Henry David Thoreau, born this day in 1817, was a Renaissance man who just happened to live in 19th century America. He was a poet and philosopher who worked for a time as a down-to-earth surveyor and pencil-maker, a naturalist who reveled in the wild but was absolutely not a cranky hermit, and a tax-resister who wrote the book, literally, on civil disobediance. "A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting." Thoreau didn't go to Walden Pond just to commune with Nature. He was looking for a quiet place to do some writing and his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson had this nice rustic place on the water. It was perfect for getting a little solitude and being able to tune-out all the hassles of modern life! I can't imagine what he would think about our wired 24-7-365 lifestyle. He might be one of those people running down the street buck-naked, his crazed rants captured on someone's iPhone and posted to YouTube as it happens. As he noted in a chapter of Walden: "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." He wasn't a Material Guy and frankly, wasn't pulling in a lot of benjamins at the time so he figured he could reduce his material needs by living simply, rather than support a lifestyle back in Concord that he didn't need or really care about. And if he could do a little communing and meditation, well, so much the better. Portrait of Thoreau by Samuel Rowse (1854) In his famous lecture, "Life without Principle" given first in 1854 at Railroad Hall in Providence, Rhode Island and several more times over the course of the next year, Thoreau argued that work should be something we love in order to lead a life worth living, not simply to make a living. Well, that's all very well and good for a Harvard man to spout such idealistic notions, but he seems to have completely forgotten about the poverty-striken masses who were (and still are) struggling to pay the rent and put food on the table for their children. The ideal fulfilled life may indeed be found in pursuing a path that leads us to what we truly love to do, and then work doing that; however, the reality is that many people lack that freedom and must take a job because it comes with a paycheck. But I'm willing to forgive him because he did write a lot of great quotes about books! "Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business." Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Leo Tolstoy, Martin Buber and Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas all have this in common: an admiration for Thoreau's essay of 1849 "Civil Disobedience," originally published as "Resistence to Civil Government." (It not clear whether he actually ever uttered the words "civil disobedience.")But beyond the big names, the essay was read in the 1940's by the Danish resistance; in the 1950's, it was brandished by those who opposed McCarthyism; in the 1960's, it was influential in the early struggle against South African apartheid; and in the 1970's it was discovered by a new generation of anti-war activists. The essay contains the famous quote often misattributed to Thomas Jefferson: "I heartily accept the motto, — ‘That government is best which governs least.'" Thoreau was actually was referring to an existing saying that was the motto for the journal The United States Magazine and Democratic Review, which was edited by American journalist and editor John Louis O’Sullivan. In 1844, Thoreau’s old pal Emerson also wrote in an essay: “The less government we have, the better.” (What's a little borrowing among friends?) Hmm, I foresee Thoreau's face soon will be glaring out at me from posters held aloft by Tea-Party protesters. Here's what his man-crush Emerson had to say about him: "He was bred to no profession; he never married; he lived alone; he never went to church; he never voted; he refused to pay a tax to the State: he ate no flesh, he drank no wine, he never knew the use of tobacco; and, though a naturalist, he used neither trap nor gun. He chose, wisely, no doubt, for himself, to be the bachelor of thought and Nature. He had no talent for wealth, and knew how to be poor without the least hint of squalor or inelegance. .... Thoreau was sincerity itself ..." You can read more about this fascinating fellow with these biographies, which range from the scholarly to the refreshingly whimsical:
Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind - Robert Richardson, Jr. (1988) Henry Thoreau: A Biography - Walter Harding (2011) Henry Thoreau: A Man for All Seasons - Douglas T. Miller (2001) The Thoreau You Don't Know - Robert Sullivan (2009)
