Posts Tagged ‘Lapham’s Quarterly’
And a side of Bacon…
From the Spring, 2010 issue of Lapham’s Quarterly (“Arts and Letters”), “Friends, Lovers, and Family,” a plot of the “degrees of separation” among the creatives who have, among them, done so much to define the canon of English arts and letters…
An excerpt from the chart:
See the whole thing here… and rest assured that it does, finally, resolve to Kevin Bacon.
As we revisit our Facebook friends lists, we might recall that it was on this date in 1939 that the Baseball Hall of Fame was dedicated and opened in Cooperstown, NY.
Stephen C. Clark, a local hotel owner, was the champion of the effort to build the Hall in Cooperstown. He was anxious to boost the local economy, which was suffering economically, as the Great Depression had significantly reduced the local tourist trade, and Prohibition had devastated the local hops industry. He played heavily on the erroneous assertion that U.S. Civil War hero Abner Doubleday had invented baseball in Cooperstown, a claim made by former National League president Abraham G. Mills and his 1905 Mills Commission. His grand-daughter, Jane Forbes Clark, currently serves as Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Hall of Fame.
(Readers should note that Cooperstown is by no means a one trick pony: it is also home to The Farmers’ Museum, The Fenimore Art Museum, Glimmerglass Opera, and the New York State Historical Association.)
Making ends meet…
Most readers will know that Charlotte Bronte spent most of her daylight hours in service as a governess, and long-time (pre-blog) readers may remember that, in his capacity as Postal Surveyor, Anthony Trollope invented the iconic British “pillar box”… but did one know that T.S. Eliot toiled as a bank clerk? Or that Henry Fielding, the creator of the ribald Tom Jones, sat as a Magistrate?
Happy, Lapham’s Quarterly has provided a helpful chart: Day Jobs.
As we turn again to that unfinished screenplay, we might recall that it was on this date in 1827 that John Walker, a chemist from Stockton-on-Tees, recorded the first ever sale of friction matches; Walker had accidentally created them the prior year by mixing potassium chlorate and antimony sulfide. He recorded the first sales as “Sulphurata Hyper-Oxygenata Frict,” but by the second sale (five months later), he was getting the hang of naming: “friction lights.”
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