Quote of the Day (William Henry Harrison, on States With “Financial Concerns”)

“In consequence of the embarrassed state of business and the currency, some of the States may meet with difficulty in their financial concerns. However deeply we may regret anything imprudent or excessive in the engagements into which States have entered for purposes of their own, it does not become us to disparage the States governments, nor to discourage them from making proper efforts for their own relief. On the contrary, it is our duty to encourage them to the extent of our constitutional authority to apply their best means and cheerfully to make all necessary sacrifices and submit to all necessary burdens to fulfill their engagements and maintain their credit, for the character and credit of the several States form a part of the character and credit of the whole country. The resources of the country are abundant, the enterprise and activity of our people proverbial, and we may well hope that wise legislation and prudent administration by the respective governments, each acting within its own sphere, will restore former prosperity.”—William Henry Harrison, Presidential Inaugural Address, March 4, 1841

Here I was, ready to hold up to scorn the ninth President, William Henry Harrison, for insisting on delivering his entire inaugural address—the longest ever, more than 8,000 words, taking one hour and 45 minutes to read—in the midst of a snowstorm. (For his sins, Harrison died one month later of pneumonia he’d contracted as a result.)

I was about to contrast, in the nastiest possible way, Harrison’s long-winded lack of eloquence with other, far more memorable addresses given by our country’s chief executives on the same late-winter day: Thomas Jefferson’s first (“We are all Federalists, we are all Republicans”), delivered after the first peaceful transfer of power in the nation's history, and Abraham Lincoln’s first, given as America stood on the brink of civil war (“The mystic chords of memory,

stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”)

But search hard enough and you’re bound to find something of surprising import, and that’s the case even with Harrison, who’s fascinating to aficionados of American history (the shortest-serving President in the republic) but the bane of high-school students of the subject (how do you recall someone who never did anything remotely interesting—at least as presented in textbooks?).

Here, the new President discusses something we all recognize far too readily today: the hard-pressed condition of state governors as they figure out what to do with their budgets after a massive financial upheaval. Today’s governors are dealing with the aftermath of the 2007-09 recession (and the current anemic recovery), while those of Harrison’s era grappled with the consequences of the Panic of 1837 (a financial setback so severe that it won the Presidency for Harrison in his second contest against Martin Van Buren).

How else did the two situations resemble each other? How did they differ? It’s not a bad way for high-school teachers to show how a subject filled with mounds of dates that kids dread also has continuing relevance to their current circumstances.

Quote of the Day (“The Lion in Winter,” on “How Peace Begins”)

Prince John: “A knife! He's got a knife!”
Eleanor of Aquitaine: “Of course he has a knife, he always has a knife, we all have knives! It's 1183 and we're barbarians! How clear we make it. Oh, my piglets, we are the origins of war: not history's forces, nor the times, nor justice, nor the lack of it, nor causes, nor religions, nor ideas, nor kinds of government, nor any other thing. We are the killers. We breed wars. We carry it like syphilis inside. Dead bodies rot in field and stream because the living ones are rotten. For the love of God, can't we love one another just a little - that's how peace begins. We have so much to love each other for. We have such possibilities, my children. We could change the world.”--James Goldman, The Lion in Winter (1966)

Yes, that’s Katharine Hepburn in the accompanying image as Eleanor of Aquitaine, in the role that netted her a second Oscar trophy. But two years before it became a vehicle for her, on this date in 1966, The Lion in Winter premiered at Broadway’s Ambassador Theatre, with an actress two decades the junior of Kate the Great--the luminous Rosemary Harris--as the estranged spouse of King Henry II of England. (Robert Preston played the latter role onstage; Peter O’Toole would handle it onscreen, repeating the role that had earned him a nomination four years previously in Becket.)

I was fortunate enough to see Harris onstage in Edward Albee’s All Fall Down several years ago, in a production presented by the Roundabout Theatre Co. That same troupe mounted, in the winter of 1999, a revival of The Lion in Winter starring Stockard Channing and Laurence Fishburne.

Both the play and film (adapted by Goldman himself) feature a war of wills, wit and words between Eleanor and Henry, who has decided to let his wife out of prison for the Christmas season as he ponders an heir to the throne among their children. As the quote above indicates, there’s much in the script that actors would virtually kill for.

