Thomas Fleming
Thomas Fleming is president of the Fleming Foundation. He is the author of six books, including The Morality of Everyday Life and The Politics of Human Nature, as well as many articles and columns for newspapers, magazines,and learned journals. He holds a Ph.D. in Classics from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and a B.A. in Greek from the College of Charleston. He served as editor of Chronicles: a Magazine of American Culture from 1984 to 2015 and president of The Rockford Institute from 1997-2014. In a previous life he taught classics at several colleges and served as a school headmaster in South Carolina
I first read Treasure Island lying on a remote beach on Kauai. It became one of my favorite novels alongside Kipling’s Kim.
Whatever the 1930s movie may have failed to capture was more than made up for by the presence of Wallace Beery and Jackie Cooper. That was my favorite films featuring the duo and one of my 5 favorite movies. So Treasure Island makes both lists for me. Happy birthday RLS.
I was born on 24 November 1949 on Thanksgiving Day at approximately 11:32 a.m., ruining Thanksgiving Dinner according to my father. About every seven years, my birthday again falls on Thanksgiving.
Happy Birthday, Mr Peters. Every 7 years my birthday falls on Canadian Thanksgiving, eh? So I feel a special bond.
I should add that the day I was born, Jackie Robinson played his final game, hitting into a double play to end the heartbreaking 7 game series to the Yankees (Washington Irving must have turned over in his grave, the day a NY team saw fit to choose that as a name). The Suez Crisis and the Hungarian uprising were just about to heat up. I hope Dr Fleming will do a podcast on October birthdays next year.
Hedy Lamarr’s contribution to technology was in the field of spread spectrum radio, which could provide secure communications. During the Cold War it was all pretty hush-hush stuff, on the NSA level. Since then it has, I believe, been instrumental in, to name an obvious example, the development of cell phone technology. I think the intelligent Hedy conceived all this by extrapolating from the dinner conversation of an early husband, a German industrialist, and his cronies.
Gadda’s novel “That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana” has been a particularly daunting literary cross for me to bear, ever since you first dropped his name in an essay years ago. I have not given up and may try it again. As I recall it was as if Borges had written an Inspector Montalbano Novel. Not that that would a bad thing. I like Borges (a big fan of detective fiction, by the way). Gadda himself was an engineer with literary aspirations, which appeals to me. He is in good company there along with such people as Robert Musil, Hermann Broch, and Max Fritsch. Walker Percy, for that matter, a devotee of the scientific method, if there ever was one.
Speaking of Borges, since I think you were involved in giving him the Ingersoll Award, once upon a time, do you have any comment on his story “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” It seemed inordinately prescient to me, how it seemingly foresaw the false narrative under which we live nowadays. Written about the same time as Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, if I’m not mistaken.
The fact that you were given life is more important than when and who else was born in November.