctly American literary style, the first voice, as Charles H. Brown put it in his 1971 biography, "to sing of native birds like the brown thrasher and bobolink rather than the skylark and nightingale, of the spicebush or the late-blooming fringed gentian rather than Britain's gorse or primrose." Ralph Waldo Emerson believed that Bryant had "written some of the very best poetry that we have in America." Henry Wadsworth Longfellow called him "my master in verse."
EXCERPT

Fifteen years after he had first proposed it, Bryant's dream of a park for the people was coming to fruition.
• Read an excerpt from "William Cullen Bryant: Author of America"1

By his own report, Bryant was still a teenager living in his native Cummington, Mass., when he wrote the bulk of "Thanatopsis," the blank-verse meditation on death that remains his most influential poem. Already he displayed a knack for delivering weighty Romantic sentiments in plain language drawn from the natural world. In 80-odd lines the poem moves from an acknowledgment that death entails a loss of the self to a transcendent identification with nature. It's our fate, Bryant says, to "mix forever with the elements, / To be a brother to the insensible rock / And to the sluggish clod." But in "Thanatopsis" he turns this dissolution into a restful communion with nature, approaching death "Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch / About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams."

Mr. Muller's account highlights the range of Bryant's later work, a body of poetry marked by some of the period's most vivid writing about nature -- in poems like "Earth" and "To the Fringed Gentian" -- and topical poems on subjects ranging from Greek independence to the plight of American Indians. (Bryant also wrote a raft of less durable verse in response to the political squabbles of his day.) His often overlooked translation of the "Iliad," published late in Bryant's life, is a masterful synthesis of classicism and Romanticism that uses colloquial language and blank verse to re-create the energy of Homer's original poem. Despite Bryant's accomplishments, however, there were those who believed that he had squandered his poetic gifts. When he was still in his 40s, Emerson wrote to a friend: "I saw Bryant, but his poetry seems exterminated from the soil not a violet left."
The conventional view is that what threatened to exterminate Bryant's poetry was the journalism career that immersed him in public affairs. When he arrived in New York in 1825, after a year at Williams College, he drifted into literary journalism, becoming a contributor to the North American Review and the editor of the short-lived New York Review and Athenaeum Magazine. But when the Review and Athenaeum folded, he turned to the mainstream press, taking a position that opened at the New York Evening Post when its longtime editor was injured in a carriage accident.

The career shift came at a key moment in the history of New York City. It was a time when foxes still roamed lower Manhattan and hunters shot ducks in Chelsea. But with the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825, New York was on its way to becoming the nation's commercial and, eventually, cultural center, and Bryant found that he liked the rising stage he had stumbled on. He spent the next 50 years at the Evening Post, promoting the interests of the city's growing working class, arguing against slavery and reporting on contemporary life in the U.S. and abroad.

As a newspaperman, Bryant held strong opinions, and he wasn't shy about making them known. (In one bizarre incident, he bullwhipped a rival editor in the middle of Broadway.) But he was also inclined to look at contemporary debates from all sides. His positions during the Civil War are a case in point. A lifelong opponent of slavery, he toured the South in 1843 to see it for himself and found that, while he abhorred the institution, the Southerners were "very agreeable and intelligent men." Nevertheless, he was among the earliest and most outspoken supporters of the Union in the New York press. In the same way, he had publicly supported Abraham Lincoln's campaign in 1860 but challenged the president two years later for being slow to recognize the failure of George McClellan as general in chief of the Union Army.
[book cover]

Although Emerson and others saw journalism as an impediment to Bryant's literary development, Mr. Muller suggests that the two pursuits were in fact intertwined. In journalism as much as in poetry, Bryant honored Wordsworth's injunction toward ordinary speech. (At the Evening Post he warned writers off the kind of elevated language that other papers favored, recommending begin over commence, for example, and fire over devouring element.) And he used language for the same ends in both fields. From the beginning Bryant had believed that "the emotions raised by poetry," as Mr. Muller puts it, "could guide readers to the springs of moral conduct." In his editorials at the Evening Post he believed he was simply using a different medium to do the same job for the country's democracy.

But it may be that Bryant's most potent medium was neither poetry nor journalism. Bryant was beloved as much for what he represented as for what he did. "He grew to be not only a citizen, journalist, thinker, poet," Edmund Clarence Stedman, a poet who wrote for a rival newspaper, once said, "but the beautiful, serene, majestic ideal of a good and venerable man."

