Piltdown Man

clipped from www.answers.com

Where did the Piltdown Man get his name?

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Piltdown Man's Reconstructed Skull

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Between 1911 and 1915, researcher Charles Dawson found fragments of a cranium, a tooth and some tools in a gravel deposit in Piltdown, in Sussex, England. The scientific world was agog with the findings — anthropologists believed that the fossilized remains of an ancient hominid had been discovered, a missing link between ape and man. The fossil was called the Piltdown man after the area in which he was found. However, much as the word Edsel has become synonymous with lemon, Piltdown has become synonymous with fraud. It took 40 years for the discovery to be scientifically disproved. On this date in 1953, the Piltdown man was declared a fake. The skull was found to be composed of a combination of the remains of a man and an orangutan.

[From Wikipedia]

Identity of the forger

The identity of the Piltdown forger remains unknown, but suspects have included Dawson, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Arthur Keith, Martin A. C. Hinton, Horace de Vere Cole and Arthur Conan Doyle as well as numerous others.

The recent focus on Charles Dawson as the sole forger is supported by the gradual accumulation of evidence regarding other archaeological hoaxes he perpetrated in the decade or two prior to the Piltdown discovery. Dr Miles Russell of Bournemouth University has recently conducted a detailed analysis of Charles Dawson's antiquarian collection and it is clear at least 38 are obvious fakes. Among these are the teeth of a reptile/mammal hybrid, Plagiaulax dawsoni, "found" in 1895 (and whose teeth had been filed down in the same way that the teeth of Piltdown man would be some 20 years later), the so-called "shadow figures" on the walls of Hastings Castle, a unique hafted stone axe, the Bexhill boat (a hybrid sea faring vessel), the Pevensey bricks (allegedly the latest datable "finds" from Roman Britain), the contents of the Lavant Caves (a fraudulent "flint mine"), the Beauport Park "Roman" statuette (a hybrid iron object), the Bulverhythe Hammer (shaped with an iron knife in the same way as Piltdown elephant bone implement would later be), a fraudulent "Chinese" bronze vase, the Brighton "Toad in the Hole" (a toad entombed within a flint nodule), the English Channel sea serpent, the Uckfield Horseshoe (another hybrid iron object) and the Lewes Prick Spur. Of his antiquarian publications, most demonstrate evidence of plagiarism or at least naïve referencing. At Piltdown itself, of the faked skull, jaw, teeth, animal bone assemblage, flint tools, and other remains, Dr Russell has shown that the only clear suspect is Charles Dawson, stating that: "Piltdown was not a 'one-off' hoax, more the culmination of a life's work".

Dawson was in fact a suspect from the very beginning. On one occasion, as an example, a collection of flints he exchanged with another collector, Hugh Morris, turned out to have been aged with chemicals, a point Morris noted down at the time and which was later unearthed. There were also numerous individuals in the Sussex area well-acquainted with Dawson who long held doubts about Piltdown and of Dawson's role in the matter, but given the sheer weight of scholarly affirmation regarding the find few if any were willing to publicly speak out for fear of being ridiculed for their trouble.

His initial motivations may well have lain along the lines of gaining further fame and notoriety in his native Sussex, but it is clear that his increasingly successful early frauds may well have emboldened him to pull off the master stroke that would have landed him his most cherished goal, that of a fellowship in the prestigious Royal Society. It was a long ambition that ultimately went unfulfilled.

"Fraud and falsehood only dread examination. Truth invites it."

— Samuel Johnson

Empedocles on Aetna

clipped from en.wikisource.org

Why should I say that life need yield but moderate bliss?

Shall we, with temper spoil'd,

Health sapp'd by living ill,

And judgement all embroil'd

By sadness and self-will,

Shall we judge what for man is not true bliss or is?

Is it so small a thing

To have enjoy'd the sun,

To have lived light in the spring,

To have loved, to have thought, to have done;

To have advanc'd true friends, and beat down baffling foes;

That we must feign a bliss

Of doubtful future date,

And, while we dream on this,

Lose all our present state,

And relegate to worlds yet distant our repose?

From Empedocles on Etna by Matthew Arnold

Bob Sessions and family Newport 2003

Happy Birthday Don

Today is my brother Don's birthday. I took this photo of Don and Jan in Sanibel.




















