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If there were a past life (for who would foolishly choose to hope for a future life) and I could become anyone of my choosing, I would choose to be Sergei Diaghilev or Paul Cadmus.
As Diaghilev I could have been loved by Nijinsky and revered by such as Picasso, Stravinsky, and Cocteau. But as Cadmus, I could have been loved by photographer Jared French and model-musician Jon Andersson and revered by such as W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, George Balanchine, George Platt Lynes, George Tooker, Lincoln Kirstein (New York City Ballet Director, the husband of Paul's sister Fidelma), and E. M. Forster (who, while posing for a portrait, passed the time reading aloud passages from 'Maurice').
As a journalist some years ago at the annual ceremonial of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, I commenced a friendship with Cadmus when he inquired and learned that I write for 'Free Inquiry' and other humanist publications. Asked by this controversial and eminent painter of 'The Fleet's In!' and 'The Seven Deadly Sins' what I meant by 'humanist,' I responded in such a way that he replied, 'Oh then, I'm a secular humanist also!' From then on, whenever we were together, he jovially introduced us as 'two secular humanists.'
He told me, however, that he had never been much of a student of philosophy. From my description of 'naturalistic humanism,' however, he agreed that he fit in to its non-supernaturalistic outlook and its emphasis upon the humanities. Later, we both came to prefer "humanistic naturalism" as a label, one that John Dewey also had once used and which emphasizes the non-supernaturalism. A devout Catholic until he was seventeen, he then 'shed it all,' he said. 'I've always liked the story of the Albigensians who were besieged by the Pope at Beziers. His soldiers asked him: "How do we know the heretics from the Christians?" The Pope replied, "Burn them all. God will know his own." ' A gentle man who seldom raised his voice against anything or anyone, he laughed almost as softly as he played his beloved grand piano, surrounded by books, sculpture, photographs, and different kinds of art.
At one lunch he prepared for me at his Connecticut home, Cadmus said, 'I think my ancestors sailed from Jutland around 1710. My father's side may have been Dutch and, like Erasmus, Latinized the name. My mother, conceived in Spain, was born in New York. Her father was Basque, her mother Cuban. Maybe I was just a cad to begin with,' he joked, 'and the name was Latinized.' His parents, both artists, encouraged their son and their daughter, Fidelma, to study art, and Cadmus began with an interest in antiques. One day at the National Academy of Design in uptown Manhattan and knowing that older art students had nude models to work with, he peered through a peephole and saw a naked female. 'I had never seen a stranger in the nude. It was a revelation,' he confirmed telling others. While growing up in Manhattan, he said, 'I was fascinated by the sailors around the Soldiers and Sailors Monument. I was young and was propositioned many times. But I was afraid to go with them, and we just talked while sitting on the benches.'
'The male nude has been a specialty of my own oeuvre,' Cadmus told several friends, 'when I am not being concerned with the foibles of people in daily life: men, women, and children. . . . We are made, we are told, "in God's image," and we assume that He was not clothed by Armani or Brooks Brothers or, if He is She, not attired by Balenciaga or Donna Karan.'
Cadmus, who in 94 years completed over 120 paintings, delighted in such observations. 'I do love Michelangelo's male forms,' he has said, adding that 'Michelangelo's women often look like males with grapefruits attached.' 'It seems that genitalia,' Cadmus lamented about the public taste, 'equal pornography.' But not for him personally: 'My penis is not the most important organ in my body. My eyes are.'
Cadmus met Jon Andersson, 27, when he himself was 59 and 'I never wanted to be with anyone else.' That included the time he was invited to a long-ago party by Truman Capote. Capote's long-time companion Jack Dunphy told him he could not bring a male guest, that 'Truman said he didn't want to ask "a bunch of fags" to his party.' This infuriated Andersson and was one of the few times the two did not appear together in public or private. On one occasion when it was said that he was the only artist to draw so many male nudes, the then 92-year-old Cadmus quipped, 'Well, there was Michelangelo.'
Biographer Charles Kaiser quotes Cadmus as having been interviewed by Alfred Charles Kinsey: 'He took homosexuality just as calmly as he did his work with wasps. He interviewed me about my sex life&endash;how many orgasms, how big it was, measure it before and after.' Kinsey even went to dinner at Cadmus's house following the interview.
Just before his 95th birthday on December 17th, friends were invited on December 1st to a birthday party at the D. C. Gallery. Painters Jack Levine and Chuck Close, sculptor Phylis Raskind, photographer Charles Henri Ford (once Tchelichew's lover), and over one hundred other friends were on hand to toast Cadmus and celebrate his birthday. Cadmus walked spryly and greeted everyone joyfully. I was introduced as "a fellow secular humanist," and he and Jon were elated to meet my new companion, who is a descendant of Maroons and who is four decades my junior. As always, Cadmus gazed with an artist's eye. Eleven days later, and just five days before his actual birthday, Cadmus died peacefully while watching television with Jon at their suburban home in Connecticut.
Some of us start out in music but switch to other fields. Although a piano major at the U of Northern Iowa, I used the GI Bill of Rights after experiencing Omaha Beach in 1944, then studied literature with Lionel Trilling at Columbia University, and taught English in Manhattan and Connecticut for three decades. Concurrent with teaching, I founded and owned with my partner-companion Fernando Vargas a major independent recording studio in Manhattan to which Marvin Hamlisch brought Liza Minnelli for her first demonstration session. It was 180 days a year correcting papers (of students such as the children of Mel Powell and Celeste Holm) and 185 days working with major recording stars (such as Paul Simon and Tito Puente), composers (such as Jack Lawrence and Jerry Bock), writers (such as Arthur Miller and Paddy Chayevsky) and Broadway producers (such as Hal Prince and Robert Whitehead). Rochester University Press has recently proposed a book about some of the memorable work Vargas and I did.
John F. Szwed's Space is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra (NY: Pantheon, 1997) tells of my special friendship with Sun Ra, describing the jazz great as one who "was at once the last of the great romantic composers, one of the premier avant-gardists of the latter half of the twentieth century, and a black cultural nationalist who extended Afrocentrism from ancient Egypt to the heavens." True, our Variety Recording Studio not only recorded Sun Ra's Arkestra but also supplied him long-term credit, lived with occasional bounced checks, and helped him cut costs&emdash;"Sonny often saved fifty dollars by sticking his own blank labels on the records, keeping his cost for a 12-inch LP to ninety-nine cents," Yale University Prof. Szwed quoted me as saying.
For thirty years Vargas was the engineer who recorded much of Sun Ra's music, edited the tapes with him, mastered them, and pressed his records in quantity. I introduced Sun Ra to such people in show business as Gershon Kingsley, an early synthesizer enthusiast who later helped Sun Ra program his first Moog.