That Bryant's reputation was bound up with the man himself may account for the decline it has suffered in the century since his death, but it also makes his biography -- especially one as richly researched and readable as Mr. Muller's -- all the more valuable.

Cyd Charisse Dies at 86

Cyd Charisse, the long-legged beauty who danced with the Ballet Russe as a teenager and starred in MGM musicals with Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, died Tuesday. She was 86.

Ms. Charisse was admitted to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center on Monday after suffering an apparent heart attack, said her publicist, Gene Schwam.

She appeared in dramatic films, but her fame came from the Technicolor musicals of the 1940s and 1950s.

Classically trained, she could dance anything, from a pas de deux in 1946's "Ziegfeld Follies" to the lowdown Mickey Spillane satire of 1953's "The Band Wagon" (with Mr. Astaire).
[Image]
Associated Press
Cyd Charisse with Gene Kelly

She also forged a popular song-and-dance partnership on television and in nightclub appearances with her husband, singer Tony Martin.

Her height was 5 feet, 6 inches, but in high heels and full-length stockings, she seemed serenely tall, and she moved with extraordinary grace. Her flawless beauty and jet-black hair contributed to an aura of perfection that Mr. Astaire described in his 1959 memoir, "Steps in Time," as "beautiful dynamite."

"Her beauty was breathtaking," Debbie Reynolds, who starred with Ms. Charisse in the 1952 classic "Singin" in the Rain," said in a statement. "The world will miss her dancing."

Ms. Charisse arrived at MGM as the studio was establishing itself as the king of musicals. Three producers -- Arthur Freed, Joe Pasternak and Jack Cummings -- headed units that drew from the greatest collection of musical talent. Dancers, singers, directors, choreographers, composers, conductors and a symphony-size orchestra were under contract and available. The contract list also included the screen's two greatest male dancers: Messrs. Astaire and Kelly.

Mr. Astaire, who danced with her in "The Band Wagon" and "Silk Stockings," said of Ms. Charisse in a 1983 interview: "She wasn't a tap dancer, she's just beautiful, trained, very strong in whatever we did. When we were dancing, we didn't know what time it was."

She first gained notice as a member of the famed Ballet Russe, and got her start in Hollywood when star David Lichine was hired by Columbia Pictures for a ballet sequence in a 1943 Don Ameche-Janet Blair musical, "Something to Shout About."

Although that film failed to live up to its title, its ballet sequence attracted wide notice, and Ms. Charisse (then billed as Lily Norwood) began receiving movie offers.

"I had just done that number with David as a favor to him," she said in "The Two of Us," her 1976 double autobiography with Mr. Martin. "Honestly, the idea of working movies had never once entered my head. I was a dancer, not an actress. I had no delusions about myself. I couldn't act -- I had never acted. So how could I be a movie star?"

She overcame her doubts and signed a seven-year contract at MGM. She also got a new name, the exotic "Cyd" instead of her lifelong nickname Sid to go with her first husband's last name.

"Singin" in the Rain" marked a breakthrough.

When Mr. Freed was dissatisfied with another dancer who had been cast, Ms. Charisse inherited the role and danced with Mr. Kelly in the "Broadway Melody" number that climaxed the movie. She stunned critics and audiences with her 25-foot Chinese silk scarf that floated in the air with the aid of a wind machine.

Ms. Charisse also danced with Mr. Kelly in "Brigadoon," "It's Always Fair Weather" and "Invitation to the Dance." She missed what might have been her greatest opportunity: to appear with Mr. Kelly in the 1951 Academy Award winner, "An American in Paris." She was pregnant, and Leslie Caron was cast in the role.

In 1996, Ms. Charisse recalled her reaction on entering the movies: "Ballet is a closed world and very rigid; MGM was a fairyland. You'd walk down the lot, seeing all these fabulous movies being made with the greatest talent in the world sitting there. It was a dream to walk through that lot."

Last Footage from Laurel & Hardy Ever! in 1956!

You will see a home movie that was taken at the house from stan. Ollie was visit Stan in 1956. The footage is in color. Enjoy!

Henry Miller's unfond memories of NYC

Major Scientists Killed or Injured by Their Experiments

Karl Scheele
Died from tasting his discoveries



Scheele was a brilliant pharmaceutical chemist who discovered many chemical elements - the most notable of which were oxygen (though Joseph Priestley published his findings first), molybdenum, tungsten, manganese, and chlorine. He also discovered a process very similar to pasteurization. Scheele had the habit of taste testing his discoveries and, fortunately, managed to survive his taste-test of hydrogen cyanide. But alas, his luck was to run out: he died of symptoms strongly resembling mercury poisoning.


