“Experience is a hard teacher. She gives the test first, and then the lesson.”
Vernon Sanders Law (1930- )
An Idaho native ordained in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints at an early age, Law pitched for the Pittsburgh Pirates from 1950 to 1967. During the 1960 season he went 20-9 with a 3.08 ERA, winning the Cy Young Award and beating the Yankees twice in the World Series. In 1965 his work on and off the field was recognized with the Lou Gehrig Memorial Award. Law is also cited as the originator of the quote “A winner never quits and a quitter never wins.” He is currently the pitching coach at Provo (Utah) High School.
Born in Cambridge, England, Adams was an early standout in prep school for his height and writing ability. He was initially “discovered” by Graham Chapman of the Monty Python troupe and is one of the few outside writers to work with the Flying Circus. In 1974 he wrote The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as a play for the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. A tour de force of British humor and understatement, it was later published as a five volume series of books. Adams also wrote for the television series Dr. Who and worked on various BBC shows as a script doctor. A fine amateur guitarist, he sat in on occasion with Pink Floyd and Procol Harum. He counted evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins among his friends and worked with him on expressions of their shared atheism. Adams died of a heart attack at 49 while in California. His many fans celebrate Towel Day each year on May 25th and remember not to panic.
Sometimes described as the Sanskrit equivalent of the Iliad, the Mahabharata is an epic poem that tells the story of the Kurukshetra War, which may have occurred as early as 2400 BC. Seven-hundred of the nearly 200,000 verses form the Bhagavad Gita, sacred to Hindus. The hero of the epic, the warrior prince Arjuna, is befriended by the god Krishna who aids him in his battle for the succession to the throne of Hastinapura. Among his many trials, Arjuna is asked a series of riddles in order to gain access to water for himself and his brothers who are dying of thirst. When asked what is the greatest wonder in the world he answers with the quote above and is allowed to drink.
Evelyn Howe’s friends describe her as a woman who lived life fully, as if she knew what Arjuna realized so many centuries ago. Her passing reminds us that we all hang by a thread, but also that we have the choice and the power to make the most of our limited days.
Born in Belgium to an Austrian father and a mother from the royal family of the Netherlands, Hepburn studied to be a ballet dancer before beginning her cinema and stage career. Her films include Gigi, Roman Holiday, Charade and Breakfast at Tiffany’s. She is one of a handful of people to have been awarded a Tony, an Emmy, a Grammy, a Golden Globe, and an Oscar. Famous for her elfin good looks, her collaboration with designer Hubert de Givenchy set the style for women’s high fashion in the 1950’s, and helped to popularize the iconic “little black dress.” In later life she devoted herself to work with UNICEF and was recognized for her commitment with a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1992.
Raised in an Irish Catholic family in White Plains, Campbell had an early fascination with Native American culture and mythology. He attended Dartmouth and Columbia Colleges and received degrees in English and Medieval Literature. While returning from a family trip to Europe in the 20’s, a chance shipboard meeting with Jiddu Krishnamurti (quoted earlier in this space) awoke in him a lifelong interest in eastern philosophy. Campbell withdrew to a shack in upstate New York for five years of intensive reading and study, learning French, German, Latin, Sanskrit, and Japanese in the process. He taught at Sarah Lawrence College for many years and in 1949 published The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the seminal work of comparative mythology, followed in the 1960’s by The Masks of God. Both books have had an enormous influence on writers and storytellers as diverse as George Lucas and Richard Adams, but it was the 1988 PBS series The Power of Myth, in which journalist Bill Moyers interviewed Campbell at length, that brought his ideas into popular culture. The Joseph Campbell Foundation continues to publish his astonishingly prolific output of books, essays and talks on the nature of the universal human search for meaning.
Midwestern humorist, cartoonist, and writer known best for his political commentary, Hubbard was a high school dropout who said his goal in life was to own a circus. He worked briefly as a silhouette artist and attended art school for a short time before beginning cartoon work for the Indianapolis News. For 25 years he drew the acclaimed cartoon “Abe Martin of Brown County” which went into syndication and made him nationally known. Will Rogers cited Hubbard as an influence and called him the greatest humorist of his time.
“Do stuff, be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention, attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.” Susan Sontag (1933-2004)
Educated at Berkeley, the University of Chicago, Harvard, and Oxford, Sontag was known as the “Dark Lady of American Literature.” Although she described herself as a novelist, she was a prolific essayist and critic as well, not only of literature but also photography, the Vietnam War, patriarchy and Western Civilization. Her articles and short stories in the New Yorker magazine brought her widespread fame and a MacArthur Fellowship in 1990. Sontag was married to writer David Rieff from 1950 to 1958, but was openly bisexual in a time when it was not generally accepted, and had a long-standing romantic relationship with photographer Annie Leibowitz. Sontag’s last novel, In America, was given the National Book Award.
