54

Jul28

54 is a wonderful number, not quite as interesting as 52, but still a lovely number and a good place to be.

On October 13th in the year 54, the Roman emperor Claudius died, possibly after being poisoned by Agrippina, his wife and niece. He was succeeded by Nero. O.K. that’s not a very beautiful event to remember, but it is interesting. Has anyone read I, Claudius and and Claudius the God, both by Robert Graves? I read both volumes of Graves’ fictionalized biographical novels about Emperor Claudius quite a while ago, and I don’t remember the details; however, I do remember them as quite well-written and fascinating.

54 is a semiperfect number and can be written as the sum of three squares: 49+4+1
27 + 27 = 54 That’s two times three cubed.

A score of 54 in golf is colloquially referred to as a perfect round. This score has never been achieved in competition.

Car 54, Where Are You? was a 1961-63 TV series starring Joe Ross and Fred Gwynne as New York City policemen having comical adventures.

Studio 54 was a highly popular discotheque in the 1970s and early 1980s. Studio 54 was originally a New York City Broadway theatre, then a CBS radio and television studio. In the 1970s it became the legendary nightclub located at 254 West 54th Street in Manhattan. The club opened on April 26, 1977 and closed in March 1986.

Debby Boone (9/22/1956), Carrie Fisher (10/21/1956), Katie Couric (1/7/1957), LeVar Burton (2/16/1957), Vanna White (2/18/1957), Spike Lee (3/20/1957), Vince Gill (4/12/1957), and Scott Adams (6/8/1957) are all 54 years old right now.
And Osama bin Laden (3/10/1957) was 54 years old when he died.

There are 54 countries in Africa, according to Wikipedia.

NASA has identified 54 potentially habitable, or life-friendly, planets outside our solar system.

54 Wonderful Projects is a post from last week about all the projects I’d like to read about, try out, live vicariously, or at least start. I have lots of lists of 100 (Top 100 Hymns Project), or 50 (50 Favorites) or 52 (52 Ways to Read and Study the Bible in 2011) things on this blog. In fact, one of my favorite things to do is to make lists. Look for more “54” lists this year.

54 is the number of cards in a deck of playing cards, if the two jokers are included. And by all means, I’m at an age to include the jokers. I identify with the jokers.

Psalm 54 sounds like a good prayer for this year. I’m beginning my 55th year of life, and for the past 54 years God has been my help, and the Lord has sustained me. Amen.

1 Save me, O God, by your name;
vindicate me by your might.
2 Hear my prayer, O God;
listen to the words of my mouth.
3 Arrogant foes are attacking me;
ruthless people are trying to kill me—
people without regard for God.
4 Surely God is my help;
the Lord is the one who sustains me.
5 Let evil recoil on those who slander me;
in your faithfulness destroy them.
6 I will sacrifice a freewill offering to you;
I will praise your name, LORD, for it is good.
7 You have delivered me from all my troubles,
and my eyes have looked in triumph on my foes.

1903: Books and Literature

Jul27

Nobel Prize for Literature: Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Norwegian poet and playwright.

Fiction Bestsellers:
1. Mary Augusta Ward, Lady Rose’s Daughter
2. Thomas Nelson Page, Gordon Keith
3. Frank Norris, The Pit Wheat speculation and the commodities market in Chicago.
4. Alice Hegan Rice, Lovey Mary Orphan girl Lovey Mary runs away to the Cabbage Patch (see #6 below).
5. Owen Wister, The Virginian
6. Alice Hegan Rice, Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch
7. James Lane Allen, The Mettle of the Pasture Set in Kentucky and written by a Kentucky author who also wrote The Choir Invisible.
8. George Horace Lorimer, Letters of a Self-Made Merchant to His Son
9. Thomas Dixon Jr., The One Woman Dixon was a Baptist preacher turned novelist, and this novel in particular was a sermon on the evils of socialism.
10. John Fox Jr., The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come Another book with a Kentucky setting, this book takes place during the Civil War. It was made into a movie in 1961.

Critically Acclaimed and Historically Significant:
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
John Dewey, Studies in Logical Theory
Jack London, Call of the Wild
Bertrand Russell, Principles of Mathematics
Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh I have this book on my Kindle, but I haven’t started it yet. Should I?
Henry James, The Ambassadors
Helen Keller, The Story of My Life
Erskine Childress, The Riddle of the Sands. I read this book on my Kindle not long ago, and I found it quite confusing. It does indicate the deep mistrust and rivalry that existed in the early twentieth century between the British and the Germans, both trying to build their empires at the expense of the other.