Jean-Francois De Rozier
First victim of an air crash



Jean-Francois was a teacher of physics and chemistry. In 1783 he witnessed the world’s first balloon flight which created in him a passion for flight. After assisting in the untethered flight of a sheep, a chicken, and a duck, he took the first manned free flight in a balloon. He travelled at an altitude of 3,000 feet using a hot air balloon. Not stopping there, De Rozier planned a crossing of the English Channel from France to England. Unfortunately it was his last flight; after reaching 1,500 feet in a combined hot air and gas balloon, the balloon deflated, causing him to fall to his death. His fiancee died 8 days later - possibly from suicide.

Sir David Brewster
Nearly blinded



Sir David was a Scottish inventor, scientist, and writer. His field of interest was optics and light polarization - a field requiring excellent vision. Unfortunately for Sir David, he performed a chemical experiment in 1831 which nearly blinded him. While his vision did return, he was plagued with eye troubles until his death. Brewster is well known for having been the inventor of the kaleidoscope - a toy that has brought joy to millions of children over the years.

Elizabeth Ascheim
Killed by X-Rays


Elizabeth Fleischman Ascheim married her doctor, Dr Woolf, shortly after her mother died. Because of his medical position, Woolf was very interested in the new discovery of Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen - x-rays. His new wife became equally interested and she gave up her job as a bookkeeper to undertake studies in electrical science. Eventually she bought an x-ray machine which she moved in to her husbands office - this was the first x-ray lab in San Francisco. She and her husband spent some years experimenting with the machine - using themselves as subjects. Unfortunately they did not realize the consequences of their lack of protection and Elizabeth died of an extremely widespread and violent cancer.

Alexander Bogdanov
Killed himself with blood



Bogdanov was a Russian physician, philosopher, economist, science fiction writer, and revolutionary. In 1924, he began experiments with blood transfusion - most likely in a search for eternal youth. After 11 transfusions (which he performed on himself), he declared that he had suspended his balding, and improved his eyesight. Unfortunately for Bogdanov, the science of transfusion was a young one and Bogdanov was not one to test the health of the blood he was using or the donor. In 1928, Bogdanov took a transfusion of blood infected with malaria and tuberculosis. Consequently he died shortly after.

Robert Bunsen
Blinded himself in one eye


Robert Bunsen is probably best known for having given his name to the bunsen burner which he helped to popularize. He started out his scientific career in organic chemistry but nearly died twice of arsenic poisoning. Shortly after his near-death experiences, he lost the sight in his right eye after an explosion of cacodyl cyanide. These being excellent reasons to change fields, he moved in to inorganic chemistry and went on to develop the field of spectroscopy.

Sir Humphrey Davy
A catalog of disasters



Sir Humphrey Davy, the brilliant British chemist and inventor, got a very bumpy start to his science career. As a young apprentice he was fired from his job at an apothecary because he caused too many explosions! When he eventually took up the field of chemistry, he had a habit of inhaling the various gasses he was dealing with. Fortunately this bad habit led to his discovery of the anesthetic properties of nitrous oxide. But, unfortunately, this same habit led to him nearly killing himself on many occasions. The frequent poisonings left him an invalid for the remaining two decades of his life. During this time he also permanently damaged his eyes in a nitrogen trichloride explosion.

Michael Faraday
Suffered chronic poisoning

Thanks to the injury to Sir Humphrey Davy’s eyes, Faraday became an apprentice to him. He went on to improve on Davy’s methods of electrolysis and to make important discoveries in the field of electro-magnetics. Unfortunately for him, some of Davy’s misfortune rubbed off and Faraday also suffered damage to his eyes in a nitrogen chloride explosion. He spent the remainder of his life suffering chronic chemical poisoning.

Marie Curie
Died of radiation exposure



In 1898, Curie and her husband, Pierre, discovered radium. She spent the remainder of her life performing radiation research and studying radiation therapy. Her constant exposure to radiation led to her contracting leukemia and she died in 1934. Curie is the first and only person to receive two Nobel prizes in science in two different fields: chemistry and physics. She was also the first female professor at the University of Paris.