According to Szwed, "Smith tells the story of when Vargas and Sonny were editing at three in the morning, and Fred accidentally played a tape backwards. 'Galactic!' cried Sonny, and insisted that the sound be dubbed into the final version just as it was. Warren Smith took care of business matters at Variety and had long conversations with Sonny about philosophical, personal, and financial matters when he was in the studio. Sonny began to have disagreements with Alton Abraham and feared that other producers were cheating him. So Smith created a fictive corporation by having 'Enterplanetary Koncepts' stationery printed up, and he sent out inquiries to producers and record companies requesting accountings of money owed to Le Son'y Ra, Sun Ra and His Arkestra, and El Saturn Records. No money was ever collected, but Sonny treated Vargas and Smith as his colleagues: Arkestra members often slept overnight at the studio after recording sessions."
Toward the end of his life, Szwed continues, Sun Ra "found himself gasping for breath, his heart beating fast, then dropping away to a slow fade. Again they took him to the emergency room, and when the nurse saw his blood-pressure readings they put him back in the hospital once more. He came back out in a few days, but one morning he woke up unable to walk. The band tells the story that the doctor in the emergency room went through the procedures for establishing the nature of the injury, the degree of the damage: How many fingers do you see? What year is this? Who's the president of the United States? Where were you born? That was it: he called for a specialist. When the neurologist arrived there was a whispered conference at the door to the room, and the second doctor looked in and said, 'Oh, it's Sun Ra. He is from Saturn!' But this time it was serious. Serious enough that his sister came up from Birmingham to see him. The diagnosis was a series of strokes, yet Sun Ra--like Bob Marley a few years before him--denied it was a stroke, and said it was something done to him by his enemies. 'There are forces trying to hold me back. And other forces trying to help me onward. And I'm the battleground!' "
"One side was affected, his legs, his left hand hardly functioned. He asked to be released from the hospital so the band wouldn't miss any work. But they kept him there and later moved him to a rehabilitation center. While in rehabilitation he asked to have a keyboard beside his bed and continued to play with one hand. He made calls to friends to reassure them and made plans for his return. One of the calls was to Smith to say that he had heard that Smith's partner Vargas had died, and he was touched to find out that Smith had played part of the John Cage/Sun Ra recording at Vargas's funeral."
Szwed then quotes me: "To his metaphysical surprise, I informed him that Fred was still at the studio. 'Still at the studio? What do you mean?' Sun Ra asked. 'Well,' I explained, 'I took most of his cremains along with my luggage to Costa Rica, having them buried next to his parents and other family members. But I saved a little tube for my apartment and I saved another tube for the studio.' 'You did what?' Sun Ra asked in disbelief. 'Yes,' I explained, 'when the workers were constructing the new Studio A control booth and no one was looking I slipped the cremains into a part of one of the walls. So Fred is still in his studio!' Sun Ra thought that was just the most beautifully metaphysical thing I had ever told him about, and before he hung up he said, 'I love you both.' The emphasis was on both. 'I love you, too,' was all I could respond, and the fact that he called just before his death adds to my indelible memories of the guy who once denied to me the London Times's report about his real birthplace and his real name . . . but we both knew otherwise, and he knew I knew. One newspaper, he laughed, even wrote that he had green blood in his veins."
Years later, I told his friend Ornette Coleman about this as well as about his testicle problem and all the hearts that Sun Ra had broken. Coleman was convulsed in laughter. For the entire story, check the Szwed book.
Although primarily a writer now, I have recently produced a compact disk in memory of my late partner Vargas, a collectors' item about Caruso's competitor, "Manuel Salazar: Costa Rica's Forgotten Tenor." It has been donated to the National Opera in Costa Rica, which is named after Salazar. Vargas had mastered the disk back in the 1970s from rare 78rpm records.
In short, you can leave music as an occupation . . . but music never leaves you.
Kids playing around the acropolis must surely have argued as to whether Dionysus could drink more wine than Zeus. Whether Hestia was really a virgin. Or whether Adamastor's penis really was so huge that he and the nymph Thetis were unable to have sex.
Kids today have similar questions about such gods as Yahoo, Lycos, or Excite. Some of their gods' answers aren't based upon fact, either, which illustrates how as we progress from childhood to adultery some of us grow by shedding most of what we used to think.
Formerly, kids found some answers from an oracle at a shrine. Today, kids turn to Jeeves, who is found on the World Wide Web (WWW) at <www.ask.com>. Ask Jeeves various questions and Jeeves will buttle the news that Dionysus is connected with Australian fine Victorian wines. That you can sleep in a tree top on Thetis island off Vancouver. And that Adamaster has 30 . . . matches on the WWW.
The WWW is like a newly constructed international library, one in which information not from books is being accessioned daily, facts are accumulating by the trillions, and the Web is growing exponentially as well as anarchistically. No Zeus nor Jehovah has created nor controls the Web, its measure of mankind being Man.
If it is true that a person does not die so long as someone remembers, Bertrand Russell is very much alive and is destined for immortality. On the search engine Alta Vista (<www.altavista.com>) over 12,500 references are currently found, and the number increases daily. Russell's books are named and commented upon, his name is linked with other figures in philosophy, his views are analyzed, his picture appears on the screen, and his voice comes out of the computer's speakers.
Also, Russell still has his enemies. The Rev. Ralph A. Smith, for example, takes him to task for being a sinner and an infidel&emdash;meaning, one hopes, that their concept of morality is inspiringly different.
Ask Jeeves or Alta Vista about Russell, and both will supply thousands of references. Two of the major sources all Russellians need to know about:
<www.mcmaster.ca/russdocs/russell.htm>
Anyone, any time, and anywhere can click this homepage, and all kinds of information is seductively presented on the computer screen. Skeptics, of course, are quick to point out that much of the information on the Web is false, but the same can be said of information found in a library.
Lovers of trivia can determine who on the Web is mentioned most often, for example. As to the number of times a word or a phrase occurs, anyone's computer comes up with an almost immediate mathematical answer--methinks Lord Russell would have loved playing with one. Sex (9,788,020) is mentioned more than God (5,627,610), he could have found.
Using the Alta Vista search engine one finds that Plato (157,360) rates more mentions than Aristotle (121,400), Aristotle more than Socrates (119,840). More Web pages cite Nietzsche (72,810) than Wittgenstein (31,819). Even in July 1999, Monica Lewinsky (54,079) rated higher than Pope John Paul II (31,819). Isaac Asimov (21,025) scores more than Sir Arthur C. Clarke (14,638)&emdash;both, however, beat Bertrand Russell (12,542). Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (12,241), so it goes, rates higher than Pat Robertson (11,744). On the Web are 8,508 references to David Hume that one could pursue.