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No, he didn't invent this! Wednesday, July 11th is Bowdler’s Day, which commemorates the birth of Thomas Bowdler, born on this date in 1754, near Bath, England. At this point, you are probably asking, why should I care about this? Well, you have probably heard or read the term bowd·ler·ize/ˈbōdləˌrīz/, which is a verb which means to remove material that is considered improper or offensive from (a text or account), especially with the result that it becomes weaker or less, for example: "a bowdlerized version of the story." Yes, this English doctor, philanthropist and man of letters spawned a verb which is synonymous with censorship. How did that “happen?” Now Bowdler was quite likely a man of numerous talents, a gentleman and a scholar, in the almighty words of Mick and Keith, “a man of wealth and taste.” He was a crusader for the cause of prison reform and apparently played a mean game of chess. He was in fact so clever a player that he won several matches against Frenchman François-André Danican Philidor, who was the Garry Kasparov of the 18th century. But what do the short encyclopedia entries note as the poor guy's dubious achievement? Redacting Shakespeare. (He also performed this service for Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and the Old Testament, with less famous results.) Expletive deleted, as they said in the Watergate era Bowdler grew up listening to his father, a wealthy banker, reading aloud from the Bard’s greatest works. However, once he was old enough to read the texts on his own, he realized that Daddy had been leaving out the naughty bits. As a great admirer of Shakespeare’s plays, Bowdler felt it would be a public service to publish an edition for families in which the paterfamilias was not a sufficiently "circumspect and judicious reader" to accomplish this expurgation. In other words, to assist a dad who liked the naughty bits too much to remember to skip over ‘em when the young'ens were listening. To provide a solution to this problem and protect tender sensibilities, Bowdler did a little tampering with some important but, alas, offensive words and passages, a snip, snip here, a scratch-out there. Henrietta Maria Bowdler, his sister, may have assisted him. Bowdler claimed his goal was to provide texts "in which nothing is added to the original; but those words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read in a family." He didn't have Wite-Out. Bowdler explained his rationale thusly: “I acknowledge Shakespeare to be the world's greatest dramatic poet, but regret that no parent could place the uncorrected book in the hands of his daughter, and therefore I have prepared the Family Shakespeare… Many words and expressions occur which are of so indecent a nature as to render it highly desirable that they should be erased… If any word or expression is of such a nature that the first impression it excites is an impression of obscenity, that word ought not to be spoken nor written or printed ; and, if printed, it ought to be erased." (Preface to 1818 edition) (Apparently Bowdler thought it was okay for boys to read the naughty bits!) He called his book The Family Shakspeare: In Ten Volumes; in which Nothing is Added to the Original Text; But Those Words and Expressions are Omitted which Cannot with Propriety be Read Aloud in a Family. The 1818 edition became extremely popular and helped make Shakespeare's plays known to a wide audience. Many critics of the 1800's, including the redoubtable Algernon Charles Swinburne praised Bowdler's edition for making Shakespeare's plays safe for women and children. Some examples of his redactions and expurgations include: Ophelia's death in Hamlet is referred to as an accidental drowning, not a possible suicide. (Guess she was just out rock-hunting and just happened to stow a bunch of her most interesting finds in her pockets before she, alas, fell into the stream.) Lady Macbeth's "Out, Damned spot" is changed to "Out, Crimson spot." (Perfect cheer for any teams playing Alabama or Harvard!) Doll Tearsheet (a woman of ill-repute (how’s that for bowdlerizing?) is completely written out of Henry IV, Part 1. In Romeo and Juliet, instead of saying "the bawdy hand of the dial is now upon the prick of noon,” Mercutio quips "the hand of the dial is now upon the point of noon" (not half as quipish) and Juliet's line "Spread thy close curtain, love performing night" is changed to "... and come civil night." (Oh please!) And there's plenty more where that came from... Now, to be honest, most people have their own acceptable standards of censorship where