Galileo Galilei
Blinded himself


Galileo’s work on the refinement of the telescope opened up the dark recesses of the universe for future generations, but it also ruined his eyesight. He was fascinated with the sun and spent many hours staring at it - leading to extreme damage to his retinas. This was the most likely cause of his near blindness in the last four years of his life. Because of his life’s work, he is sometimes referred to as the “father of modern physics”.

Louis Slotin
Killed himself with an accidental fission reaction

Canadian born Slotin worked on the Manhattan project (the US project to design the first nuclear bomb). In the process of his experimentation he accidentally dropped a sphere of beryllium on to a second sphere causing a prompt critical reaction (the spheres were wrapped around a plutonium core). Other scientists in the room witnessed a “blue glow” of air ionization and felt a “heat wave”. Slotin rushed outside and was sick. He was rushed to hospital and died nine days later. The amount of radiation he was exposed to was equivalent to standing 4800 feet away from an atomic bomb explosion. This accident prompted the end of all hands-on assembly work at Los Alamos.

Interesting Vice Presidents

1. Chester Arthur: James Garfield’s VP

Chester Arthur took office under the thickest cloud of suspicion. As a lieutenant in Senator Roscoe Conkling’s political machine, Arthur held one of the most lucrative positions in government—collector for the port of New York. For seven years, Arthur raked in approximately $40,000 annually (about $700,000 today), running a corrupt spoils system for thousands of payroll employees. With so much money and power, Arthur developed an affinity for fancy clothes and earned the nickname “the Gentleman Boss.” But his luck didn’t last. President Rutherford Hayes eventually stepped in and fired him from the post.

Even with the kickback scandal and claims that he’d been born in Canada (which should’ve disqualified him for the vice presidency), Arthur still managed to get elected on James Garfield’s 1880 ticket. After Garfield passed away 199 days into his presidency, Arthur didn’t hesitate to sign the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act. Much to the chagrin of Conkling, the Act revamped civil service by effectively killing the same patronage system that made Arthur very, very rich. In cleaning up civil service, Arthur also cleaned up his reputation, and he exited the White House a hero.

2. Henry Wallace: Franklin Roosevelt’s Second VP

FDR-Wallace.jpgHenry Wallace was a dedicated devotee of Eastern mysticism. While serving as U.S. Secretary of Agriculture in the 1930s, he allegedly sent his guru to Mongolia under the pretense of collecting grasses that could withstand drought. In reality, Wallace was diverting funds to help his guru hunt for evidence that Christ had visited Asia.

But it wasn’t Wallace’s spiritual beliefs that landed him America’s No. 2 job. Wallace was a big Franklin Roosevelt fan and supported his entire platform, which is why Roosevelt handpicked him as his third-term running mate in 1940. Wallace wasn’t popular with the Democratic Party, but when Roosevelt made it clear he wouldn’t run without him, the party acquiesced.

As vice president, Wallace made many international goodwill trips. Most famously, he traveled to the Soviet Union, where he experienced a political transformation that resulted in him becoming an avowed Soviet apologist. His communist leanings did nothing for his image, especially once he became secretary of commerce under President Truman. In 1948, Wallace unsuccessfully ran for president on the Progressive Party ticket, espousing views that sounded shockingly Marxist. He even described corporations as “midget Hitlers” attempting to crush the labor class.

But nobody can say Wallace didn’t know how to own up to his mistakes. In 1952, he recanted his support of the Soviet Union in a magazine article called “Where I was Wrong.” By then, however, his political career was over. Wallace spent the rest of his life conducting agricultural experiments on his farm in New York. [Image courtesy of Ron Wade Buttons.]
3. William Rufus de Vane King: Franklin Pierce’s VP

William R. King was sworn into office in Cuba, becoming the only executive officer to take the oath on foreign soil. King had gone to Cuba to recuperate from tuberculosis and severe alcoholism, but it didn’t work. He died in 1853 after being vice president for just 25 days.

That might not be the most memorable thing about King, though. It’s widely rumored that the former VP was homosexual. Further still, he’s suspected of being James Buchanan’s lover. Neither King nor Buchanan ever married, and they lived together in Washington for 15 years before Buchanan became president. Of course, King’s predilection for wearing scarves and wigs only fanned the rumors. President Andrew Jackson used to call him “Miss Nancy,” and Aaron Brown, a fellow Southern Democrat, dubbed him “Aunt Fancy.”
4. Richard M. Johnson: Martin Van Buren’s VP

Despite his credentials as a war hero and a Kentucky senator, Vice President Richard M. Johnson was never accepted in Washington. Perhaps that’s because he dressed like a farmhand, cursed like a sailor, and made no secret of his three black mistresses, who were also his slaves. The first mistress bore him two daughters before she passed away; the second tried to run off with a Native American chief, but Johnson captured and resold her; and the third was the second one’s sister. Johnson attempted to introduce this third mistress into polite society, but the couple wasn’t well-received.