I’m surprised, not at how many of the books I haven’t read, but at how many of the best-selling authors I’ve never even heard of. I don’t know the details of how the list was compiled early in the twentieth century, but it was published in Publishers Weekly after 1912. Before that, it is unclear to me where the lists came from. And, of course, these are the best-sellers in the United States. Who knows what they were reading in other English-speaking countries?

Friday Night Lights: What Comes First?

Jul27

I just finished watching the final episode of the final season of the TV show Friday Night Lights, and I am quite impressed with the quality and thoughtfulness of the entire series. The show’s creators and writers and actors got a lot of things right, and I enjoyed the ride.

First of all, for the most part, they got Texas right. The actors talked and acted like Texans, and it wasn’t overdone or caricatured as it is in so many Texas setting movies and television shows. A lack of Hispanic characters was a weakness in the program, since Texas is 37% Hispanic, but the characters who were there were pure Texan.

They got football right, too. Football really is King in much of Texas, especially small and medium-sized towns in Texas. A few of the situations the writers got themselves into with outlandish behavior by football fans and boosters were over the top, but they showed just how seriously many Texans take their high school football.

I was disappointed, however, by the overall take on sex and Christianity in the program. Christianity was portrayed as a Sunday thing: almost everyone went to church on Sunday, but faith didn’t inform their lives the rest of the week at all. Characters rarely prayed, except in a formulaic way before football games, and Christian moral values were not even considered as characters in the show engaged in promiscuous, casual sex with multiple partners at a young age. In fact, as the series drew to a close, Coach Taylor and his wife Tammy, a guidance counselor at the local high school, were unconcerned that their nineteen year old daughter had sex with her long-time boyfriend, quarterback Matt Saracen (played by actor Zach Gilford, one of the best actors in a series filled with good acting, by the way), but were completely appalled that Julie and Matt wanted to get married at ages nineteen and twenty respectively. “You’re too young!” No one ever mentions that it’s better to marry than burn (as Paul says) or that sex comes after marriage, not before. It’s just not an issue, and everyone is doing it. The “rules” seem to be:

Be sure you’re “ready”, emotionally and mentally prepared.
Use condoms. (One high school student gets pregnant because she and her boyfriend didn’t. Later, her mom lets the boy come back, with the admonition, “Use a condom this time or I’ll kill you!”)
Don’t have an affair with a married man or woman, and if you’re married , don’t commit adultery. It’s the last taboo.
Don’t get too involved or committed because sex is just sex, and marriage is only for old people and has nothing at all to do with sex.

I take it back: at the beginning, the first couple of season, FNL did “get religion”, at least to some extent. Then, I think the writers thought it became too limiting to the dramatic necessities of the show to have Christian characters trying to live their convictions, even though they were shown failing and trying again. This clip from the pilot episode shows that promising beginning:

Give all of us gathered here tonight the strength to remember that life is so very fragile. We are all vulnerable, and we will all, at some point in our lives… fall. We will all fall. We must carry this in our hearts… that what we have is special. That it can be taken from us, and when it is taken from us, we will be tested. We will be tested to our very souls. We will now all be tested. It is these times, it is this pain, that allows us to look inside ourselves.

Mary DeMuth says Friday Night Lights taught her about community and the need for close relationships.

1902: Music and Art

Jul26

Florodora was the most popular and longest running show on Broadway in 1902. It was a musical comedy featuring proper young ladies (chorus girls) who became engaged to very proper young men with the help of a mysterious perfume invented in the exotic Philippine Islands. The hit song from the musical was called Tell Me, Pretty Maiden (Are There Any More at Home Like You?).

In November 1902, sales of Italian tenor Enrico Caruso’s first record reached one million copies.

On April 20, 1902 a major art show opened in Paris featuring what the French called Art Nouveau. Some of the artists working this style were Czech artist Alphonse Mucha, Gustav Klimt, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, René Lalique, Antoni Gaudí and Louis Comfort Tiffany. Here’s an example of Art Nouveau Tiffany glass:

'N84.74' photo (c) 2009, Catherine - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

1902: Events and Inventions

Jul26

January, 1902. The Chinese imperial court returns to Peking from X’ian where they had gone during the Boxer Rebellion. Empress Dowager Tz’u-hsi continues to rule along with the Emperor Guanghzu.

February 22, 1902. Major Walter Reed and Dr. James Carroll of the United States Yellow Fever Commission in Cuba publish a scientific report revealing that their research indicates that the disease is transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito.

May, 1902. Cuba gains its official independence from Spain, and American interim government and troops withdraw from the new republic. Tomas Estrada Palma becomes the first president of Cuba.