hate speech, racism, pornography, violence and the sensibilities of children intersect. And Shakespeare is regularly expurgated by theatre and film directors as they cut and move his dialogue around to fit their concepts of design and performance. And if you are a parent, when doing the nightly read aloud, you know that you occasionally do skip over passages or substitute words or phrases, whether due to censorship or the fact that you're dog-tired and want to get through the chapter before you fall asleep face first in the book. So why do we object to Bowdler and use his name in a perjorative manner? Is it because we think he was being dishonest? Do we wonder how he could dare take a scissors to the Bard? Carroll dreams of editing the Bard During the 18th and 19th centuries, there were many other more or less expurgated versions of the plays. Lewis Carroll even contemplated putting together his own version, which never came to fruition, called The Girl's Own Shakespeare: "I have a dream of Bowdlerising Bowdler, i.e., of editing a Shakespeare which shall be absolutely fit for girls" (from "Alice Reads Shakespeare: Charles Dodgson and the Girl's Shakespeare Project" by Georgianna Ziegler in Reimagining Shakespeare for Children and Young Adults). Of course, we all know about LC and his "sank heaven for leetle girls" thing. In the man cave: no women allowed So, go ahead, to celebrate Bowdler's birthday, read an unexpurgated version of a Shakespeare play. If you are looking for naughty bits and laughs, Love’s Labour’s Lost is probably the bawdiest of the Bard’s comedies, with a simple plot: Three young men vow to devote themselves to studying and avoid any female contact for three years. (Think Judd Apatow, but a lot more wit and a lot less outright vulgarity) Predictably, none of them are able to keep away from temptation for any length of time. In a similar vein is The Merry Wives of Windsor, in which a rotund and foolish knight named Falstaff is consumed with desire for two hot housewives who decide to play tricks on him. For violence, any of the tragedies might suit your fancy and Romeo and Juliet has enough sex and violence for a hard R from the MPAA's raters! Or you could choose to read E.B. White (Charlotte's Web, Stuart Little, etc.) or Patricia Polacco (The Keeping Quilt, Thunder Cake, Pink and Say or any number of other picture books) since they were also born on July 11. I don't believe any of their books have been bowdlerized, as of yet. (Although I predict that somebody will one day make a movie version of Charlotte's Web in which the spider lives! Don't want to traumatize the kiddies!)
With two recent movies spawned by the Snow White fairy tale (for those living in a cave: Mirror, Mirror with Julia Roberts and Snow White and the Huntsman with Kristen Stewart and Charlize Theron, not to mention hunk-o-the-month Chris Hemsworth), we do indeed seem to be living in a "who's the fairest of them all" era. For those of us who lack magic talking mirrors, there's an app that's ready to help us answer that timeless question. Or at least figure out how ugly we are. Ugly Meter app The Ugly Meter is advertised thusly on iTunes: "Do you ever wonder if you're ugly and your friends just don't tell you? Do you have an ugly friend, and you just don't know how to tell them? The Ugly Meter takes your photo and scans the details of your face to give you a rating of 1-10 on the Ugly Scale. If you rate a 10, you probably have a face that only a mother could love. Depending on how bad your rating is, the Ugly Meter will comment on your looks!" Brad Pitt through the Ugly Meter Pro You snap a picture of you (or your victim). The app scans the photo and evaluates it based on things such as facial symmetry, proportions and shape. It then spits out a score from 10 to 0. Unlike the Dudley Moore/Bo Derek movie romp, in this case, a 10 signifies the ugliest and a zero means you're hot. Then, depending on your score, it will insult you with a clever put-down, such as "any similarity between you and a human is purely coincidental." All this for 99 cents! Or $4.99 for the PRO upgrade, where the scale goes to 100. (Why not 11?!?!?) Of course, the Ugly Meter is a complete joke. A user can submit the same photo half a dozen times and receive different results every time. And the app creators, the Dapper Gentlemen, go so far as to poke fun at all the press they have received about this app, including featured stories on CBS and MSNBC, the Today Show, the Tonight Show, the Huffington Post, the Daily Mail and Howard Stern, many of whom don't seem to get the joke. But maybe the problem