Russell's Why I Am Not A Christian rates 118 entries, whereas Principia Mathematica only rates 16. The New Yorker (31 May 1999), reporting that the latter book surfaced at #23 on Modern Library's list of the century's hundred greatest nonfiction books, described it as "the most influential book never read."
Of the 546 entries for our honorary member Taslima Nasrin, <humanists.net/nasrin/Photos.htm> has photographs of her with Jacques Derrida, Güntar Grass, Mario Vargas Lloso, and French presidents Mitterand and Chirac.
We do have to be careful. Many of the 3,006 Paul Edwards citings are about a footballer who has the same name as the distinguished philosopher. It's the same story with the 182,140 Kenneth Blackwells, some of whom are Clevelanders. Also, Alan Schwerin (26 entries), it is revealed, is so interested in model aircraft that he bought a T-shirt showing a low-speed airfoil.
The good thing about the Net . . . is that people can find you. The bad thing about the Net . . . is that people can find you.
Whatever happened to the teenage beatnik poet often described as England's Allen Ginsberg? The answer is that he's alive and well, has been traveling all around the world since he left England at the age of twenty, and today he is somewhere in Southeast Asia.
Royston Ellis left school at the age of sixteen and as a teenager toured with the Beatles when they were starting out as the Beetles. He convinced them they were part of the Beats, individuals unfairly being beaten down simply because they were unconventional, and they agreed to the change in spelling. While they provided the music at events, Ellis provided the rocketry (poetry read to rock 'n' roll). Also, he showed John Lennon and Paul McCartney how to break down a Benzedrine nose inhaler and sniff the strips inside in order to produce a mild high. This was, Lennon later recounted, their first experience with drugs.
Steve Turner, in Cliff Richard, The Biography (1993), describes Ellis as
. . . Britain's first teenage pundit, an Allen Ginsberg of suburban London. The fact that he wore a beard and had worked as an office boy, duster salesman, gardener, milk-bottle washer, building labourer, and farm hand by the age of eighteen helped confirm the image. . . . His first volume of poems, Jiving to Gyp, was dedicated [to Cliff Richard], and he was soon asked by television programmes to explain what teenagers were all about. He ended up with his own series, "Living For Kicks," in which he explored the controversial issues of the day such as pep pills and sex before marriage.
"One in every four men is homosexual," Ellis told McCartney, according to Barry Miles's Paul McCartney (1998):
So we looked at the group! One in every four! It literally meant one of us is gay. Oh, fucking hell, it's not me, is it? We had a lot of soul-searching to do over that little one.
The "one" was their manager, Brian Epstein, who in 1962 signed a management contract with them for twenty-five per cent of their gross receipts, after a certain threshold was reached and after he got them a recording contract.
Ellis is a cogent musical commentator--his 1961 paperback The Big Beat Scene still stands up as an appraisal of early British rock 'n' roll--had met the fledgling Beatles in May 1960. "The first time we ever heard about gayness was when a poet named Royston Ellis arrived in Liverpool with his book Jiving With Gyp," McCartney has recalled. "He was a Beat poet. Well, well! Phew! You didn't meet them in Liverpool. And it was all 'Break me in easy, break me in easy . . . .' It was all shagging sailors, I think. We had a laugh with that line."
McCartney's biographer adds the following concerning Ellis's close friendship with the Beatles:
"Polythene Pam" was another of John's songs written in India and originally destined for the White Album. It was inspired by Stephanie, a girlfriend of the Beat poet Royston Ellis, whom the Beatles backed at Liverpool University in 1960. On 8 August 1963, the Beatles played at the Auditorium in Guernsey, the Channel Islands. Royston Ellis was working as a ferryboat engineer on the island and invited John to come back to his flat. John told Playboy: "I had a girl and he had one he wanted me to meet. He said she dressed up in polythene, which she did. She didn't wear jackboots and kilts, I just sort of elaborated. Perverted sex in a polythene bag. Just looking for something to write about." Royston Ellis told Steve Turner: "We all dressed up in them and wore them in bed. John stayed the night with us in the same bed." Paul remembered meeting Royston in Guernsey: "John, being Royston's friend, went out to dinner with him and got pissed and stuff and they ended up back at his apartment with a girl who dressed herself in polythene for John's amusements, so it was a little kinky scene. She became Polythene Pam. She was a real character." John: "When I recorded it I used a thick Liverpool accent because it was supposed to be about a mythical Liverpool scrubber dressed up in her jackboots and kilt."
I first met Ellis when my syndicated column, "Manhattan Scene" in West Indian islands, appeared in The Educator, which he was editing in Dominica and where he was the Reuters correspondent. At that time he was a real estate developer for the Marquis of Bristol, and we learned that we shared in common a liking for champagne and caviar. "Partial to black seeds," we found.
Under the pseudonym Richard Tresillian, he became a best-selling author of The Bondmaster series--over a million copies of the paperbacks with a historical background were sold and described the lives and loves of 19th century West Indian whites and the workers on their estates. Under the same pseudonym he wrote a best-selling series, Fleshtraders, again about 19th century miscegenation and adventures but this time set in Mauritius.
Since he moved to Sri Lanka in 1981, he has become a travel author, a lecturer on the Queen Elizabeth II's trip between Bombay and Singapore, and an author on various topics.
In 1983, some of his poetry was included in The Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse, poems from his "Cherry Boy." He has written extensively about railroads in Sri Lanka and is known for his definitive guide to the 7,000 railroads in India and for his travel guidebook about Mauritius. His most recent work, A Man for All Islands (1998), is a biography of Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, President of the Maldives. With the imaginatively expert photographer Gemunu Amarasinghe, he wrote A Maldives Celebration.
In our discussions about philosophy and humanism, Ellis has told me that since the age of fourteen he had decided it was not God who created man but that man had created God. "My first book, Jiving to Gyp (gyp means hell), was published when I was 18," he said, "and it contained raunchy atheistic poems." He is nostalgic about having had backing from The Beatles and Led Zeppelin, and he only returns to England occasionally, loving the adventurous life in the tropics.
Today the Life Fellow of the Royal Commonwealth Society might be on the QEII, or seeing one of the Buddha's two known teeth, the one at Kandy in Sri Lanka, or doing a photo-shoot somewhere in Southeast Asia, or just working on a novel that has a Maldivian setting. "How do you tell a Muslim male Maldivian from a Buddhist male Sri Lankan," I recently asked, ingenuously. Lifting his champagne glass, Royston had his playfully mischievous and enlightening response: "Raise the sarong."
Royston Ellis: gay secular humanist, writer extraordinaire, lecturer, sexy storyteller, lusty world traveler!