May 8, 1902. 30,000 inhabitants of St. Pierre, Martinique die when the volcano Mt. Pelee erupts suddenly and unexpectedly.

May 31, 1902. The Treaty of Vereeniging is signed, ending the Boer War in South Africa. The British won the war and take over the administration of South Africa and its valuable diamond and gold mining industry. The Boers (Dutch colonizers) remain in South Africa under British rule.

June, 1902. Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy renew their Triple Alliance for another twelve years.

July 17, 1902. Willis H. Carrier designs the first system to control temperature and humidity, inventing modern air conditioning.

October, 1902. A cholera epidemic in Egypt ends after killing more than 30,000 people.

December 10, 1902. THe Aswan dam is completed on the Nile River in Egypt. THe purpose of the mile and a quarter long, 130 foot high dam is to control the annual flooding of the Nile and release the water in a way that will make agriculture in Egypt more widespread and more profitable.

December, 1902. The British and German ambassadors request repayment from Venezuela for the losses suffered by their people during the Venezuelan coup of 1899. The Venezuelans refuse to recognize any debt, and so the British and Germans seize the entire Venezuelan navy, four ships. The ongoing disagreement has resulted in arrests of British and German subjects in Caracas and acts of war against Venezuela by Great Britain and Germany.

A lady dressed in the costume of 1902.

Apparent Danger to The Shooting Salvationist

Jul25

Odd. This book, Apparent Danger, about Fort Worth Baptist preacher J. Frank Norris, has apparently been re-published under a different title, The Shooting Salvationist, with more publicity. I read the book last year, and I thought it was quite good, good enough that I included it in my Top Eight Nonfiction Reads of 2010.

Everything old (2010) is new again. Does this sort of thing happen often, a book being re-published (maybe re-edited?) under a different title?

1902: Books and Literature

Jul25

Nobel Prize for Literature: Theodore Mommsen, German historian and author of History of Rome.

Fiction Bestsellers:
1. Owen Wister, The Virginian. I tried but was unable to conquer. Becky read it and loved it. Maybe I need to try again.
2. Alice Caldwell Hegan, Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch. I have this classic on my Kindle, but I haven’t read it yet.
3. Charles Major, Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall.
4. Emerson Hough, The Mississippi Bubble.
5. Mary Johnston, Audrey.
6. Gilbert Parker, The Right of Way.
7. A. Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles. I have read my Sherlock Holmes. I had a friend in high school who was mad about Holmes and Watson both.
8. Booth Tarkington, The Two Vanrevels. I’ve read Penrod and The Magnificent Ambersons, enjoyed them both, but not this one. Both Penrod (1914) and The Magnificent Ambersons (1918) are set during this time period, the first decade of the twentieth century.
9. Henry van Dyke, The Blue Flower. Short stories about the search for happiness by the author of The Other Wise Man and of the hymn lyrics Joyful, Joyful We Adore Thee.
10. Lucas Malet, Sir Richard Calmady.

Critically acclaimed and historically significant:
Jane Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics.
William James, Varieties of Religious Experience.
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
André Gide, The Immoralist
Vladimir Lenin, What is to be Done?
Henry James, The Wings of the Dove. Reading The Wings of the Dove by Elizabeth Gaffney at Salon.com.
Rudyard Kipling, Just So Stories
Beatrix Potter, The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Ms. Potter and I share a birthday, and so I wrote about her here. Go here for even more information about Beatrix Potter and Peter Rabbit.

Fiction Set in 1902:
Zora and Me by Victoria Bond. Fictionalization of the life of author Zora Neale Hurston from age nine to age eleven. In the book Zora becomes a girl detective who tries with her friends to figure out what happened to a man who was murdered or accidentally killed in their small Florida town.
Land of Promise by Joan Lowery Nixon.

The Hardest Thing To Do by Penelope Wilcock

Jul24

I was re-reading The Peacemaker by Ken Sande of Peacemaker Ministries when I received Penelope Wilcock’s new book, The Hardest Thing To Do, in the mail. What a lovely (and convicting) serendipity! Ms. Wilcock’s new installment in the saga of the monks of St. Alcuin’s Abbey is a long time in coming. The original trilogy of books about St. Alcuin’s and Father Peregrine its abbot began with The Hawk and the Dove and continued in The Wounds of God and The Long Fall. These three books were published by Crossway in the early 1990’s.

Now we have a fourth book in the series, twenty years later, and it lives up to the fine standard set by the other three. In The Hardest Thing To Do, St. Alcuin’s has a new abbott, Father John, but the brothers are still serving each other and the same Lord, still living quiet, peaceable lives, still striving to practice the rule of St. Benedict in a fallen world. And of course, as is the way of this world, the brothers have a new challenge when they must decide what to do with a human “wolf” who has come into the sheepfold and who threatens to spoil both their peace and their way of life.