Born Allan Stewart Konigsberg in the Bronx, Woody began writing comedy as a teenager and in the 1950’s was a highly paid gag man for Ed Sullivan, Sid Caesar and others. In the Sixties he began developing his own stand-up career and the character of the nebbish with which he is so closely identified today. He began his film writing and directing with slapstick comedies but moved quickly on to more dramatic material with Annie Hall, Manhattan, and Hannah and Her Sisters. He describes his work as heavily influenced by Bergman and Fellini, and he himself is taken more seriously in Europe than at home. He has won four Academy Awards and has been married three times. Woody frequents the New York club scene and sits in as a jazz clarinetist. Although he is famously agnostic, his quote reveals a recognition of the comedy inherent in humans attempting to understand the divine.
A native of Amdo, in the disputed province of Qinghai, the Dalai Lama was chosen as the incarnation of the previous title holder when he was two. He began his monastic training at six and was awarded the highest level Buddhist degree at 23. From the age of 15 he headed theocratic Tibet, which was being subsumed into China first by the Nationalists and later by the People’s Republic. At the beginning of the Tibetan Uprising of 1959 he led 80,000 refugees to India to establish a government-in-exile. He has traveled widely in the West and garnered international support for an independent Tibet while receiving honors from several countries culminating in his 1989 Nobel Peace Prize. His simple message and support of ecumenism has endeared him to the members of many faiths. He is the longest incumbent Dalai Lama in history.
A New Yorker by birth and niece of Theodore Roosevelt, Eleanor lost both parents and a brother before she was eleven. She attended Allenwood Academy in London and was influenced by headmistress Marie Souvestre, an early feminist. She married Franklin Delano Roosevelt, her fifth cousin, in 1904, and supported his forays into politics despite his polio and her discovery of his extra-marital affairs. Wishing to carve out an identity for herself, she became active, first in the New York State Democratic Party when FDR was Governor, and then as the most outspoken of all First Ladies when he was elected President for the first of his four terms in 1932. She was an ardent supporter of the rights of women and minorities, and created much controversy when she opposed some of her husband’s policies, including Japanese-American internment during the Second World War. Following FDR’s death in 1945 she was named one of the first delegates to the United Nations, the founding of which she had strongly supported, and continued her social justice advocacy for the rest of her life, becoming one of the most admired and respected Americans of her era.
(1885-1972) from Canto 13 Quoted, with thanks, from JoeAnn Hart’s excellent new book Float. Born in what was then the Idaho Territory to parents of Quaker and Puritan ancestry, Pound was raised in Philadelphia, but rebelled against his genteel surroundings and exiled himself to England to be a poet. Disgusted by the slaughter of the First World War, which he blamed on market capitalism, he spent much of the next twenty-five years in France and Italy. He befriended and championed Eliot, Hemingway, Frost, Joyce and our own Charles Olson, and helped to publish much of their early work. A supporter of Mussolini and Hitler, he made radio broadcasts denigrating the United States during the Second World War, was arrested as a traitor at its conclusion, and spent the next 12 years in an American psychiatric hospital. Meanwhile his poetry continued to be read and appreciated, winning controversial awards and prizes. Finally released in 1958, he returned to Italy publishing the last of his Cantos, 110-118, in 1968.
Greg Bover
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"The man who says he is willing to meet you halfway is usually a poor judge of distance." Dr. Laurence J. Peter (1919-1990)
Born in Vancouver, British Columbia, and educated at Washington State University, Dr. Peter was a coordinator of programs for emotionally disturbed children at the University of Southern California. As a student of bureaucracies, he was famous for his theory The Peter Principle, and his 1968 book of the same name, which posits that in a hierarchical organization an employee rises until he or she reaches one level above that at which they are competent. In later life he was active in the Kinetic Sculpture Race which occurs in many locations around the world (and looks like a whole lot of fun. Couldn’t we have one on Rocky Neck?)
Though born in St. Louis, Eliot’s family had New England roots reaching back to the Salem witch trials and deep into Harvard yard. He attended Milton Academy and spent summers on Cape Ann (seeThe Dry Salvages), later studying at Harvard, Oxford, and the Sorbonne. In later life he renounced both Unitarianism and his American citizenship in favor of Anglicanism and the United Kingdom. Eliot is often cited as the greatest modern poet, andThe Waste Land as one of the most important poems of the 20th century. In 1948 he was awarded both the Nobel Prize for Literature and the Order of Merit.
