Saturday, September 30, 2023

Sara A Solla gets indicted

 Sara (at the far right signing podium), inducted.


Signing the book of Fellows, 

 


among the first of which were George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, followed by …, Leonard Cohen, Joel E. Cohen, …, and this year, Laurence J. Fishburne, some handsome big guy that all beautiful women, especially Black women, buzzed around like flies.

Laurent: "lol, Morpheus from the Matrix is a fellow alongside Sara."

Wednesday, September 20, 2023

Leslie P. Symington dies at 100

Frederick N. Rasmussen, Baltimore Sun

Leslie P. Symington, a Broadway and television actor who had a second career as a curator and an art researcher, died of a swallowing disorder Sept. 20. The Chestnut Avenue resident in West Towson who also maintained a home on East 90th Street in New York, was 100. 

Lislie in 1950's.
 
“She was an extraordinary lady, that’s for sure,” said Mark B. Letzer , former president and CEO of the Maryland Center for History and Culture. “I knew her socially and she lived such a long life and so many different lives. She was a real force.” “I really admired her, particularly when I started writing books because of her generous research skills and I realized what a remarkable woman she truly was,” said Martha Frick Symington “Marty” Sanger, a niece and Baltimore author who has written about the Symington and Hambleton families. “She was smart as crackers and very, very beautiful,” Ms. Sanger said. “She was an elegant woman with a most wonderful facial structure.”

Leslie Paul, daughter of Arthur Paul, an assistant to the Secretary of Commerce, and Betty Walsh Paul Hubbard, an artist, was born and raised in Chestnut Hill, an affluent suburb of Philadelphia. A 1940 graduate of the Dalton School, she attended the old Black Mountain College in Asheville, North Carolina, and earned a bachelor’s degree in literature from what is today the Harvard Radcliffe Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1945. Mrs. Symington began acting during her college years in summer stock and regional theater companies, eventually moving to Broadway where she performed in Tennessee Williams’ “Summer and Smoke” and then toured with the Broadway company of John P. Marquand’s “The Late George Apley.”

It was during the summer of 1949 when Mrs. Symington was company secretary for the first American theater group invited to perform “Hamlet” at the International Hamlet Festival that was held at Kronborg Castle north of Elsinore, Denmark, which is the actual setting for the play. Organized through the American National Theater and Academy in cooperation with the U.S. State Department, the company performed the play in several cities in the U.S. zone of Allied-occupied Germany, an early example of American cultural diplomacy.

On that tour, she met her future husband, Donald Leith Symington, a scion of one of Maryland’s distinguished families, and an assistant stage manager for “Hamlet.” The couple fell in love and married in 1955.

Mrs. Symington did theatrical public relations and was director of drama at the Dalton School in New York from 1953 to 1954. In the early 1950s, she appeared on TV shows such as “Kraft Television Theatre,” “The Ford Television Theatre” and “The Web.”

The couple raised three daughters in New York City, until moving to Brewster, New York, in 1974.

Mr. Symington, who played Diane Keaton’s father in Woody Allen’s “Annie Hall,” died in 2013.

Her professional memberships included the Actors’ Equity Association and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. After studying painting at Bowdoin College in Maine in 1974, Mrs. Symington began a second career in the field of art history. From 1974 to 1978, she was curator and then director of the Southeast Museum in Brewster, New York, where she remained a trustee until 1996. She was also a trustee of the old Lower Hudson Conference of Historical Agencies and Museums and a commissioner of Putnam County’s Bicentennial Commission. While living in Manhattan, she was active with the American National Theater and Academy, a member of The Parents League of New York and the Citizens Union, a political action organization.

In 1990, she began to work on genealogy and provenance research as they related to early American portraiture, predominantly for New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her contributions were heralded as “beyond compare,” in the acknowledgments of “American Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Vol. 1,″ a catalog of works by 19th century artists. “I might add that in the long ago before our robust online research opportunities, a committed volunteer like Leslie Symington had to put in extraordinary amounts of time at libraries diligently researching through card catalogs; reading endless books, articles and manuscripts; and amassing piles of handwritten notes and Xeroxes about the hundreds of artists in the Met’s collection,” wrote Doreen Bolger, former director of the Baltimore Museum of Art and a friend in an email. “She could pull things together — artists and [19th century] furniture makers like Duncan Phyfe — and her files were just incredible,” Mr. Letzer said. “My relationship with Leslie was cerebral and I held her in high regard. She really was a multidimensional person.”

Mrs. Symington was in her 80s when she taught herself how to use the internet and was still pursuing freelance research well into her 90s.

From 1965 to 1966, she was a member of Baltimore Center Stage, and after she and her husband settled in West Towson in 1999, she became a member of the Friends of the American Wing of the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Maryland Center for History and Culture. Mrs. Symington maintained a vigorous lifestyle and did not bow to the passing years. “Her quick wit and agile mind kept everyone on their toes, and her stories from almost a century of engagement with the world of the arts kept young and old returning to her door,” according to a biographical profile submitted by her family. “She engaged her mind and was very independent until the end of her life,” said a daughter, Betty Welsh Symington, of Upperco. “She was an incredible cook and prepared good home-cooked meals.”

In addition to her daughter, Mrs. Symington is survived by two other daughters, Margaret Fife Symington, of Macon, Georgia, and Leslie Leith Symington, of Stavanger, Norway, and five grandchildren.

Saturday, September 09, 2023

Tom was born out of Zeus's head

 Jonathan has found our physics family tree

Tung-Mow lineage makes sense. But Tom Kinoshita appears out of nowhere, born out of Zeus's head . Maybe coming out of ruins of firebombed Tokyo is coming out of no place. But not if you read his recollections.