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William Carlos Wllliams

clipped from writersalmanac.publicradio.org

[William Carlos Williams is the] doctor and poet who wrote, "It is difficult/ to get the news from poems,/ yet men die miserably every day/ for lack/ of what is found there." Born in Rutherford, New Jersey (1883), he worked in Rutherford as a doctor for his whole life, and he wrote poetry as well, up until his death at age 80. His books include Spring and All (1923), Imaginations (1970), and a five-volume epic poem called Paterson, the name of the city near Rutherford where he was head pediatrician of the hospital.

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Getting to Sleep in New Jersey

by John Stone

Not twenty miles from where I work,
William Williams wrote after dark,
after the last baby was caught,

knowing that what he really ought

to do was sleep. Rutherford slept,

while all night William Williams kept

scratching at his prescription pad,

dissecting the good lines from the bad.

He tested the general question whether

feet or butt or head-first ever

determines as well the length of labor

of a poem. His work is over:

bones and guts and red wheelbarrows;

the loneliness and all the errors

a heart can make the other end

of a stethoscope. Outside, the wind

corners the house with a long crow.

Silently, his contagious snow

covers the banks of the Passaic River,

where he walked once, full of fever,

tracking his solitary way

back to his office and the white day,

a peculiar kind of bright-eyed bird,
hungry for morning and the perfect word.

"Getting to Sleep in New Jersey" by John A. Stone, from Music From Apartment 8: New and Selected Poems. © Louisiana State University Press, 2004.

On the beach

clipped from www.seabrookwa.com

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(Photo by Pierce Brown)

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Rapture

clipped from writersalmanac.publicradio.org

Rapture

by Richard Jones

In the desert, a traveler
returning to his family
is surprised

by a wild beast.

To save himself
from the fierce animal,
he leaps into a deep well

empty of water.

But at the bottom
is a dragon, waiting
with open mouth

to devour him.

The unhappy man,
not daring to go out
lest he should be

the prey of the beast,

not daring to jump
to the bottom
lest he should be

devoured by the dragon,

clings to the branch
of a bush growing
in the cracks of the well.

Hanging upon the bough,

he feels his hands
weaken, yet still
he clings, afraid

of his certain fate.

Then he sees two mice,
one white, the other black,
moving about the bush,

gnawing the roots.

The traveler sees this
and knows that he must
inevitably perish, that he will

never see his sons again.

But while thus hanging
he looks about and sees
on the leaves of the bush

some drops of honey.

These leaves
he reaches with his tongue
and licks the honey off,
with rapture.

"Rapture" by Richard Jones, from The Blessing: New and Selected Poems. © Copper Canyon Press, 2000.

Tour the Louvre

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MUSEODELOUVRE.pps

84 Charing Cross Road

clipped from writersalmanac.publicradio.org

It was on this day in 1949 that Helene Hanff wrote her third letter from New York City to a used bookshop at 84 Charing Cross Road, London. It was the beginning of a flirtatious epistolary friendship across the Atlantic that lasted for 20 years and revolved around classic literature. The letters were collected into 84, Charing Cross Road, a book Hanff published in 1970 and later adapted for the London stage, into a Broadway production, and into a film starring Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins (1987).

The correspondence began in early October 1949 when Miss Helene Hanff responded to an ad placed by London booksellers Marks & Co, whose bookshop was located at 84 Charing Cross Road. She wrote:

Gentlemen: Your ad in the Saturday Review of Literature says that you specialize in out-of-print books. The phrase "antiquarian booksellers" scares me somewhat, as I equate "antique" with expensive. I am a poor writer with an antiquarian taste in books and all the things I want are impossible to get over here except in very expensive rare editions, or in Barnes & Noble's grimy, marked-up schoolboy copies.

I enclose a list of my most pressing problems. If you have clean secondhand copies of any of the books on the list, for no more than $5.00 each, will you consider this a purchase order and send them to me?
Helene Hanff
(Miss) Helene Hanff

Over the 20 years, Helene Hanff ordered from 84 Charing Cross Road John Donne's Sermons, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Samuel Pepys's diary, Plato's Four Socratic Dialogues, Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice, and volumes of essays and poetry. She once wrote, "I require a book of love poems with spring coming on. No Keats or Shelley, send me poets who can make love without slobbering — Wyatt or Jonson or somebody, use your own judgment. Just a nice book preferably small enough to stick in a slacks pocket and take to Central Park."