But even actors of enormous skill can’t hide the fact that this otherwise literate script is more than a little anachronistic. As the sons of Henry and Eleanor scheme against each other and their father for the throne, the tone becomes more than a little like one of those 20th-century Thanksgiving and Christmas family get-togethers. You know--the kind that usually climaxes with, “Mom (or Dad) always loved you best!”

Quote of the Day (Joseph Addison, Launching “Spectator”)

“Thus I live in the World, rather as a Spectator of Mankind, than as one of the species; by which means I have made myself a Speculative statesman, Soldier, Merchant, and Artizan, without ever meddling with any Practical Part in Life. I am very well versed in the Theory of an Husband, or a Father, and can discern the Errors in the Oeconomy, Business and Diversion of others, better than those who are engaged in them; as Standers-by discover Blots, which are apt to escape those who are in the Game. I never espoused any Party with Violence, and am resolved to observe an exact Neutrality between the Whigs and Tories, unless I shall be forced to declare myself by the Hostilities of either Side. In short, I have acted in all the Parts of my Life as a Looker-on, which is the Character I intend to preserve in this Paper.”—Joseph Addison, March 1, 1711, launching The Spectator, in Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, Selections From The Tatler and The Spectator, with an introduction and notes by Robert J. Allen (1965)

Charlie Sheen and his antics (will they never cease?) will just have to wait for another time. Today, we’ll talk about something \of far greater cultural import: the beginning of the London periodical The Spectator, founded by longtime Oxford friends Joseph Addison and Richard Steele—one of the crucial moments in the development of the English essay.

Their achievement was enough to link them forever as a team, as surely as Smith and Dale, Simon and Garfunkel, Mantle and Maris, even though the two had separate careers and personalities. (Addison, the more equable of the pair, eventually became Secretary of State in the British government, while Steele, who tended to write more from his gut, was better suited to journalism and the theater.) A tip of the hat to their influence can still be seen on newsstands in the U.K. (and large out-of-town periodical emporiums here in the U.S.) where the names of two magazines, The Tatler and The Spectator, bear the names of the great progenitors of the English essay.

From today’s perspective, neither publication lasted too long, with The Spectator calling it a day after only a year and a half. Some seminal rock bands (e.g., the Velvet Underground, Buffalo Springfield), known for expiring before their time, have still had longer shelf lives than this. Nor have many of their original topics remained relevant (amazingly, 20 years after the madness across the ocean in Salem, the pair were still discussing witchcraft).

But, no matter what the medium—a blog, or even those now-threatened print dinosaurs, the newspaper and the magazine—whenever someone writes something that becomes the talk of the town, endlessly discussed Out There, it’s the legacy of Addison and Steele coming into play.

The Tatler was their first try at putting out periodicals for the rising English middle class, and the two friends would have kept that going, except that their involvement—and particularly their political commentary—was exposed. Two months after that exposure—three centuries ago yesterday—Addison’s essay, quoted above, was the opener of their follow-up, The Spectator.

This time, Addison and Steele did their best to keep politics out of the mix. (Probably a good thing, too: they had already fallen out with former ally Jonathan Swift when he took up the cause of the Tory Party, and by the end of the decade these two fast friends would fall out with each other—a breach never healed in Addison’s lifetime—over a different political matter.)

Nevertheless, they didn’t mind taking risks of a different kind, concerning aesthetics. Addison’s reflections on the theater, for instance, did much to sustain an audience for this art form.

Quote of the Day (Luke Matheny, With the Best Line of the Oscars)

“I should’ve got a haircut.”--Luke Matheny, winner of the Oscar for live-action short for his film God of Love, gasping in astonishment before a worldwide audience of millions at his victory last night

You got that right, dude! How many times did your mom tell you this?

Now you learn, too late! Your ‘do is a character unto itself--sort of like John Turturro’s astonishing George S. Kaufman tonsorial tribute in Barton Fink.

As another winner from last night, director Tom Hooper (The King’s Speech), might say, the moral of this story is simple: Listen to your mother!

