If you were a scoop of vanilla
And I were the cone where you sat,
If you were a slowly pitched baseball
And I were the swing of a bat,
If you were a shiny new fishhook
And I were a bucket of worms,
If we were a pin and a pincushion,
We might be on intimate terms.
If you were a plate of spaghetti
And I were your piping-hot sauce,
We’d not even need to write letters
To put our affection across,
But you’re just a piece of red ribbon
In the beard of a Balinese goat
And I’m a New Jersey mosquito.
I guess we’ll stay slightly remote.
“What We Might Be, What We Are” by X.J. Kennedy from Exploding Gravity. © Little Brown, 1992. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)
It’s the birthday of the man who wrote, “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains”: philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (books by this author), born on this day in Geneva (1712). In 1749, the Academy of Dijon sponsored an essay contest, and the question was: “Has the revival of the arts and sciences done more to corrupt or to purify morals?” Rousseau was delighted by the question, and he said that his head was so full of ideas he was unable to breathe. He said: “And that is how I became a writer almost against my will. ... The remainder of my life and all my subsequent misfortunes were the inevitable result of this moment of aberration.” He worked feverishly on his essay, “A Discourse on the Arts and Sciences.” He argued that the advances of science and art had been harmful to humanity by consolidating power in the hands of governments and creating an atmosphere of competition and fear between citizens. His essay won first prize, and he went on to write many more philosophical works, including his most famous, The Social Contract (1762), in which he said that the natural condition of humanity is to be brutal and lawless, and that it is through an agreed “social contract” of what constitutes a good society that humans are able to rise above their base nature.
It was on this day in 1888 that Robert Louis Stevenson set sail for the South Seas. Stevenson’s father was a lighthouse engineer, and his parents had hoped that he would enter the family trade. Stevenson soon left the study of engineering for the study of law, and on his summer breaks he would travel. He suffered from an undiagnosed respiratory illness, most likely tuberculosis. As a result, he usually traveled to warmer climates like the French Riviera, where he hobnobbed with artists and writers. He earned his law degree, but never practiced; he told his parents that he wanted to become a writer instead. His first book was An Inland Voyage (1878), about his canoe trip from Antwerp to northern France. The book set the pattern for much of Stevenson’s later tales of travel and adventure. While in France, he met and fell in love with Fanny Vandegrift Osbourne, an American woman who was separated from her husband. She returned to California, Stevenson followed her, and they were eventually married.
In the 1880s, Stevenson’s health declined. He wrote many of his most famous books — including Treasure Island (1883), Kidnapped (1886), and Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) — from his sickbed in Scotland. In the hope that a warmer climate would be beneficial for his condition, the Stevensons departed San Francisco aboard the schooner yacht Casco for an extended tour of the South Pacific. They arrived in Samoa the following year and decided to settle there. The locals dubbed Stevenson “Tusitala,” the teller of tales. Stevenson wrote journalistic accounts of the region and his attempts to better understand it in his books In the South Seas (1896) and A Footnote to History (1892). Stevenson died of a brain hemorrhage in 1894, at the age of 44. He was buried at the top of Mount Vaea.
Today is the birthday of the founder of the Methodist movement, John Wesley (1703) (books by this author). He was born in Epworth, Lincolnshire, England, and his father was a Nonconformist — a dissenter from the Church of England. Wesley studied at Oxford, where he decided to become a priest. He and his brother joined a religious study group that was given the nickname “the Methodists” for their rigorous and methodical study habits; the name wasn’t meant as a compliment, but Wesley hung onto it anyway and managed to attract several new members to the group, which fasted two days a week and spent time in social service.
By 1739, he felt he wasn’t really reaching people from the pulpit, so he took to the fields, traveling on horseback, preaching two or three times a day. He began recruiting local laypeople to preach as well, and ran afoul of the Church of England for doing so. He believed that Christians could be made “perfect in love” when their actions arose out of a desire to please God and to promote the welfare of the less fortunate.
Wesley was an ardent abolitionist and tireless man. He traveled 250,000 miles, preached 40,000 sermons, and wrote, translated, or edited more than 200 volumes. He made £20,000 for his publications but gave most of it away and died in poverty. Though there’s no evidence that he actually wrote it himself, “John Wesley’s Rule” does a fair job of summing up his life:
Do all the good you can,
By all the means you can,
In all the ways you can,
In all the places you can,
At all the times you can,
To all the people you can,
As long as you ever can.
It’s the birthday of Eric Ambler (books by this author), born in London (1909). He was the first author to write stories about international espionage that were based on real life. His books include Background to Danger (1937) and Cause for Alarm (1938).
It was on this date in 1928 that Louis Armstrong and his band the Hot Five recorded “West End Blues.” Armstrong was 26 years old at the time and living in Chicago, where he’d been for six years. He’d moved there from New Orleans as part of Joe “King” Oliver’s band; Oliver had been a friend and mentor to the young singer and trumpeter since Armstrong was a teenager. They parted ways in 1925. Oliver composed “West End Blues” and had just recorded his own version a few weeks earlier, but Armstrong’s cover, recorded in Chicago’s OKeh studio, is legendary. It features Earl “Fatha” Hines on piano, and it’s one of the first recorded examples of Armstrong’s trademark “scat” singing.
The recording took the jazz world by storm. An ecstatic audience carried Armstrong off the stage when he performed the song live one night. Composer Gunther Schuller wrote that the record “made it clear jazz could never again revert to being entertainment or folk music. The clarion call of ‘West End Blues’ served notice that jazz could compete with the highest order of musical expression. Like any profoundly creative innovation, [it] summarized the past and predicted the future.”