An English poet and aesthetic philosopher, Coleridge may be best known for his long poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and Kubla Khan. He had intended to enter the ministry but was given an annuity by Josiah Wedgewood so that he might devote himself to writing. A life-long friend of William Wordsworth, he was an important influence on Emerson and the Transcendentalists and is frequently credited with helping to foster both the Romantic and Gothic sensibilities. His lectures on Shakespeare and Milton did much to raise awareness of their writing to the heights they enjoy today. He suffered from depression, which he treated with laudanum, leading to opium addiction, against which he struggled for many years, but which ultimately contributed to his demise.
This is the gate house to the Todaiji Shrine, also in Nara. The scale of this woodworking is awe inspiring. That fluorescent green dot is my adult son Nick.
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I’m in Japan for a couple of weeks so the quote is sent in from Kyoto today. "You wouldn’t worry so much about what other people think of you if you knew how seldom they do." Variously attributed to Olin Miller, Eleanor Roosevelt, Phil McGraw and others. Greg
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Ever wonder why Pope Julius II Commissioned Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel?
Well, the Catholic Church had been losing influence — and parishioners — partly due to tensions created by events leading up to the Protestant Reformation, which was sparked a few years after Julius II died. So, thought Julius, what better way to bring people back to the fold than to make his churches the most beautiful buildings you’re ever likely to see.
And then, of course, there’s the music, which matured over the next 200 years to produce such great works that we still play them today. Think our popular music will be played 300 years from now? Here’s a piece you proabably know, written about 300 years ago:
Imagine life in the early 1700s (when Bach was a church organist — 200 years after Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel). The only sounds you heard were those of nature–birds chirping, rustling leaves, whistling wind, the roar of the sea, the gentle wash of a babbling brook or running stream. Think of this as the background music of the day upon which you hear the human voice: the sigh of a maiden in love; the jealous rage of a prince betrayed; the joyful song of family gathered around a crackling fire; a newborn’s cradle gently rocking on wide pine boards to his mother’s soft candlelight serenade.
People of the day spent their lives listening to the sounds of nature augmented only by music they made themselves, the notable exception being on Sunday. Church music was an utterly exotic and extraordinary sound — and most likely the loudest sound anyone ever heard.
So, you fill the most impressive building in the city with the best art and music available anywhere on Earth and you’ve got a draw. That’s what got people to church. And it still does. Just ask Greg Bover who buys most of the organs he builds at CB Fisk.
Regardless of their religious affiliations, more people go to church during big celebrations than at any other time — and a big reason is that’s when the music and pageantry (entertainment wrapped in ceremony) are at their best. Check out this video of an Easter 2012 church service to see what I’m talking about:
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“Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for – in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.” Ellen DeGeneres (1958- )
A Louisiana native, DeGeneres began her public career as a stand-up comedian after a number of working class experiences as a waitress, house painter and bartender. She had a sitcom for several years before her syndicated talk program The Ellen DeGeneres Show, which has won multiple Emmys. She has appeared in several movies and is in demand as a voice actor, especially since her award-winning role as Dory in Finding Nemo. Her wisecracking ability to think on her feet has made her a memorable host of the Emmys and the Academy Awards. She famously came out as a lesbian on the Oprah Winfrey Show in 1997 and is married to Portia Rossi. DeGeneres is an animal rights activist and owns a vegan tapas bar in Los Angeles.
Born into a Lutheran family in Alsace-Lorraine at a time when it was a part of the German Empire, Schweitzer was an organ prodigy who studied with Charles-Marie Widor at Saint-Sulpice in Paris, and became famous for his scholarship and for his interpretation of the works of Johann Sebastian Bach. He was a powerful advocate for the preservation and restoration of the historic pipe organs of Europe, many of which have therefore been available to inform my own work. Through his study of theology he developed a personal philosophy he called Reverence for Life, which held that the ethical person does not allow his or her ‘will to live’ to overcome the right of those around us to thrive as well. Schweitzer expressed this philosophy by setting aside his promising academic and musical career, spending seven years to become a medical doctor, and establishing a hospital in an extremely remote area of colonial French Equatorial Africa, now Gabon, setting an example followed by generations of altruists, culminating in the work of NGO’s such as Doctors without Borders. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952.
A native of Brookline and a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard University, where he served as president of the Harvard Lampoon, O’Brien was a writer for Saturday Night Live and The Simpsons before hosting the variety shows Late Night and, briefly, The Tonight Show. The two-time Emmy award winner now hosts Conan on TBS and often appears in cameo roles on other comedy shows such as The Colbert Report, The Daily Show and 30 Rock. An avid guitarist who has played with Bruce Springsteen, O’Brien is also an anti-hunger activist and often speaks against the corrosive effects of cynicism.
Good Morning Gloucester 