William Gaddis, who died in December, was an innovative American author of complex novels. He attended Harvard College (1941-1945) until he and a friend were asked to leave because of an altercation with the police. He became a fact checker for New Yorker (1945-1947), a Guggenheim fellow (1981), a MacArthur Prize fellow (1982), a Rockefeller grantee (1976), and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
His four published novels&emdash;The Recognitions (1955), a Faust-like work that examined spiritual bankruptcy; J. R. (1975), a harsh depiction of greed, hypocrisy, and banality in the business world; Carpenter's Gothic (1985), a depiction of American society's moral chaos, an attack on religious charlatanism; and A Frolic of His Own (1993), about plagiarism and intellectual property&emdash;"stand tall and totemic in the field of modernist literature," wrote critic Mel Gussow. He was compared to James Joyce and Thomas Pynchon for the 1955 work. Other critics compared him to Malcolm Lowry and Herman Melville, Cynthia Ozick calling him "an American original."
Because of some harsh criticism about his first novel from Granville Hicks and others&emdash;one wrote, "What this sprawling, squalling, overwritten book needs above all is to have its mouth washed out with lye soap"&emdash;he published nothing for two decades, earning a living by writing for the Pfizer pharmaceutical company. Although one of the least read of important American writers, he developed a wide underground reputation for writing demanding, perceptive, and inventive novels.
"Like most American novelists, Willie didn't have any grounding in belief of any kind," the critic Frederick Karl said upon Gaddis's death. "He was alone, no religious revival, no reaching for spiritual salvation. Irony became his fall-back position, his world view. He found everything artificial and deceptive and conspiratorial&emdash;counterfeit. That was his great theme." As Gaddis himself once remarked, "Stupidity&emdash;and I don't mean ignorance&emdash;is a central issue of our time."
In a characteristic aside, Gaddis wrote in The Recognitions, "The Irish mathematician Sir William Rowan Hamilton calculates that Jesus in assumption, being drawn up through space at a moderate rate, would not yet have reached the nearest of the fixed stars." "I think he thought God was a terrible joke," his literary agent Candida Donadio told The New Yorker's Philip Gourevitch.
Gaddis, a freethinking humanist, died of prostate cancer on 16 December 1998.
Taslima Nasrin (also Nasreen) is called a lot of names: the female Salman Rushdie, because Bangladesh mullahs have placed a fatwa on her head and forced her into hiding in Sweden; the most dangerous woman in the world, because she fights patriarchy and the male domination of society; a 20th Century Antigone, because despite the fatwa she dared to return to Dhaka with her dying mother, allowing her to die at home after unsuccesful treatment for cancer in New York; and a humanist heroine, because she is articulately anti-clerical and an inspiring secular humanist.
She also has been called "worse than a prostitute" by Maulana Azizul Haque, the mullah who demands her execution; "a blasphemer," because of what she wrote in Nirbachito Kolum, a collection of her newspaper columns that are critical of bigotry and supernaturalism; and an atheist--one of her poems commences "I don't believe in God" and ends
Throughout the world,
religion has extended its eighteen talons.
In my lone brandishing, how many of its bones can I shatter.
How much can I rip discrimination's farspreading net?
Taslima fled from Bangladesh in 1994, narrowly escaping with her life. Her novel, Lajja (Shame), depicted Bangladesh's Hindu minority as having been picked out for revenge by Muslims after an incident in December 1992, in which a Hindu mob destroyed an ancient mosque in Ayodhya, northern India. The work depicted a Hindu family attacked by Muslims in the aftermath of the razing of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya by Hindu extremists. Immediately a reward of 50,000 taka was offered to anyone who would kill the 31-year-old gynecologist, daughter of a government physician who adheres to the Sufi tradition of Islam. In December 1993, 5,000 zealots marched through Dhaka, demanding her death. A general strike resulted in clashes in which one man was killed and more than 200 other people were injured.
The Guardian (14 December 1994) and Free Inquiry (Winter 1998) have interviewed her, "60 Minutes" has televised her story, and she became so famous in France that cartoonists have used Le Pen and her as dueling opposites. The Bertrand Russell Society has made her an honorary member, as has the Voltaire Society of America. In France, Jacques Chirac presented her with copies of Voltaire's works, and a cultural organization presented her with a bust of Voltaire which she has placed on her desk in Sweden. Those who want to know more about her would do well to visit her homepage:
Striking photos of her with French presidents Mitterand and Chirac, Jacques Derrida, Günter Grass, Mario Vargas Llosa, and others are found at
GALHA readers who know the humanist affirmation--"We attempt to transcend divisive parochial loyalties based on race, religion, gender, nationalist, creed, class, sexual orientation, or ethnicity, and strive to work together for the common good of humanity"--will not easily find elsewhere her views on sexual orientation. So let's discuss her being in total agreement with the secular humanist stance. In Germany, for example, one of the gay humanist leaders took her to a gay bar. She was delighted. When I took her to one in New York City, she found it even more colorful than the German. We ate once at Rubyfruit, a popular lesbian restaurant-bar in Greenwich Village--she was amused by the waiter's greeting, "OK, girls, what can I get you?" In Sweden when I was her guest, she asked a member of PEN to arrange for me to visit a gay center in Stockholm--we both were taken for coffee and at an adjacent table met a Norwegian chap who preferred, he said, Swedish men. The heterosexual Taslima, in short, is entirely liberated about same-sex relationships. I even informed her that a large gay Muslim group plans a May conference in New York City.
Although ordinarily she has police protection when she travels, she came to New York City unannounced. We went to plays ("Art" was her favorite), movies ("Saving Pvt. Ryan" was preceded by my personal description of what I had experienced in 1945 at Omaha Beach), museums, and other cultural events. She enjoyed seeing the nude male go-go strippers at Gaiety in Times Square (where Madonna visited to find dancers for one of her movies). And she squealed with laughter when, at Hogs & Heifers ("heifers" are the girlfriends of "hogs," male motorcyclists), two of the waitresses jigged atop the bar, removed their bras, then threw them up on the wall (along with hundreds of others that had been tossed by many of the major names in showbusiness).
As a journalist I was able to take her to the annual ceremonial of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The 1998 Centennial Address, given by novelist John Updike, was "The Academy as It Was and Is." Over $825,000 was given out in awards for art, architecture, literature, and music, one $5,000 Merit in Poetry Award going to Anglo-American Thom Gunn. Charles Corréa, a major architect from India, was one of the foreign honorary members inducted that day, and both he and his wife recognized her and were delighted to converse.
I made a point of introducing her to Kurt Vonnegut Jr., honorary president of the American Humanist Association, who immediately recognized her. The two are members of the Council for Secular Humanism's International Academy of Humanism. As I snapped a photo, he told her, "Taslima, you are one brave woman!" Months later when she did the unexpected and slipped back into Bangladesh, I handed Vonnegut a copy of the photo and told how she again was being hunted by Muslim fundamentalists. He had just given one of his hilarious lectures at a book signing, but his jaw dropped, he became very concerned, and he exclaimed, "This is just terrible news!"