With the support of Andrew Jackson, Johnson landed the vice presidency under Martin Van Buren in 1836. After four years of public relations disasters, Jackson withdrew his support. Nonetheless, Van Buren kept Johnson on his ticket, and the two lost their re-election bid in 1840.
5. Aaron Burr: Thomas Jefferson’s VP

burr.jpgNo story on vice presidents would be complete without Aaron Burr—best known for shooting and killing Alexander Hamilton in a duel in 1804. After the incident, Burr went back to presiding over the Senate. From there, he plotted a treasonous conspiracy to become emperor of the western United States and Mexico.

The plan could have worked, but one of Burr’s co-conspirators ratted him out. He was tried in 1807 before the Supreme Court, which found him not guilty, mainly because he hadn’t actually committed the treason yet. A free man, Burr turned his sights on Florida. He went to France and tried to convince Napoleon Bonaparte to help him conquer the swampland, but that plan foundered, too.

Although his political high jinks often failed, Burr consistently found success with the ladies. After his wife died in 1794, Burr remained a bachelor for 40 years, making the acquaintance of several eligible socialites. He enjoyed flirtations with Philadelphia debutantes, as well as a widow named Dolley Payne Todd—later known as Dolley Madison, wife of James Madison. At age 76, Burr married a wealthy widow of ill-repute and plundered her fortune. Citing numerous infidelities on his part, she filed for divorce and was actually granted it. Unfortunately for her, it came through on the day Burr died.
6. John Tyler: William Henry Harrison’s VP

When President Harrison succumbed to pneumonia in 1841 after only a month in office, John Tyler became the first vice president to take the Oval Office as the result of a president’s death. Understandably, he was totally unprepared for the job. Like previous VPs, Tyler had expected to carry the title without responsibilities. He’d actually taken such a lax approach to the position that he was enjoying life on his Virginia farm when a messenger brought news of Harrison’s demise. Tyler had to borrow money from a neighbor to catch the riverboat back to Washington.

As president, Tyler’s administration was largely unremarkable, except that he annexed the Republic of Texas and became the first president to have Congress override his veto. Tyler was also the first president to receive no official state recognition of his death. Why? By the time of his passing in 1862, he was an official in the Confederacy.
7. Andrew Johnson: Abraham Lincoln’s Second VP

andrew-johnson.jpgAndrew Johnson took his 1865 vice-presidential oath drunk as a skunk and belligerent as hell. Having grown up dirt poor, Johnson felt the aristocracy in Washington had abused his kinfolk. Glassy-eyed and smelling of whiskey, he reminded Congress, the Supreme Court, the Cabinet, and pretty much everyone within hearing distance that they owed their positions to “plebeians” such as himself, then kissed the Bible and staggered away.

Needless to say, his address was poorly received. The New York World opined, “To think that one frail life stands between this insolent, clownish creature and the presidency! May God bless and spare Abraham Lincoln!” Unfortunately, God didn’t. The South surrendered six days before Lincoln’s assassination, leaving Johnson to handle Reconstruction—a job he bungled so completely that Congress moved to impeach him. Johnson avoided being booted out of office by just one vote.
8. John Cabell Breckenridge: James Buchanan’s VP

By all accounts, John C. Breckenridge was a Kentucky gentleman in the grandest sense. He had an impressive career as a lawyer and a representative in the Kentucky House. More notably, at age 36, he became the youngest vice president in history. But, like Aaron Burr, things took a turn for Breckenridge when he was charged with treason. In September 1861, only a few months after his vice presidential term had ended, Union and Confederate forces invaded his home state of Kentucky. Breckenridge cast his lot with the Confederates, and the federal government promptly indicted him.