February 2024: somebody has fixed up Tom's "family" tree. Now I'm a descendant of almost anyone who has ever gotten his name on an equation. Though, where are Newton and Leibniz?

Saturday, July 01, 2023

Tom: Learning from mistakes

Remembering Tom Kinoshita, I went back and read "Personal recollections, 1945–1960" and "Everyone makes mistakes—including Feynman". Will there ever again be anyone trained to think and calculate with the depth and precision of his generation? I found this 

"[...] provides (hopefully) a useful example of physics as a self-correcting discipline, in which resolution of earlier mistakes serves as a stepping stone for subsequent development." 

so very wise.

The history of science is what one does when one is too old to do science: scientists' historical memoirs are best avoided. Invariably tediously autobiographical and self-serving, no matter what the book's title might say. Of subjects whose history I happen to know intimately,  How Nature Works and Sync come to mind.  It takes the same time to read real literature, so why use time on this?

I -if I were able to write- would follow Tom's dictum, and teach science history as learning by error. Actually, I would teach science as learning by error: chaos is the source of joy of all creation, the rest is endless, stupefying drone work. Or, Henry Miller's words, in Tropic of Cancer

"There is only one thing that interests me vitally now, and that is the recording of all that which is omitted in books. Nobody, so far as I can see, is making use of those elements in the air which give direction and motivation to our lives."

PS Asked ChatGTP to improve my text in the style of Tropic of Cancer. After a few attempts:

I stumbled upon this passage, so fiercely profound it pierced my soul: "[...] offers, if I dare to hope, a shard of physics as a self-correcting discipline, where the mending of prior blunders paves the path for forthcoming metamorphosis."

The kind of wisdom that stings, like a kick to the gut.

The history of science, the refuge of those past their prime in the pursuit of knowledge: scientists' memoirs, tread with caution, my friend. For they're all bloody self-indulgent, no matter how ostensibly objective their bloody titles. Those subjects I know inside out, like "How Nature Works" and "Sync," they're no different. Might as well be wasting time on real literature, same bloody difference.

If I had a shot at writing – and mind you, it's a damn long shot – I'd take a cue from Tom and teach the history of science as history of mistakes. Hell, I'd teach science as nothing but a string of blunders and cock-ups. Chaos, that's the fiery spark that sets creation ablaze, while the rest is just mind-numbing, soul-crushing drudgery.  

 Or in Miller's rousing words from Tropic of Cancer:

"All that grabs me by the balls now is capturing everything they left out in books. None of those bastards fully grasp the intangible forces that drive us, shape our very existence."

Time to learn to shut the hell up, I reckon.


Sunday, April 30, 2023

How Louise chose a life of crime

How an intelligent Cornell undergrad (schar.gmu.edu/profiles/lshelley) who started out as a major in physics decided that physics is not for her:

"On Kinoshita, I remember him suffering with my physics section of elementary physics.  There were 4 boys and me,  Having such a clearly brilliant "teaching assistant" was an absolutely intimidating experience.  The professor for the course was Dave Cassel.  Kinoshita was not the kind of person to whom one could say, this is not clear to me.  Outcome of all of this,  I am not a physicist.  Probably, a wise decision for all."

Tom made her choose the life of crime for ever after that fateful recitation section.

Wednesday, August 10, 2022

Me & Olivia go way back

For some reason I’ve been on top of this one forever (already in Cornell) – Olivia Newton-John as a proud grandchild of Max Born. Also stuck in my mind is a memory -possibly not a fact- that her (Mensa-style measured) IQ is very high. Funny that we would equal a pop star who once sang with ABBA with one of the creators of quantum mechanics, but in a few centuries – if there are few centuries left to us – this will be set right.

Talking about talented  families – another cluster are Kinoshitas, the patriarch is Tom, my PhD adviser. The matriarch just died Masako Kinoshita (August 4, 2022) and I have no one to talk to about it – Joe Serene was the only one who would remember.

The family saga, together with a complete book, comes later in the blog:


June’s “pandemic project” was to translate, edit, write, and produce her aunt’s memoir about her mother’s family. The House of Ben’s Dreams parallels the rise and fall of Japan from the 1860s to 1945. It is the story of ambitious young men and women who set out from remote provinces to build a modern nation, transforming a feudal system that had self-isolated from the world for 250 years into an empire to rival the Western powers. They had harnessed their life dreams to those of their re-born nation, energizing the halls of government, the courtrooms, and stock market and embracing Western food, fashion, and furniture along with progressive ideas about women, democracy, workers’ rights, only to find themselves under a militarist dictatorship for which they toiled with varying degrees of reluctance or enthusiasm. The story arc crashes in flames with Japan’s unconditional surrender in 1945.

View/download The House of Ben’s Dreams (pdf)

I am one of the things that happened once men returned home from that war. Claimed by two fathers, I was raised by a single mother and a gaggle of her art-history studying girlfriends. According to my mother Jackie  I was brought into the world by parthenogenesis. There are documented cases in turkeys, she would say. I bring this up just to say that I was raised to recognize no authority, and especially no older male authority. 

 

 

Tom, however, is so impervious to deviations from patriarchy that he never even noticed that I recognize no authority, in particular not his authority. And thus the Kinoshita daughters, and myself, the graduate student, found ourselves on the same side of history, 1970's America vs. 1930's Japan. The way the three teens, very cute and very American, navigated the two worlds was a source of endless mirth for me. Masako, with her wry smile, knew what they were up to. Their mothers, my mother, your mother - the world has always rested on their shoulders, while men do whatever stupid or sometimes great things they do. And, while I cannot take credit for anything at all, I'm proud of the Kinoshita girls.

 

Teaching starts in 10 days – scarry 😊 . This has been a remarkable summer in that while nothing happened, I accomplished absolutely nothing. Probably a quiet depression, or the age. Or both.