Now that Taslima is back to relative safety (the fatwas continue both for her and for Rushdie), her Enfance, au féminin (Editions Stock, 27 rue Cassette, 75006 Paris) has been published. The work is a prose description of her years of growing up and was adeptly translated from Bengali by Philippe Benoît, a charming young French chap whose roommate, interestingly, is a Bengali. Adequate translations of her novels and poetry still need to be arranged, but after grieving for her mother she again is writing poetry. In March she left Sweden for a stay in France at a creative artists' colony where it is possible that she may be the subject of a movie.
Some in Bangladesh have made "taslima" a synonym for blasphemer. Numbers of Muslim women vehemently insist that Islam is not at all oppressive for women, and many have spoken out against her. However, rationalists, freethinkers, humanists, and forward-looking Western-type women have every right proudly to consider Taslima Nasrin a "Humanist Heroine of the Century."
Editors Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates Jr. of Harvard declare that "In the year 2000, half the world's people will be Asian, and one-eighth will be African; a majority, too, will be non-Christian. And of the world's twenty largest cities, none will be in Europe or the U.S."
Their dictionary's purpose, then, is to provide a new cultural map, one which is meant to include what the Western-centered reference books now fail to emphasize or contain. The publisher proclaims that the work is "the first authoritative overview of global culture to emphasize the achievement of the non-Western world." The editors' method was to ask numerous individuals around the world to suggest key information to be included, which they then culled with an eye to emphasizing the "global." Such a concept, that of providing a non-white, intellectual, global reference work, is an excellent one.
But can all the cultures of the various peoples here on Earth be covered by such a small dictionary? Will we, for example, learn something about the Arawak, the Maylasian, the Pygmy, the Tamil cultures? And perhaps even about the past cultures of the groups detailed from 1934 to 1961 in Arnold Toynbee's 12-volume Study of History? One eagerly approaches the book of 717 pages by the two African-American editors who invite us to learn "what every American needs to know as we enter the next century."
First, we find some enlightening listings: algebra, apartheid, Chinua Achebe, Gautama [listed as Buddha, although the Christ is listed as Jesus], Islam, K'ung fu-tse [listed as Confucius], Naguib Mahfouz, Nation of Islam, Pushkin [who on his mother's side, many are unaware, was descended from a member of an Abyssinian princely dynasty], Ramadân, Santería, Léopold Senghor, voodoo. Let us focus, however, on that latter word: inasmuch as the work is a dictionary, not an encyclopedia, "voodoo" is covered in less than one page but still includes information about vodun, loa, houngan, mambo, and zombi. Benin, however, is not cited as the center of the Vodoun or Vodun religious beliefs and practices, nor are the West Indian and Brazilian related movements of obeah and candomblé named.
Second, you will not find listings that one would expect the African-American editors to have included: AIDS, Aesop, Africa, African art and music, Afrocentrism, Idi Amin, Maya Angelou, animism, Claude Brown, Ed Bullins, the Caribbean, Eldridge Cleaver, genital mutilation, Alex Haley, V. S. Naipaul, race, rap music, Paul Robeson, sex, slavery, soccer, South Africa, the West Indies, August Wilson, Frank Yerby. If such subjects and individuals are not included, can it be assumed that readers in the various continents will similarly fail to find other items&emdash;even if some are admittedly subjective&emdash;that because of space requirements or editorial decision have been omitted?
Secular humanists, wherever in the global world they are, will find no entries whatsoever for philosophy, atheism, agnosticism, freethought, and rationalism. Nor are Ayer, Flew, Hume, Quine, Richard Rorty, or Bertrand Russell included (although other Caucasian philosophers such as Diderot, Sartre, and Voltaire have entries). Neither Thomas Paine nor his prescient 8 March 1775 article about "African Slavery in America" is included.
Martin Luther King's Baptist denomination is cited, and Golda Meir is named as being Jewish. Although Jesse Owens was included, no mention was made of his being a Universalist.
Included, but with no inkling that they were non-theistic: Diderot, W. E. B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Joyce, Proust, Whitman, Richard Wright.
Excluded other non-theists: Thelma "Butterfly" McQueen, James Farmer, Lorraine Hansberry, Claude McKay, A. Philip Randolph, Whitney Young.
The entry for Thomas Jefferson gives no indication of the current controversy about his having been a slaveholder. The entire Bible gets miraculously summarized in two pages, but no mention of the silly story about the black race's origin (caused by Ham's having broken the taboo of not remaining continent while on the ark&emdash;he slept with his wife!) or the Mormon tale about why Cain was turned black.
In their introduction, the editors relate how inspired they have been that the Old Testament gives three great religions "the same tradition of awaiting a messiah whose arrival will end secular history." For the vast majority of Asians, they add in a qualification, "the incarnation of Christ has no religious significance: it is someone else's story." Yes, well the someone elses number 66% of the human population (3.84 billion, of whom 887-million are termed "non-religious" and 222-million "atheists," according to the 1997 Encyclopaedia Britannica Book of the Year). The remaining 34% (1.95 billion) are, according to their churches' unaudited count, Christian.
Even a superficial reading of the book makes it clear that the work goes out of its way to emphasize examples of how religion has favorably, never unfavorably, influenced culture. As a result, we read that Christianity "has made great inroads," "the teachings of St. Paul were crucial to the spread of Christianity," "Jesus is generally recognized as both a historical person and an object of worship," and "the Bible has been translated into nearly every language."
So is the reader ever informed about those Arawaks, Maylasians, Pygmies, Tamils, and others? No, missing is the theophagy practiced by cannibals, about which the Arawaks and Caribs knew. The richest man in the world, the Sultan of Brunei, will look in vain for cultural information about the Dyaks, his million or more subjects in Borneo whose culturally interesting "longhouses" contain the dried heads of their enemies. The seminomadic, hunter-gatherer Pygmies are overlooked. And nowhere to be found is how the Bengalese culture differs from that of the Sinhalese.
In short, the editors could have narrowed the scope to surveying their subject entirely from an African-American perspective. Also, why omit Nadine Gordimer, or Gunnar Myrdal, or gays, or the significance of amulets but include in Catherine the Great's entry the following "cultural" item: "Although it is a popular myth and often repeated as fact, Catherine the Great did not die bearing the brunt of a horse during a sexual maneuver, but instead died of a stroke in her lavatory."