Breckenridge headed south and became Jefferson Davis’ secretary of war. But when the Confederacy surrendered in 1865, Breckenridge was forced to go on the lam. He hid for the next two months in Georgia and Florida before escaping to Cuba. Breckinridge, his wife, and their children spent the next four years in exile, wandering through Canada, England, Europe, and the Middle East, until President Andrew Johnson issued a General Amnesty Proclamation on Christmas in 1868. The following March, Breckenridge returned to the country with his family, but his name wasn’t officially cleared until 1958, when a Kentucky circuit court judge dismissed his indictment.
9. Nelson Rockefeller: Gerald Ford’s VP

2rockefeller.jpgNelson Rockefeller, as his name suggests, was really, really rich. After a brief stint managing his family’s property and running oil companies, he turned to public service by taking a job in the State Department.

Rockefeller quickly gained a reputation as a rather strong-willed person. In 1933, he commissioned Mexican artist Diego Rivera to paint a large-scale mural in the lobby of the RCA Building at Rockefeller Center. The mural featured a likeness of Vladimir Lenin, and the overt reference to communism offended Rockefeller. He asked Rivera to change it to a face of an unknown man, and the artist refused. In response, Rockefeller had the whole mural torn down and carted out in pieces.

Rockefeller was equally dissatisfied with his gig as vice president. He refused to run with Ford on the Republican ticket in 1976.

7 Tragic SNL Deaths

Ten years ago today, Saturday Night Live alum Phil Hartman was murdered by his wife. Due to the tragic nature of his death, as well as other high-profile deaths of former SNL cast members, the media was abuzz with talk of an SNL curse. In 31 seasons, 118 cast members have appeared on the show and seven of them have died. That’s only a five-percent fatality rate. While there probably isn’t a curse, here is a chronological look at the deaths of seven former cast members.
John Belushi

belushi.jpgEasily one of the best-known cast members of all time, original player John Belushi also became a wildly successful film actor. On his thirtieth birthday in 1979, Belushi had the number one album (The Blues Brothers: Briefcase Full of Blues), the number one movie (Animal House) and was the star of the highest-rated late night television show (SNL). Of course, Belushi was equally well known for his drug and alcohol indulgences. In a sketch called “Don’t Look Back in Anger,” which aired in 1978, John Belushi plays an elderly version of himself, visiting the graves of his fellow cast members. ‘’They all thought I’d be the first to go,'’ he gloats. ‘’I was one of those live-fast, die-young, leave-a-good-looking-corpse types, you know. But I guess they were wrong.'’ Belushi died of a drug overdose at the famous Chateau Marmont hotel. The lethal dose of cocaine and heroin was given to him by backup singer and notorious groupie Cathy Smith. Years later, Smith would serve prison time for her involvement in his death, among other crimes.

In one of his final television appearances, Belushi was filmed dead and face down in a swimming pool for the opening sequence of the show Police Squad. The footage was part of a running gag during the opening credits, where the episodes’ guest-star would meet an untimely demise before the show even started. Due to his untimely death, the sequence never aired.
Gilda Radner

Original cast member Gilda Radner, known for her vibrant characters like Roseanne Roseannadanna and Baba Wawa, became the second cast member to pass away. She died in 1989 at the age of 42 after a second battle with ovarian cancer. For Radner, the true tragedy was that her cancer had been misdiagnosed several times, and though it was treated and went into remission, its return struck too quickly to cure. She was re-diagnosed with cancer in early May and died within the month. She had been scheduled to host an episode of SNL between her bouts of cancer but a writers’ strike ended the season prematurely. She died on a Saturday, just before a new episode of SNL was to air. A tearful Steve Martin introduced a clip of a skit featuring Radner and himself dancing.

Her widower, Gene Wilder, created an ovarian cancer detection center and testified before Congress about ovarian cancer awareness. Radner once said that “Having cancer gave me membership in an elite club I’d rather not belong to” and in 1991, a support group to raise awareness of cancer called Gilda’s Club was founded.
Danitra Vance

danitra-vance.jpgVance joined the SNL cast for the historically disappointing 1985 season and became the first African-American female repertory player. She received little screen time and was often blatantly typecast. One of her more famous recurring characters was Cabrini Green Jackson, a professional teenage mother who gave advice on pregnancy. Frustrated by her demeaning characters, Vance left at the end of her first season. The majority of the rest of the cast was fired shortly after she left due to poor ratings. Four years after she left the show, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She went into remission and created a skit based on her experiences. Unfortunately, the cancer returned and she died in 1993 at the age of 35.
Michael O’Donoghue