In The Hardest Thing To Do, Ms. Wilcock has dropped the framing story that she used in at least the first book of The Hawk and the Dove trilogy. In that first book, a mother was telling stories about the abbey of St. Alcuin’s to her daughters who were experiencing some of the same growing pains as the monks. The part of the novels that is most memorable, however, is the story of the monks themselves, so it was a good move to drop the frame and concentrate on the abbey.

I was concerned that this sequel, twenty years later, might not live up to the quality and depth of the first three books in the series, but I needn’t have worried. Ms. Wilcock, a Methodist minister, has a fine grasp of human foibles and sin and peace-making and the cost of following Christ in our interpersonal relationships. The book is about radical, costly forgiveness, and it doesn’t sugarcoat the difficulties of such a choice to forgive our enemies. Forgiveness and reconciliation in the face of real hurt truly are the hardest things to do.

Asking for forgiveness:

I am filled with terror lest you turn me away. I long for the beautiful Gospel that has always puzzled me, but that I know has a beacon in the life of this house. For the forgiveness and gentleness I have found, I should like the chance to show my gratitude. For the hurt and anger I have caused, I should like time to try and make amends. And I have glimpsed the face of Christ here. Before that glimpse dims and is smutched and bleared by the sordid life of the world, I should like to try if I might to touch for myself the vision of that fair loveliness. . . compassion . . . faith . . . peace.

I would pray that all of us could be enabled to do the hard work of forgiving and asking and receiving forgiveness because it’s the only way to true heart peace.

Saturday Review of Books: July 23, 2011

Jul22

“If my books had been any worse, I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better, I should not have come.” ~Raymond Chandler

Novelist and screenwriter Raymond Chandler was born on July 23, 1888. He wrote the screenplay for the film Double Indemnity, a movie I wrote about here. His most famous novels were The Big Sleep, The Long Goodbye, and Farewell, My Lovely. Have you read anything by Mr. Chandler? What did you think?

SatReviewbuttonIf you’re not familiar with and linking to and perusing the Saturday Review of Books here at Semicolon, you’re missing out. Here’s how it usually works. Find a book review on your blog posted sometime during the previous week. The review doesn’t have to be a formal sort of thing. You can just write your thoughts on a particular book, a few ideas inspired by reading the book, your evaluation, quotations, whatever.

Then on Saturday, you post a link here at Semicolon in Mr. Linky to the specific post where you’ve written your book review. Don’t link to your main blog page because this kind of link makes it hard to find the book review, especially when people drop in later after you’ve added new content to your blog. In parentheses after your name, add the title of the book you’re reviewing. This addition will help people to find the reviews they’re most interested in reading.

After linking to your own reviews, you can spend as long as you want reading the reviews of other bloggers for the week and adding to your wishlist of books to read. That’s how my own TBR list has become completely unmanageable and the reason I can’t join any reading challenges. I have my own personal challenge that never ends.