The bottom line: Although it is commendable that the work omitted extreme claims (e.g., that Greek culture is primarily African in origin; that whites are devils; or that AIDS is a white-invented virus, a view unfortunately expressed in the past by Bill Cosby, Will Smith, and others), The Dictionary of Global Culture simply tries to cover too much. It would have been better had the authors concentrated upon non-white cultural matters, items ordinarily omitted or de-emphasized in standard reference works. A truly non-white cultural dictionary obviously remains to be written. The present work as it stands will best be used only as an occasional reference.
Meanwhile, we white, brown, and black humanists can continue to settle for The Columbia Encyclopedia, The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Encyclopedia of Unbelief, and the library stacks.
Dictionary of Global Culture. Edited by Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates Jr. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997. 717 pp., cloth $35.
Editors Appiah and Gates of Harvard declare that "In the year 2000, half the world's people will be Asian, and one-eighth will be African; a majority, too, will be non-Christian. And of the world's twenty largest cities, none will be in Europe or the U.S." Their dictionary's purpose, then, is to provide a new cultural map, one which is meant to include what the Western-centered reference books now fail to contain.
Many entries are enlightening (e.g., algebra, apartheid, Gautama [listed as Buddha, although the Christ is listed as Jesus], Islam, Kung Fu-tse [listed as Confucius], Nation of Islam, Pushkin [who on his mother's side was descended from a member of the Abyssinian princely dynasty], Ramadan, Santeria, Leopold Senghor, voodoo), and many other entries which are not found in the standard reference books. However, the large work fails to contain entries one would expect to be included (e.g., AIDS, Aesop, Africa, African art and music, animism, genital mutilation, V. S. Naipaul, race, Paul Robeson, sex, slavery, soccer, South Africa, etc.).
Secular humanists will find no entries for philosophy, atheism, agnosticism, freethought, and rationalism, nor are Ayer, Flew, Hume, or Bertrand Russell included (although other Caucasian philosophers such as Diderot and Heidegger have entries). Of the dozens of creative artists who are included, all apparently are tacit members of some organized religion, even freethinkers such as Diderot, Langston Hughes, Joyce, Mann, Poe, Proust, and Whitman. Meanwhile, as if at a revival meeting, the authors state that Christianity "has made great inroads," "the teachings of St. Paul were crucial to the spread of Christianity," "Jesus is generally recognized as both a historical person and an object of worship," and "the Bible has been translated into nearly every language."
Of importance to global culture, apparently, is an item in Catherine the Great's entry: "Although it is a popular myth and often repeated as fact, Catherine the Great did not die bearing the brunt of a horse during a sexual maneuver, but instead died of a stroke in her lavatory." (Yes, but did she not keep her hairdresser confined for three years in an iron cage in her room lest gossips find out she wore a wig?)
A truly non-white-centered cultural dictionary obviously remains to be written. Meanwhile, we white, brown, and black humanists can continue to settle for The Columbia Encyclopedia, The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and The Encyclopedia of Unbelief.
Edgar Allan Poe, the writer who was exhumed at his Baltimore, MD, burial site, has been found to have been poisoned with arsenic.
This startling information, revealed by visiting French detective Auguste C. Dupin, goes counter to the usual stories that Poe had died during an 1849 drinking spree, suffered from heart failure, epilepsy, or a combination of these.
The new allegations are found in Janestreeter George Egon Hatvary's The Murder of Edgar Allan Poe (NY: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 1997). The author, a professor at St. John's University in the city, has written a breathtaking, Poe-like tale detailing how Dupin came to the United States following his friend's death, detected irregularities in the stories as to how Poe had died, and, after almost being killed by the perpetrator, successfully fingered the murderer. The novel's cast of characters includes all the familiar names (including Baudelaire, Margaret Fuller, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, as well as Mrs. Clemm and other family and business members) associated with Poe.
In addition to being a thought-provoking murder mystery, Hatvary's novel describes local sites that figured in Poe's life (e.g., 116 Waverly Place; City Hall; Trinity Church; Washington Square; St. George's on 16th St.; his home in Queens; Five Points near Lafayette St., then the toughest district in the city), credible scenes of city life in the 1840s, smoothly written imitations of Poe's style (including a mugging and a victim's being locked in a dark room with rats), a listing of Poe's many enemies, and likely sources from which Poe plagiarized.
In The Murder of Edgar Allan Poe, Janestreeter Hatvary in an entirely fictional work expertly brings Poe to life!
Our neighbor here on Jane Street conceived and ran Limelight, the first coffeehouse-photography gallery. How and why she started and kept the place going for seven years at 91-95 Seventh Avenue South (with a door onto 14 Barrow Street) is lovingly related in this chatty book that describes our neighborhood in the unique1950s.
Everyone saw Helen differently. Yun Gee, a Chinese modernist painter, saw her as wife and mother of his child. Li-lan Gee Ikeda knows her as a devoted mother to whom she could confide, "Mommy, did you know that little boys have udders?". Real estate agents saw her as being slightly daft for choosing The Place, site of a long-abandoned nightclub, to open a business to sell photographs and coffee. Those in the cognoscenti knew her as a one-of-a-kind artist who arranged for some seventy successful shows. Berenice Abbott, Robert Frank, W. Eugene Smith, and Edward Steichen knew her as the person who recognized them as major photographers and who displayed their works.
Gee's memoir is so folksy that it's easy to understand how she got involved in, yet pulled herself out of, so many harrowing experiences. She not only tells about "our" Village but also touches upon many intriguing subjects: the Rienzi (which your editor remembers as the place he and fellow naturalistic humanists from Columbia U fought weekly over coffee with Nausea-loving existentialists); Walter Winchell (who mentioned the Limelight the same day he wrote about Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe, Tennessee Williams, and Christine Jorgensen); the problems she had (with employees, the union, the police, the Mafia, even the husband); and VIPs she knew (Robert DeNiro as a boy; Lisette Model; Sid Grossman; Arthur Lavine, Sam Falk, Philippe Halsman, Jacob Deschin, Robert Frank, Imogen Cunningham, Grace Mayer, Eliot Porter, Dan Weiner, to name but a few in the world of photography).
Personal tidbits abound (why peahen instead of peackock was served at one major dinner; how a "Closed For Repairs" sign put an end to addicts using the men's room; how allowing bookies to operate helped solve a security problem; why Steichen appeared to be dead while lying in her bed; why Angela Calomiris, a photographer at 8 1/2 Jane Street, was crossed off as a client (because she'd been a spy for the FBI during the Senator Joseph McCarthy witchhunts; etc.).
Anyone living now, or at any time, in Greenwich Village will prize this extremely well-written, sensitive book. If you don't know what bohoes are or that Norman Mailer was sometimes stoned when gallery-hopping, you will once you add it to your library.
Clarke, Arthur C. 3001, The Final Odyssey. (London, Voyager, Harper Collins, 1997, paperback, £5.99)
Fast-forward to the 31st century.