O’Donoghue was never as famous as Farley or Hartman, but he was an integral part of the original SNL cast as the head writer. He appeared in many sketches, memorably in the opening of the first show as an English-language teacher instructing John Belushi in such phrases as “I would like to feed your fingertips to the wolverines. We are out of badgers.” Later in his tenure, O’Donoghue cultivated the persona of the grim “Mr. Mike” who told “Least-Loved Bedtime Stories” such as “The Little Engine that Died.” The sketch had the line “I think I can! I think I can! Heart attack! Heart attack! Ohmygodthepain! Ohmygodthepain!” which turned out to be strangely similar to O’Donoghue’s own last words. On the morning of November 8, 1994, O’Donoghue awoke to what he thought was a migraine, an affliction he often suffered. He took some medication and went back to bed. He later woke up a second time in immense pain and exclaimed “Oh, my God!” He was rushed to the hospital but he never regained consciousness after suffering a cerebral hemorrhage.
Chris Farley

Farley made himself a household name with his hilarious physical comedy. Struggling with his success and pigeon-holed with big, awkward and dim-witted characters, Farley turned to alcohol and drug abuse. His struggle landed him in rehab facilities 31 times in his short life, but sadly the treatments did not keep him sober. He died at the age of 33 after a speedball overdose, the same drug cocktail that killed John Belushi at the exact same age.

During Hartman’s final show, he cradled Farley (who was dressed as his wildly popular Matt Foley character) and he sang “So Long, Farewell”; the two died within six months of each other. At the time of his death, Farley had recorded vocal tracks for the title character in Shrek and was rumored to be starting work on Ghostbusters 3 and Blues Brothers 2000.
Phil Hartman

When he left SNL in 1994, Phil Hartman was the show’s longest serving cast member, appearing in eight seasons as dozens of beloved characters. He earned a reputation as one of the nicest and most genuine castmembers to ever grace the stage of studio 8H. Following his departure from SNL, Hartman continued to serve as a voice actor for The Simpsons and joined the cast of the NBC sitcom NewsRadio. But Hartman wasn’t just a smooth voiced comedian; he was also a graphic designer and created the logo for Crosby, Stills and Nash and designed three album covers for America.

Hartman was killed in his sleep by his intoxicated wife, Brynn, who killed herself just hours later. Family members attribute the act to the prescription drug Zoloft and sued the drug’s manufacturer and the doctor who prescribed the medication. Several sources have stated that Brynn was jealous of Hartman’s career, but friends stated that they always appeared to be a happy couple. Oddly enough, his NewsRadio character, Bill McNeal, claims to have numerous enemies and stalkers and often mentions a girlfriend who is unstable and tries to kill him.
Charles Rocket

charles+rocket.jpgFollowing the departure of the original cast and Lorne Michaels before the 1980-81 season, temporary replacement producer Jean Doumanian hand picked Charles Rocket to be the breakout star of the new Saturday Night Live. Billed as a combination of Bill Murray and Chevy Chase, Rocket appeared in more sketches than any other male cast member that season and even hosted Weekend Update. During a sketch in the middle of the season, Rocket said the most notorious obscenity on live television and soon was fired, as was Doumanian and the bulk of the unpopular cast.

While he had a steady stream of acting work after the abrupt end of his SNL career, Rocket was found in a field near his home with a slit throat in October of 2005. His unexpected and tragic death was ruled a suicide; a motive was never determined.

10 Investing Books Recommended By Warren Buffett

10 Investing Books Recommended By Warren Buffett

Over the years, Warren Buffett has recommended many books in a variety of venues about a variety of subjects. Continuing our ongoing series of books recommended by Buffett (our last entry in this series was on Buffett’s political book recommendations) here we highlight ten books that Buffett has recommended on investing.


Take on the Street: What Wall Street and Corporate America Don’t Want You to Know. What you can do to fight back
by Arthur Levitt



Levitt, the Securities and Exchange Commission’s longest-serving chairman, supervised stock markets during the late 1990s dot-com boom. As working Americans poured billions into stocks and mutual funds, corporate America devised increasingly opaque strategies for hoarding most of the proceeds. Levitt reveals their tactics in plain language, then spells out how to intelligently invest in mutual funds and the stock market. His advice is aimed squarely at small, individual investors, as he explains how to look for clues of malfeasance in annual reports, understand press releases and draw more from reliable sources.


The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns
by John C. Bogle



Filled with in-depth insights and practical advice, The Little Book of Common Sense Investing will show you how to incorporate this proven investment strategy into your portfolio. It will also change the very way you think about investing. Successful investing is not easy. (It requires discipline and patience.) But it is simple. For it’s all about common sense.