Her relationship with the book buyer, Frank Doel, expanded to a caring friendship filled with banter and repartee. She also corresponded with other employees of the bookshop. She sent over to the shop parcels full of dried eggs and nylons and things that were rationed and hard to find in post-World War II England.

After 20 years of corresponding with Frank Doel, Hanff received a letter from the bookstore that he had passed away. She had never made it to London nor met him in person. The day in 1969 that she found in her mailbox the news of his death, she also found a rejection slip for a play script she'd submitted.

She decided then that she was going to share the story of her correspondence, but figured it would be in a magazine article. But in 1971, she ended up publishing the letters in a slim book, just 97 pages long. It was a huge success (though no one had really expected it to be) and became a best-seller. The Wall Street Journal said of her book: "A real-life love story … A timeless period piece. DO READ IT."

Hanff went off on a book tour. She visited London for the very first time, and went to 84 Charing Cross Road. The bookstore had gone out of business, but the shop and the empty shelves remained, and she wandered around inside. She strolled about the rest of London looking for the residences of English writers and other literary sites in the city and in southern England. She wrote her next book about this trip, entitled The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street (1973). Today, there's a plaque up at 84 Charing Cross Road, London, commemorating her correspondence with the bookshop that was there, and another plaque on the apartment building in New York City where she lived for three decades.

Cowslip counters search for lost blooms

clipped from www.independent.co.uk

Cowslip counters search for lost blooms

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By Michael McCarthy

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Once people gathered cowslips by the armful, strewed them on paths at weddings and wore them as garlands on May Day, they were so plentiful; now they're being asked to count them.

The brilliant golden-yellow flowers, clustered luxuriously on their tall stems and forming great swaying carpets of colour across meadows and chalk hillsides, were one of the best-loved sights of the English countryside until about 40 years ago.

But the subsequent decades of intensive farming, with downland ploughed up and meadows sprayed with pesticides and artificial fertiliser, have virtually wiped out their habitat.

Now cowslips are much less common, and for many people exist only in books and paintings. Yet their exact status in the countryside is unknown, so Plantlife, Britain's wildflower charity, is joining forces with the National Trust in organising a national cowslip survey.

In what is probably the first attempt at a nationwide count of a wildflower, members of the public are being asked to go out into the countryside over the next few weeks to log all the cowslips they can find. (They can stop at a hundred plants in any one place.)

"We want to find out in which areas of the countryside the cowslip is suffering most, so we can prioritise conservation action," said Martin Harper, Plantlife's conservation director. "Britain has lost 98 per cent of its wildflower meadows over the past 50 years and this beautiful and evocative plant has been one of the main victims of this tragedy."

Cowslips are primulas, and closely related to primroses; the two sometimes hybridise to produce false oxlips. They are certainly one of the premier plants of countryside lore, with more than 40 local names recorded: milk-maidens in Lincolnshire, tisty-tosty in Devon, fairy cups in Dorset and paigles in many counties.

The flower's common name comes from the Old English cu-sloppe - the cowpats from which the flowers were sometimes seen to spring.

Shakespeare's spirit Ariel slept in a cowslip ("Where the bee sucks, there suck I; In a cowslip's bell I lie) and it makes one of the most delicate of country wines.

In some places the first Sunday in May used to be celebrated as Cowslip Sunday.

"The cowslip's cultural history suggests a flower that was once as abundant and accessible as the buttercup," wrote Richard Mabey in Flora Britannica, the wildflower encyclopaedia published four years ago. "No wonder that its dramatic decline between the 1950s and the 1980s was felt so keenly."

In recent years, however, Mr Mabey suggests, the flower may have started to recover. "On the chalky and light-soiled areas of England and Wales that were its stronghold, it has begun to return to unsprayed verges and village greens and to colonise the banks of new roads - no doubt assisted here and there by the scattering of wildflower seed mixtures."