Changes abound, of course, and in Arthur C. Clarke's imagination the human race has somehow survived. Frank Poole, who had been killed off by Hal in '2001,' actually had only been frozen in space. When found and awakened, he is in a dull utopia devoid of poverty, of madness, and, fortunately, of all asteroids capable of threatening Earth.
What kinds of changes? Well, the human race had deteriorated since (our) "Century of Torture." But by mentally calibrating people with a Braincap, misfits have pretty much been weeded out, education has become far more efficient, prisons are no longer needed. Nanochips can be implanted at birth, giving individuals a helpful computer-like Ident. In 2005, the New York-Havana Bank had collapsed. In 2007, Indian nuclear missiles had been launched. In 2008, the entire North American telephone network had become paralyzed. In 2304, a Pacific asteroid had caused a tsunami. Pius XX, having exposed the secret files of the Inquisition, had been assassinated by a demented cardinal, after which religion's record of anti-civilization began enjoying a general decline.
Now, by the Fourth Millenium, hoverchairs allow easy maneuvering. 'Corpse food' is no longer eaten by what has become a vegetarian population. Neither men nor women are genitally mutilated (except for medical reasons), just one indication of the demise of organized religions--in fact, anyone with symptoms of 'belief,' a sign of insanity, can now be easily treated.
Poole, after being miraculously found a millenium (!) later, learns that the human population numbers a manageable one billion. Races within mankind have gently melded. Genetically enhanced creatures not only do the hard physical work but also are docile and good-natured: '[C]hildren love them! There's a five-hundred-year-old joke: "Would you trust your kids to a dinosaur? What--and risk injuring it!" '
Having fouled their planet, people now live above Earth in a giant cartwheel, its rim in orbit, with four long foundational towers extending down to land. Now it is possible to travel to places beyond Earth. Ice-filled comets can be towed to Mercury or Venus to create artificial oceans. Jupiter, exploded by a monolith and turned into a secondary solar system, has a moon, Ganymede, which earthlings have colonized. Another, a Jovian satellite called Europa which is watched over by a monolith, is colonized by plankton-eating Europs. Jupiter's closest moon is now Io. Interplanetary travel utilizes Universal Time, in which a 24-hour day is identified by number rather than name: 'Io was so close to Lucifer that it took less than two days to race around its orbit. . . . Callisto, at over four times Io's distance, required two Mede days--or sixteen Earth ones--to complete its leisurely circuit.' In short, Clarke the visionary is in top sci-fi form.
God, as we rationalists are aware, is but a historic term. In 3001 theism is but a relic associated with the bad old days. The question now becomes how humans can fare in a solar system controlled not by some fictional God but by a trio of Monoliths. Readers of '2001' will understand how Dave Bowman and Hal have been absorbed by one of the Monoliths, part of a galactic network that lacks consciousness and is therefore unaware that they are plotting against it from within its own circuits. How Poole contacts Bowman, what's new with Hal, and why a monolith has plans to eliminate humans is part of the engrossing, inspiring, often amusing sci-fi plot.
Some critics have complained that Clarke has injected his personal views into the present work. Well, fortunately so! Unlike the complainers, he is not unhappy that organized religions will disappear nor that man will evolve. He sees a future that will belong to the human Lords of the Galaxy. Sure, lip-reading computers are in our future, and so are other magnificent things which he envisions. (If his past predictions are any measure, humanity has much to look forward to.)
Clarke's is an outlook entirely secular humanist in its scope, one that is capable of influencing far more people than tomes of philosophy texts. A doer, not just a sayer, he has taken brave stands, for example openly telling the press that the Pope and Mother Teresa are the world's most dangerous people because of their doctrinal and anti-scientific stands. Secular humanists have a tendency to emphasize the views of professional scientists and philosophers. However, it is the creative artists who are far more apt to make rationalism a meaningful outlook for large numbers of people. Clarke is in the forefront of such artists, a leading 20th Century non-believer, rationalist, naturalist, and secular humanist.
So what's wrong with '3001, The Final Odyssey'? Just that! Clarke, the Commander of the British Empire now a Sri Lankan citizen, was born 16 December 1917. It is unlikely, what with his busy schedule of television programs and interviews and films, that he will ever write '4001.' Alas, as Hotspur observed in 1401 or so, 'The time of life is short.'
Warren Allen Smith
Colin McCall's November review of the Alex Kershaw biograph of Jack London was excellent.
Others might be interested in London's Before Adam, a 1907 work that was not mentioned but includes his freethinking.
When 18, London was arrested (June 29, 1894) in Niagara Falls, New York, on a charge of vagrancy. The Buffalo Courier headlined the story, describing how "John London" was one of 13 vagrants caught in a crackdown: London was handcuffed to a tall black prisoner, shackled to the remainder of the troop of convicted vagrants, and unceremoniously led through the streets of Niagara Falls.
After a 30-day sentence, he and a fellow prisoner panhandled some change in Buffalo, went to a German saloon which his new friend wanted to rob, and London made a quick exit, jumping from the men's room window in the back of the saloon. He then hopped a freight train and returned to California.
The jailing likely inspired his description of Buck, the canine hero of Call of the Wild: "Then the rope was removed and he was flung into a cage-like crate. There he lay for the remainder of the weary night, nursing his wrath and wounded pride. He could not understand what it all meant. What did they want with him, these strange men? Why were they keeping him pent up in this narrow crate? He did not know why, but he felt oppressed by the vague sense of impending calamity. Several times during the night he sprang to his feet when the shed door rattles. . . ."
Of interest to us Secular Humanists is what the police docket recorded that London was single, had a mother and father who were living, that he listed his occupation as "sailor," and informed the officers that his religion was "atheist."
Warren Allen Smith
Free Inquiry
"Were there atheists in foxholes during World War II? Of course," writes Warren Allen Smith, a New Yorker and a freethinker, "as can be verified by my dogtags enclosed. A veteran of Omaha Beach in 1944, I insisted upon including 'None' instead of P, C, or J as my religious affiliation.
"My e-mail pal Arthur C. Clarke, the Commander of the British Empire who now is a Sri Lankan citizen, had 'None' on his tags, he tells me. In short, non-theists in Britain as well as in the United States refused to be listed as members of any organized religion."
Mr. Smith is editor of The Janestreeter, New York City, is NY editor of GALHA, published in London, and is an editorial associate of Free Inquiry.
[Photograph shows T5/Cpl Smith in a photo taken by Emily Davenport, Louisville, Kentucky, when Smith was stationed in Ft. Knox, Kentucky. Inset is a photo of his dogtags: "Smith, Warren A. 37421300 T43 44 0 None."]