1. Hope (Cape Cod Stories by J.C. Lincoln)
2. the Ink Slinger (Think)
3. Collateral Bloggage (The Language of Science and Faith)
4. Collateral Bloggage (The Hidden Reality)
5. SuziQoregon @ Whimpulsive (Buried by Mark Billingham)
6. SuziQoregon @ Whimpulsive (84, Charing Cross Road)
7. Laura (Free books and free books)
8. Laura (The Gentle Art of Knitting)
9. Mental multivitamin (The Opera Fanatic)
10. Mental multivitamin (The Winter’s Tale and more Shakespearean goodness)
11. Carina @ Reading Through Life (The Unlikely Disciple)
12. Carina @ Reading Through Life (Cinder & Ella)
13. Lucybird’s Book Blog (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets)
14. Janet (Adam of the Road)
15. Lazygal (My Name is Mary Sutter)
16. Lazygal (Vanished)
17. Lazygal (The Burning)
18. Lazygal (The Hand that Trembles)
19. The Worm Hole (The Iron King)
20. Nicole @ Linus’s Blanket (The Psychopath Test)
21. Nicole @ Linus’s Blanket (Silver Sparrow)
22. Nicole @ Linus’s Blanket (Before I Go To Sleep)		 23. Nicole @ Linus’s Blanket (The Cypress House)
24. Glynn (Nick of Time)
25. Sarah Reads Too Much (The Book of Lies)
26. Sarah Reads Too Much (Romeo and Juliet))
27. Bluerose’s Heart(The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe)
28. Barbara H. (The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe)
29. Barbara H. (Prince Caspian)
30. SmallWorld Reads (A Room with a View)
31. A Foodie Bibliophile in Wanderlust (Bad Taste in Boys)
32. S. Krishna (American Gods)
33. S. Krishna (Sisterhood Everlasting)
34. S. Krishna (When We Were Orphans)
35. S. Krishna (The October Killings)
36. S. Krishna (The Mango Season)
37. S. Krishna (The Twisted Thread)
38. S. Krishna (Saved By Beauty)
39. Amber Stults (Ascension)
40. Book Gal (Then Came You)
41. Janet (The Wild Trees)
42. Becky (Trumpeter of Krakow)
43. Becky (Swift Rivers)
44. Becky (Light Princess)		 45. Becky (Heidi)
46. Becky (Heidi Grows Up)
47. Becky (Heidi’s Children)
48. Becky (Hidden Gallery)
49. JHS (Expiation GIVEAWAY)
50. JHS (Stiltsville GIVEAWAY)
51. JHS (Ellis Island GIVEAWAY)
52. JHS (When Stars Align GIVEAWAY)
53. JHS (Money Can’t Buy Love GIVEAWAY)
54. Cindy Swanson (Wedding Season by Katie Fforde)
55. Becky (Bookends)
56. Chaff in the Wind (Library Hospital)
57. Amy Reads (Lysistrata)
58. Amy Reads (The Dew Breaker by Edwidge Danticat)
59. Amy Reads (Efuru by Flora Nwapa)
60. Reading World (The Paris Wife)
61. ChristineMM @ The Thinking Mother (Small Acts of Amazing Courage)
62. Donovan @ Where Pen Meets Paper (A Paradise Built in Hell)
63. Donovan @ Where Pen Meets Paper (Moloka’i)
64. Diary of an Eccentric (The Book of Lies)
65. Diary of an Eccentric (A Weekend With Mr. Darcy)
66. Diary of an Eccentric (The History of England)

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American Eve by Paula Uruburu

Jul19

American Eve: Evelyn Nesbit, Stanford White, the Birth of the “It” Girl, and the Crime of the Century by Paula Uruburu.

So, a photograph of Evelyn Nesbit was the inspiration for L.M. Montgomery’s description of the innocent, youthful, and inspirational Anne of Green Gables. And yet the true story of Evelyn Nesbit, The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing, is as sordid and debauched a tale as could be imagined. The contrast between the fictional character of Anne and the true character of young Evelyn Nesbit is heartbreakingly sad.

Evelyn Nesbit was born on December 25, 1884 (or maybe 1885). Her father died when she was ten or eleven, leaving the family in desperate straits. Young Evelyn managed to catch the attention of a newspaper photographer, then became a model for several artists in Philadelphia where the family was living in poverty, and finally moved with her mother and younger brother to New York where she became the most photographed young woman of the time. Photographers and artists stood in line to paint or take her picture. She was The American Beauty, the “It” Girl, Psyche, a Sibyl, the Sphinx, or “the glittering girl model of Gotham.” All this, and she was only sixteen years old.

And it all came crashing down, of course. One older New York millionaire seduced her, and another forced her into marriage and then defended her “honor” by murdering his rival on June 25, 1906 at the rooftop theater of Madison Square Garden. It was the Crime of the Century, and according to some, Evelyn Nesbit was completely responsible for the death of one man and the insanity of another. In her book about the drama, Ms. Uruburu takes the side of the underdog, Evelyn Nesbit. Everyone around Evelyn is described as “depraved” and “negligent” and “wicked”–all of which they probably were— but Evelyn is young and deceived and makes, not horrid, greedy choices, but rather “mistakes”. She is always trapped by her circumstances, unable to escape her fate, a victim of the manipulative, wealthy men and women who make her life into an obscene celebrity spectacle.

I thought the book was interesting in that it told a story that I have never read before. According to Uruburu, Evelyn Nesbit is a major character in E.L. Doctorow’s novel, Ragtime. I only made through about 100 pages of Ragtime, if that, and I never saw the movie based on the book. I also never saw or heard of the Joan Collins movie that was made about Evelyn Nesbit’s life, entitled The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing. As a defense of Evelyn Nesbit, the book succeeds for the most part, although her “mistakes” were a bit more culpable than the author wants to make them seem to be. It’s a mistake to find yourself unexpectedly alone with a married lecherous man; it’s a really bad choice to become the lecher’s mistress.

Warning: Some of the details of the story are lurid, and Ms. Uruburu’s prose gets a bit purplish at times. However, I doubt the author could have done much to sensationalize the story any more than it already was.

Evelyn Nesbit was definitely a sensation.