Quote of the Day (Mother Dolores Hart, on Leaving Hollywood for the Convent)

''Monastic life is impossible for most people to understand. People think that it is a life that is shut off, or you're gone from the world, but it's exactly opposite. You are more embedded into the world. It's a way of love that includes everyone that you've ever loved.''—Mother Dolores Hart, quoted in Thom Geier, “Mother Dolores Hart: The Nun Who Kissed Elvis Presley,” Entertainment Weekly, Feb. 11, 2011

This year’s most unlikely Oscar voter--perhaps the most unlikely one in the 80-plus-year history of the Academy--is Mother Dolores Hart. Film fans with very long memories may recall her earlier life as a Hollywood starlet of the late Fifties and early Sixties, when she made 10 films (including Where the Boys Are) before walking away from it all to enter the cloistered Abbey of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem, Conn.

Every year at this time, Hollywood engages in an awards ceremony not only flagrantly self-congratulatory but doubly laughable when you get a load of the vain bimbos and himbos on the red carpet. Though most readers of this blog would find Ms. Hart’s act of worldly renunciation in 1963 astonishing, the Tinseltown veterans who strut and fret their hour upon the stage must view her as something akin to a creature from another planet. (In fact, play Jeff Bridges’ 1984 film Star Man and see if his alien isn’t allowed a greater sense of humanity than most of the nuns depicted onscreen in recent decades.)

What a shame all this is--the men who run Hollywood will never understand the impulse behind Mother Dolores’ remarkable story, a total denial of self and commitment to God and others. Yet all of this comes with a funny bone that remains intact nearly a half century after she changed her life so radically. (In other interviews, when asked what it was like to kiss Elvis Presley onscreen in Loving You, she’s answered puckishly: “I think the limit for a screen kiss back then was something like 15 seconds. That one has lasted 40 years.")

The Entertainment Weekly article is fascinating not only for how Mother Dolores views recent Hollywood fare such as Black Swan, The Hurt Locker and Avatar (which won her vote for Best Picture last year), but also for the life she left behind (including a fiancee who, after their engagement ended, has never married) and the affectionate reminiscences of former co-stars such as Paula Prentiss Benjamin and Robert Wagner.

One hopes that someday, movie moguls will take to heart the true lesson of Mother Dolores' life: the persistent way that love abides, even in its most unexpected form.

This Day in Rock History (Beatles' “Rubber Soul” Tops Album Chart)

Feb. 26, 1966--The Beatles’ sixth studio LP, Rubber Soul, remained at #1 on Billboard's U.S. album chart, where it had stayed since the start of the year. The LP represented strong evidence of the continuing maturation--indeed, mastery--of the British quartet as songwriters and studio innovators.

American fans of the Fab Four found a somewhat different track listing than the group’s home fans did. Only 10 of the dozen tracks on the U.S. vinyl release also appeared on the British one from December 1965: “I’ve Just Seen a Face” and “It’s Only Love” from the British Help! album substituted for four tracks that would later appear on the American Yesterday…and Today. In fact, U.S. and British releases would not contain the same tracks until the Beatles’ 1967 extravaganza, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

What was the Beatles’ greatest album? Sergeant Pepper’s comes in for the lion’s share of plaudits, but I don’t think Rubber Soul can be excluded from the conversation. At a time when the group were under relentless pressure for more singles, they managed to produce what became a landmark in what would become a staple of what we know now as album-oriented radio, an LP less a collection of singles than songs marked by significant experimentation and fertile collaboration.

Consider, for instance, the role of “the quiet Beatle,” George Harrison. It took another three years, with the release of Abbey Road and its tunes “Something” and “Here Comes the Sun,” before his talents began to be acknowledged in all their dimensions.

But with “Rubber Soul,” Harrison started to move, albeit slowly, into the group songwriting space occupied by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, with “Think for Yourself” and “If I Needed Someone.” His more important contribution at this point might have been simply to shape the group’s sound. “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)” gave evidence of Lennon’s sly wit (very sly--he set himself the challenge of writing about an affair without signaling to wife Cynthia that he was doing so!), but listeners were also startled by a new instrument: the sitar, played by Harrison, displaying his growing interest in Indian culture.

