November 6


Amber pages




Thomas Kyd, playwright of "The Spanish Tragedy", born today in 1558


Adolphe Sax, elsewhere recorded as Antoine Joseph Sax, Belgian inventor of the saxophone, born today in 1814


Ignace Jan Paderewski, Polish composer and pianist, born today in 1860 


James Naismith, inventor of the game, or perhaps sport, of basketball, born today in 1861. I have a real problem with this one: the claim to be the "inventor" of something which already exists in a fractionally different form, and all you have done is steal the idea, or the means, or the materials, modify it slightly, and then rename it - the verb "to Edison" comes to mind (see July 24), or "to Zuckerberg", but actually 98% of capitalist enterprises generally turn out to be something that already exists, minorly modified, and then re-branded. Chequers, the American form of draughts, which is the English reduction of chess, which was a simplification of the Persian shach-mat; each one slightly less difficult and therefore more likely to be mass-popular than the last. So rounders became cricket, or was it cricket that became rounders - and then both of them got reduced to baseball. So Rugby football emerged from soccer (association football), when somebody picked up the ball and ran with it; and then got reduced to the sport of cheerleader-dancing with commercial breaks known as American Football. Basketball was netball, long before James Naismith...


Robert Musil, author of the self-defaming "The Man Without Qualities", came into life today in 1880, and sadly left it unfinished, as he did his great book. You can avoid the failure that most experience with Musil, of unfinishing the parts that he did not unfinish, by reading Jane Smiley's splendid piece about Musil, here


Mike Nichols, Michael Igor Peschkowsky before he graduated into that nom de directeur, born today in 
1931



At last, the true Proletarian Revolution, not the pathetic failure of the English peasantry in 1381 or 1640, not the hopeless collapse into Terror of the French peasantry after 1789 and again in 1871, not the Wagnerian anarchy of Leipzig in 1848 or the disorganised hopelessness of St Petersburg in 1905, but at last, long live Marx and Engels, Arise Ye Starvelings From Your Slumbers, the day of overthrowing that bourgeois Jew Kerensky is here, the Bolshevik revolution, in all its soon-to-be-Stalinist glory, begun today in 1917 (according to the old Russian calendar, which the revolution would throw out, and that explains why the "October Revolution" actually happened in November)



And speaking of Stalinist glory, the peace talks to end the 
Vietnam War (which is a nice way of saying: the conference at which South Vietnam, with its principal ally America, agreed the terms for its acceptance of defeat) began in Paris, today in 1968 (now what would be a suitable piece of saxophone music to accompany that event?)





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