Speculative Contagion: An Antidote for Speculative Epidemics

by Frank Martin



Speculative Contagion is an insider’s riveting real-time and real-money account of the inflating Bubble, accented with the genuine suspense to be found only in real-life drama. The epidemic of tech-driven lunacy gradually affected more and more feverish investors all too prone to be infected by the insidious absurdity of the times. In the midst of it all, Frank Martin found sanctuary in the treasure trove of history.


Benjamin Graham on Value Investing: Lessons from the Dean of Wall Street

by Janet Lowe



In this book, Janet Lowe presents a brief but interesting biography of value investor Benjamin Graham. The book also provides a nice overview of the history and theories behind modern value investing.


The Theory of Investment Value
by John Burr Williams



Though the book was first printed in 1938, it is still the most authoritative work on how to value financial assets. As Peter Bernstein has commented: “Williams combined original theoretical concepts with enlightening and entertaining commentary based on his own experiences in the rough-and-tumble world of investment.” Williams’ discovery was to project an estimate that offers intrinsic value and it is called the ‘Dividend Discount Model’ which is still used today by professional investors on the institutional side of markets.


Where Are the Customers’ Yachts? or A Good Hard Look at Wall Street
by Fred Schwed, Jr



Humorous and entertaining, this book exposes the folly and hypocrisy of Wall Street. The title refers to a story about a visitor to New York who admired the yachts of the bankers and brokers. Naively, he asked where all the customers’ yachts were? Of course, none of the customers could afford yachts, even though they dutifully followed the advice of their bankers and brokers. Full of wise contrarian advice and offering a true look at the world of investing, in which brokers get rich while their customers go broke, this book continues to open the eyes of investors to the reality of Wall Street.


The Intelligent Investor: A Book of Practical Counsel
by Benjamin Graham



Since it was first published in 1949, Graham’s investment guide has sold over a million copies and has been praised by such luminaries as Warren E. Buffet as “the best book on investing ever written.” The hallmark of Graham’s philosophy is not profit maximization but loss minimization. In this respect, The Intelligent Investor is a book for true investors, not speculators or day traders. He provides, “in a form suitable for the laymen, guidance in adoption and execution of an investment policy.” Where the speculator follows market trends, the investor uses discipline, research, and his analytical ability to make unpopular but sound investments in bargains relative to current asset value.


Paths to wealth through common stocks
by Philip Fisher



Paths to Wealth through Common Stocks contains one original concept after another, each designed to greatly improve the results of those who self-manage their investments — while helping those who rely on professional investment advice select the right advisor for their needs. In this book Fisher analyzes how worthwhile profits have been and will continue to be made through common stock ownership, and revealing why his method can increase profits while reducing risk. Many of the ideas found here may depart from conventional investment wisdom, but the impressive results produced by these concepts — which are still relevant in today’s market environment — will quickly remind you why Philip Fisher is considered one of the greatest investment minds of our time.


Bull: A History of the Boom and Bust
by Maggie Mahar



Citing studies by esteemed economists John Kenneth Galbraith and Charles Kindleberger, Mahar reminds readers that self-blinding euphoria is a regular feature of every bull market. In vivid detail, she documents the trends and outsized personalities that fueled this particular bull market, including the surge of leveraged buyouts of 1984-1987, the mania for junk bonds, falling short-term interest rates, the rush of individual investors into 401(k) retirement plans, the power (and appetites) of mutual funds and the media frenzy that lent an unlikely allure to quarterly corporate earnings reports. The book serves as a reminder that investors should employ skepticism towards information coming out of corporate management.


Security Analysis: Principles and Technique
by Ben Graham and Dave Dodd



Benjamin Graham’s revolutionary theories have influenced and inspired investors for nearly 70 years. First published in 1934, his Security Analysis is still considered to be the value investing bible for investors of every ilk. Yet, it is the second edition of that book, published in 1940 and long since out of print, that many experts–including Graham protégé Warren Buffet–consider to be the definitive edition.


Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits
by Philip A. Fisher



Regarded as one of the pioneers of modern investment theory, Philip A. Fisher’s investment principles are studied and used by contemporary finance professionals including Warren Buffett. Fisher was the first to consider a stock’s worth in terms of potential growth instead of just price trends and absolute value. His principles espouse identifying long-term growth stocks and their emerging value as opposed to choosing short-term trades for initial profit. First published in 1958, this investment classic is considered a must-read as the foundation for many of today’s popular investment beliefs.