For a little more than two years, the group had been living every day at the beck and call of Beatlemania. However much fun it might have been at first, it had become exhausting by now, and Lennon in particular took stock with two songs of self-questioning and self-assessment: “Nowhere Man” and “In My Life.”

McCartney’s craftsmanship, though, provided much of the glue holding the album together. There have been more celebrated instances in pop history of how a romantic breakup produced art (most notably, Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks and Marvin Gaye’s Here, My Dear), but the end of Paul’s relationship with actress-girlfriend Jane Asher produced some of his best work to that point, including the Rubber Soul songs “You Won’t See Me” and “I’m Looking Through You.”

Bonus Quote of the Day (Sylvia Plath, on Meeting Her Lover and Doom)

''Then the worst thing happened, that big, dark, hunky boy, the only one there huge enough for me, who had been hunching around over women, and whose name I had asked the minute I had come into the room, but no one told me, came over and was looking hard in my eyes and it was Ted Hughes….and bang the door was shut and he was sloshing brandy into a glass and I was sloshing it at the place where my mouth was when I last knew about it.

''We shouted as if in a high wind … and I was stamping and he was stamping on the floor, and then he kissed me bang smash on the mouth and ripped my hairband off, my lovely red hairband scarf which has weathered the sun and much love, and whose like I shall never find again, and my favorite silver earrings....And when he kissed my neck I bit him long and hard on the cheek, and when he came out of the room, blood was running down his face….Such violence, and I can see how women lie down for artists….And I screamed in myself, thinking: oh, to give myself crashing, fighting, to you.''—Poet Sylvia Plath, February 26, 1956, on meeting future husband and betrayer Ted Hughes the night before, in The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, edited by Karen V. Kulik (2000)

Some years ago, Edward and Nancy Caldwell Sorel collaborated on a text-and-illustration series for The Atlantic Monthly called “First Encounters.” I forget if this fateful meeting between star-crossed poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes ended up in the series. In a way, it shouldn’t have: the sheer violence of the event, and our knowledge of the horrifying end of their union, would have overwhelmed every other meeting of illuminati that the Sorels chronicled.

Most of what I’ve omitted, indicated here by ellipses, relates to other people at the wild literary party in Cambridge attended by the American Plath and the Briton Hughes. I deleted it because it would be of limited interest to my readers; 30 years ago, when the first version of the journals appeared, much of this was omitted, I think, because Hughes feared that the people mentioned (many still alive) would be all too interested in how they appeared.

But that early expurgated edition, though it included much of the alcohol-fueled groping and violence between the pair, also deleted the details about Hughes ripping off Plath’s hairband and earrings. That, in a way, is telling, because looked at in its entirety, it becomes clear that this passage is not just about sex but also possession: possession of objects, possession of another human being, and possession of one’s self.

That theme starts subtly. Plath had inquired about the handsome, dark mysterious stranger as soon as she saw him, “but no one told me.” It’s hard to resist the inference that many of these uncommunicative people were women who might have wanted Hughes for themselves (including, as it happened, Hughes' girlfriend of the time, who was understandably upset at how he looked after Plath got through with him for the night).

Instead, Plath engages in what, in its immediacy and violence, can only be thought of as what Charles Darwin termed “sexual selection”—the principle that determines the winners in the struggle for existence.

This passage becomes compelling not merely because of its all the emotion and energy that Plath invests in this act, but in the objects that mean so much to her: her hairband, itself symbolic of nature (it has “weathered the sun and so much love”), and her “favorite silver earrings.”

Already, foreboding pulses beneath the wild instincts on display (she writes of the hairband “whose like I shall never find again”), but everything is given over to the moment and its fervid remembrance several hours later. A mere four months later, the two married.

“These violent delights have violent ends,” Friar Lawrence ineffectively but accurately warns in Romeo and Juliet. For all of Plath’s astonishment in her journal that “the worst thing happened” the night she met Hughes, the truly awful events--the “violent ends” of their union--would occur later: Plath’s suicide, following Hughes’ infidelity and separation, in 1963; the suicide four years later of the woman for whom he left Plath, Assia Weevil, and her murder of their child; and, like a bomb going off nearly a half century after the initial fuse was lit, the 2009 suicide of the son of Plath and Hughes, Nicholas.