An atheist's memorial service held in a cathedral? Yes, Carl Sagan's was held February 27th at New York City's Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, the one featuring a statue of God (a bearded Caucasian with His arms outstretched) on the front facade. The former dean, James Parks Morton referred to "Carl the great atheist," and Sagan's non-theism was also cited by Harry H. Pritchett, the present dean, and Joan Brown Campbell, the general secretary of the National Council of Churches in the USA. The cathedral was chosen because of Sagan's record of having successfully worked with church leaders on environmental matters.
MIT physicist Philip Morrison, who is confined to an electronic wheelchair, related how at the age of 6 Sagan had been told that you can always add 1 to a number, that Carl had tested this by laboriously writing all the numbers from 1 to 1000, stopping only because he had to sleep.
Sagan's curiosity never diminished, for he went on to solve the mysteries of the high temperature of Venus (i.e., a massive greenhouse effect), the seasonal changes on Mars (i.e., windblown dust), and the reddish haze of Titan (i.e., complex organic molecules.).
Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, a member with Sagan of the International Academy of Humanism, remarked that unlike the Brooklyn garment worker's son who turned his eyes upwards to the skies, he as a boy in Queens had turned his eyes downwards to the ground. He added that the two New Yorkers had not known each other until much later. Ending an eloquent summary of how important Sagan had been to the entire scientific community, as well as the world's other peoples, Gould paraphrased Longfellow, saying Sagan had turned the spheres and left no hell below.
Ronald Sagedeev, who had been Gorbachev's adviser and director of the USSR's Space Research Institute, called Sagan a citizen of the world, one who was against the false promises of the Star Wars defense, and said "the Cold War was ended because of Carl Sagan and his friends."
Other speakers included Irwin Redlener, a pediatrician-friend who called attention to Carl's passion, humor, and forgiveness. Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of New York City's Hayden Planetarium, told of Sagan's consideration when, as a young black college student, he had first gone to Cornell for an interview. Frank H. T. Rhodes, who had been President of Cornell University during much of the time Sagan headed Cornell's Laboratory for Planetary Studies, called Carl "a scientist but a humanist at heart," one who was comfortable with philosophy.
One of Carl's daughters, Sasha, described how her father had taught logic, critical reasoning, and (to the large audience's amusement) the importance of questioning authority. Carl's son, Jeremy, said that his agnostic father was a warrior for the world, an avid anti-racist, an evolutionist rather than a creationist, and one who disapproved of anyone who masked ignorance by using jargon.
Carl's wife, Ann Druyan, secretary of the Federation of American Scientists, told of his and her exuberance at having included an interstellar message along with Bach, Beethoven, and other music in two NASA Voyager spacecrafts now beyond the outer solar system. At a speed of 40,000 miles per hour, the objects are traveling in space and have a projected shelf life of a billion years.
Vice-President Al Gore, noting that he the believer and Carl the non-believer had no problems whatsoever working together upon behalf of Earth's environment. The two were instrumental in getting scientific and religious leaders to unite on issues of environmental protection. Carl had shown him we are no longer central to the universe, that therefore we must do something significant if "the blue dot" as seen from space is to flourish. Gore was both folksy and eloquent in relating his warm memories of Sagan.
The most eloquent of all, however, was Carl Sagan himself. A taped excerpt of his "Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space" resounded over the loudspeakers.
Just as some blacks used to think that they should "pass" as whites, and some gays thought they should "pass" as straights, many non-believers used to "pass" as believers, often simply avoiding the topic of religion altogether.
The trend now, however, is to "come out." Lou Harrison, the composer and member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters who celebrated his 80th birthday on May 14th, has gone on record as being both gay and a non-believer, for example. He has cited Epicurus and Lucretius as having led him to being a "card carrying humanist" for a number of years, and he also has cited Archie J. Bahm's "The Philosophy of the Buddha" as having made a great impression on his outlook. Bahm was one of the signers of Humanist Manifesto II.
In addition to an April world premiere of his "Concerto For Pipa [a 4-string Chinese instrument] and Orchestra," which was performed at Alice Tully Hall in New York City; Harrison's "Rhymes With Silver" was performed by the Mark Morris Dance Group at the Brooklyn Academy of Music; and the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra with Michael Boriskin at the piano performed some of his little known compositions from the 1930s and 1940s. Once the music critic of the New York Herald Tribune, Harrison lives in a straw-bale house in the desert near Aptos, California, with his companion, William Colvig. The two are celebrating their 30th anniversary together.
Svend Robinson, a Canadian Member of Parliament, is not only an openly gay politician but also openly states that he is a non-theist.
Jean-Pierre Rampal, the distinguished French flutist, cites in autobiographical materials his non-theism.
When Marcello Mastroianni's coffin was brought from Paris last December, it was received by Flora Carabella, whom he had married in 1948, and their daughter, Barbara. Both women made arrangements for a secular service, because the actor had specifically made it clear that he did not want a religious burial service.
Allen Ginsberg did not believe in reincarnation nor that Gautama was a supernatural being, but he was an active Buddhist. At his April memorial in Manhattan's Shambhala Meditation Center, gongs were struck, the aroma of incense was strong, bells clanged, and the four-hour service involved chanting, praying, and remembering. "There is no birth and no cessation," mourners chanted. Following his stepmother Edith Ginsberg's saying, "We'll all miss him desperately. So be it. Peace," "Kaddish," about his mother's insanity and death, was read.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was at the ceremony, as were composer Philip Glass and Ginsberg's companion of forty years, Peter Orlovsky. Also present were Amiri Baraka, Patti Smith, Larry Rivers, biographer Ann Charters plus, according to The Times reporter Robert McG. Thomas Jr., "an alarming number of whom seem to have been his lovers in one sense or another, usually several." In Ginsberg's final poem, published after his death by The New Yorker (21 April 1997), he openly described many of those lovers.
Ginsberg's cremains were divided into three parts, one each for the Buddhist center in Colorado; the Jewel Heart Buddhist Center in Ann Arbor, Michigan; and the family plot at the B'nai Israel Cemetery in Newark.
The Jewish Forward reports that Skipp Porteous was married by a Reform Jewish rabbi in 1996. Already a Christian minister has preached about the good news, that Porteous left his former atheistic, secular humanist viewpoint.
Now on the World Wide Web: the Corliss Lamont page: http://www.corliss-lamont.org/ U
Spanish-speaking ethical humanists, atheists, rationalists, etc., have their own homepage, courtesy of the present author: http://idt.net/~wasm/asibehu
Explaining why establishing a speed limit was rejected in his state&endash;the only state that has no speed limits&endash;Montana State Sen. Arnie Mohl said, "The public don't want a speed limit. Let's leave it lay."
Yo, mon, be dat proper Montanics?
Warren Allen Smith Manhattan