is that our whole social milieu has become an Ugly Meter. Back in 1999, there was the attractiveness rating website called Rate My Face, which then was superseded by Hot or Not, which was apparently an inspiration for Mark Zuckerberg's first foray into social media creation, Facemash, which used hacked images of his Harvard classmates' ID photos to create a "who's the fairest of them all" smackdown. The next-gen spawn, Facebook, allows us do that in a "kinder, gentler" fashion as we scroll through all those photos of fabulous vacations and remodeled kitchens and pretty babies and that "friend" who always posts a shot of herself posing with her leg jutting forward in classic model style, as if looking for affirmation that she's still hot after all these years. It's all about the ranking and the rating... from reality television shows that are competitions in which the audience votes to eliminate the "less fair" (singer, dancer, etc., etc.) to best seller lists and box office returns and the ceaseless political polls. When did we forget how to judge for ourselves? Hey, just look in the mirror... Here in the Chicago area, we are sweltering through a third day in a row of extreme heat (100+ degrees) and many homes in my community were without power for most of the week due to a powerful storm that barreled through last Sunday. All over the state of Illinois and the Midwest, it's been hot, hot, hot. How hot, you ask? Well, a hot librarian knows where to go for answers to all sorts of questions, including those about the weather! Hot time in the old town tonight? How how is it? Hotter than a honeymoon hotel... Hotter than a stolen tamale... Hotter than a fur coat in Marfa --Texas, that is... (Thanks for my friends at Texas Monthly for those!) How hot is it? It's so hot that I have found out (the hard way) that my seat belt buckle could be used as a branding iron. It was so hot today I saw an Amish guy buying an air conditioner. (Courtesy: www.yooohaaa.com) How hot is it? Hotter than the backlog o' hell... Hotter than hell with the blower on... Hotter'n a burnt boot... All from Cowboy Lingo: A Dictionary of the Slack-Jaw Words and Whangdoodle Ways of the American West by Ramon F. Adams (Houghton Mifflin, New York, 2000) How hot is it? Hotter than a two-dollar pistol - Very hot, an allusion to cheap 19th-century pistols that got hot when fired. Hotter than Methodist hell - About as hot as it can get; an expression used chiefly in Maine. Hotter'n a skunk - 1. Very drunk. 2. Very hot weather or anything hot. Hotter'n love in hayin' time - Extremely hot. All from: Facts on File Dictionary of American Regionalisms: Local Expressions from Coast to Coast by Robert Hendrickson (Facts on File, New York, 2000) How hot is it? Hotter than an iPad 3 after a couple minutes use... Hotter than a steel playground slide at noon... Hotter than a habañero orbiting the sun... How hot is it? Hotter than a Times-Square Rolex... Hotter than a brazen hussy in church... Hotter than blue blazes... This actually makes sense from a scientific point of view since the hotter the source of light, the shorter its wavelength, and blue light has the shortest wavelength of the visible spectrum. Well, officially it is called violet, but physicists generally refer to the end of the spectrum that includes violet as the blue end and this is due to how our eyes see color. We have three kinds of color sensing cells, called cones, in our eyes. These cones sense red, green, and blue light. So every color we perceive is some combination of red, green, and blue. That includes yellow, believe it or not. So physicists just talk about those three colors. Maybe they never had the 64-pack of Crayola Crayons to color with as children! But I digress... So hotter than red hot, even hotter than white hot, is blue hot. (Or, for purists, violet hot.)
(Thanks to Amazing Space from the Space Telescope Science Institute's Office of Public Outreach.) Since the 4th of July parade and fireworks were cancelled in my town in the wake of a powerful storm that rolled through last Sunday, causing major damage, Intern Bruce threw together a presentation to cheer me up! (Who knew the librarian's Action Hero would have a flair for Powerpoint?) Coming soon: a brave new world where books are conceived, written, edited and marketed by data analysis! You'll get the books you want... and deserve. Check out this article from the Wall Street Journal: Your E-book is Reading You And you thought you were hiding the fact that you were reading "50 Shades of Grey" by downloading on your Kindle!
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