The cowslip count is a special part of a new Common Plants Survey, a nationwide survey of 58 common wildflowers that will be regularly repeated to track changes in populations.

THE WOODPECKER PECKS, BUT THE HOLE DOES NOT APPEAR

THE WOODPECKER PECKS, BUT THE HOLE DOES NOT APPEAR

It's hard to imagine how unremembered we all become,
How quickly all that we've done
Is unremembered and unforgiven,
how quickly
Bog lilies and yellow clover flashlight our footfalls,
How quickly and finally the landscape subsumes us,
And everything that we are becomes what we are not.

This is not new, the orange finch
And the yellow and dun finch
picking the dry clay politely,
The grasses asleep in their green slips
Before the noon can roust them,
The sweet oblivion of the everyday
like a warm waistcoat
Over the cold and endless body of memory.

Cloud scarce Montana morning.
July, with its blue cheeks puffed out like a putto on an ancient map,
Huffing the wind down from the northwest corner of things,
Tweets on the evergreen stumps,
swallows treading the air,
The ravens hawking from tree to tree, not you, not you,
Is all that the world allows, and all one could wish for.

Charles Wright

From Scar Tissue Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006. (winner of the 2007 International Griffin Poetry Prize)

clipped from writersalmanac.publicradio.org

Self-Portrait

by Mary Oliver

I wish I was twenty and in love with life

and still full of beans.

Onward, old legs!
There are the long, pale dunes; on the other side
the roses are blooming and finding their labor

no adversity to the spirit.

Upward, old legs! There are the roses, and there is the sea
shining like a song, like a body

I want to touch

though I'm not twenty
and won't be again but ah! seventy. And still
in love with life. And still
full of beans.

"Self-Portrait" by Mary Oliver, from Red Bird. © Beacon Press, 2008.

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Mary Oliver, was born in Maple Heights, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland (1935). She won the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for her collection American Primitive (1983) and the 1992 National Book Award for New and Selected Poems (1992).

She's one of the best-selling poets in America, and she's also a very private person, giving relatively few interviews or details about her personal life. She taught in Bennington, Vermont, throughout the 1990s and currently lives in Provincetown, Massachusetts. She once wrote in an introduction to a poetry collection, "I have felt all my life that I was wise, and tasteful, too, to speak very little about myself — to deflect the curiosity in the personal self that descends upon writers, especially in this country and at this time, from both casual and avid readers."

But her recent collection Thirst (2006), which was written after her partner of 40 years passed away, contains many lines that address her personal experiences of grieving.

Oliver also wrote a lively sequence of poems about their dog, Percy. In "News of Percy (Five)" she writes: "We named him for the poet, who died young, in the blue waters off Italy. / Maybe we should have named him William, since Wordsworth almost never died."

Her books of poems include No Voyage (1963), The River Styx, Ohio, and Other Poems (1972), Twelve Moons (1978), The Leaf and the Cloud (2000), Owls and Other Fantasies (2003), and Red Bird (2008). Her most recent collection, Evidence, came out in April of this year.

She's also written some books of prose, including A Poetry Handbook (1994), Blue Pastures (1995), and Rules for the Dance: A Handbook for Writing and Reading Metrical Verse (1998).

Mary Oliver wrote: "Every day I walk out into the world / to be dazzled, then to be reflective."

And she wrote:

"My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird —
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect? Let me
Keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work

which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished."

—from "Messenger" in Thirst (2006), first appeared in Nature and Spirituality

Old Friends

High school and Princeton classmate, Bud Page, and his family. Bud and Ellen live in Marblehead, MA.

Another poem for Bob

Perfection Wasted

And another regrettable thing about death
is the ceasing of your own brand of magic,
which took a whole life to develop and market --
the quips, the witticisms, the slant
adjusted to a few, those loved ones nearest
the lip of the stage, their soft faces blanched
in the footlight glow, their laughter close to tears,
their tears confused with their diamond earrings,
their warm pooled breath in and out with your heartbeat,
their responses and your performance twinned.
The jokes over the phone. The memories packed
in the rapid-access file. The whole act.
Who will do it again? That’s it: no one;
imitators and descendants aren’t the same.

--John Updike