The High Priest of Self-Centeredness

There are two new biographies of Ayn Rand on the market. She of the icy glare, the modified Hitler hairdo, the large dollar-sign brooch. Her philosophy behaved more like a religion or a cult, with fierce dogmas and sudden excommunications. But her devotees are legion. Former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan was one of the earliest, sitting at her feet during her living room sermonettes in the early days in New York. And her books have sold millions of copies, mostly, it seems, to disgruntled and arrested adolescents who think nobody understands them.

Rand was traumatized by the Russian Revolution. Her family lost everything when the Bolsheviks took over. Impoverishment at the hands of Russian governments has shaped some of the greatest and most peculiar literature we have, from Conrad to Nabokov (his sister was Ayn Rand's best friend). None, perhaps, as odd as Rand's. Nabokov's peculiarities are well cataloged in A Book of Ages. Had these Rand biographies been published earlier I would have included more about her. She preached holy individualism, and fixated on muscular, dominant males in her novels, yet she kept her husband in a state of servility. He was fully informed about her twice weekly sexual intercourse with her lover and deputy. She made Frank wear a bell on his shoes so she could hear his movements around the house. During the 1970s her Wednesday evenings were devoted to watching Charlie's Angels. Odd doesn't begin to describe her.

The Revolution

On November 7th, 1917, the Bolsheviks overthrew the short-lived democratic government that had replaced the Tsarist government, putting in place a ragtag, ruthless, disorganized, incompetent, religiously committed but fanatically irreligious Soviet government that nobody thought would last three months, much less 70 years. It lasted far longer than the Thousand Year Reich of the Nazis, who had superior planning and machinery, not to mention far better art direction. In the end it was hard to distinguish the heroic statues promoting the two violently opposed ideologies. The two systems weren't that different in their design and operation. Both kleptocracies, both wonderfully efficient at appropriating property and killing their citizens.

During the Twenties capitalists didn't sleep at night, worrying about the Red Menace, expecting a Revolution to occur here any day. Communism made the Nazis seem far more attractive to people like Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh and the Duke of Windsor, something I note in A Book of Ages. When the Crash came in 1929 Capitalism appeared doomed. For three years, the Hoover administration waited patiently for the economy to revive itself magically, but it didn't. It turned out that money hidden away by plutocrats was no more useful at stimulating an economy than money stolen by Bolsheviks.

Then on November 8th, 1932, FDR was elected president. He quickly betrayed his fellow patricians and rewrote the rulebook. His regulatory system presided over the best half century the US or any nation ever enjoyed. Until Ronald Reagan arrived and put things back to where they were before. But pure, unopposed capitalism is uninteresting on its own. It doesn't galvanize people. Twenty years after its death, Communism remains the energizing philosophy of an important part of the American political spectrum––not the left, but the right. They love it still. It's why they exist, even when it isn't there.

Guy Fawkes

Today is Guy Fawkes Day, celebrated in England with bonfires and with stuffed effigies that children use to extort money and sweets.

On November 5th 1605 Guy Fawkes was caught leaving a rented cellar adjacent to the Houses of Parliament where a subsequent search discovered 36 barrels of gunpowder, enough explosives to break all the windows within a kilometer's radius and exterminate the Mother of Parliaments and King James I during the State Opening scheduled for that day. The Catholic conspirators also planned to kidnap the royal children. They expected a popular uprising to follow that would restore the kingdom to the Catholic faith. If they had succeeded the King James Bible would, like the breed of spaniels, have been named after James's son Charles instead. Unless, of course, the kidnapping had succeeded as well; in that event, who knows. History is a mare's nest of causes and effects.

James I appears once in A Book of Ages. Charles I also appears once. Fawkes doesn't appear at all, but does feature prominently in the film "V for Vendetta." Some consider Guy Fawkes the patron saint of anarchists and pyromaniacs. What the anarchists couldn't achieve, Parliament achieved, at least partly, by legal means, when they beheaded Charles I in 1649.

Did Not Invent Levis

I just read the obituary of Claude Levi-Strauss, the French anthropologist who died last Friday in Paris. He was 100. Why didn't I include him in the book? Why indeed.

Although he didn't invent Levis (that was a different Levi Strauss entirely) Claude L-S changed the way we thought about humanity by asking questions that sounded fundamental and were. "Who are we? How did we come to be be in this time and place?" Questions which conjure the same thoughts of simultaneity raised by A Book of Ages. If I ever get asked to publish a French edition I might have greater latitude to include the kind of public intellectual they have in France. Not pundits but thinkers. If Letterman were on TV in France, Claude Levi-Strauss would have been a regular guest.

Walter Cronkite

Walter Cronkite was born on this day in 1916, in St. Joseph, Missouri. The family lived in Missouri until he was ten, when they moved to Houston. He was a Boy Scout and went to church. The family changed denominations three times when he was a kid, finally settling on Episcopalian. Young Walter was a member of a youth branch of the Freemasons. He joined things. He joined a theatre group in college; two friends in the company went on to successful film careers. He wrote for the newspaper at the University of Texas, but he dropped out of college in his junior year to become a newsman, and he was a newsman for the rest of his life. He was 20 years old.

Cronkite was more trustworthy than glamorous. One doubts he would be given an anchor chair today, not in any major TV market anyway. Not pretty enough. He didn't have the jawline or the hair for it. He wore a mustache. He exuded affability tempered with seriousness, tolerance (up to a point; no tolerance for bullshit,) sincerity, sympathy, judgment, and what used to be called "sound Midwestern values." Although that term has suffered noticeably in recent years. When he gave his opinion, as he did in his report on the Vietnam War in the aftermath of the Tet Offensive, it was a departure from form and done only after careful sifting of evidence and information. He'd been lied to; we all had. As I mentioned in a post just the other day, the Johnson administration had decided to spin the dispatches from the war zone. The president himself had lied us into the war. For a man from Missouri, especially a newsman, this was intolerable. It demanded a reality check, and he delivered one.

Those who downplay Cronkite's plausibility today or call him biased tend to be implausible and biased themselves, many of them tied in with a cable news organization that was created to spin the daily news feed, disguising it as "fair and balanced." Cronkite recognized their product as packaged, adulterated baloney, and said so, but he no longer had an anchor desk to broadcast from. Walter Cronkite appears four times in A Book of Ages.

Snapshots

Today is the birthday of the photographer Walker Evans, born in St. Louis in 1903. His father abandoned the family when he was 15, and it was around this time that Walker picked up his first camera. It was a Kodak Brownie. He took it around Toledo, everywhere he went, taking pictures of people unaware, "like a spy" is how he later described it. He spent a year in Paris, thought about being a painter, then settled in New York among the Bohemians. His first published photographs were of the Brooklyn Bridge. They appeared in a 1930 book of poems by Hart Crane. Evans was 27. Most of his photography was of people, though, people sitting on stoops, people working, people sitting on subways who didn't know they were having their picture taken. He took pictures of working men's bedrooms and empty houses.

In 1935 he embarked on a tour of the South, paid for by FDR's Farm Security Administration. Until this time poverty was a private matter, something that wasn't reported in newspapers, wasn't measured, certainly wasn't shown. The photographs appeared in a book accompanied by a text written by James Agee. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men wasn't about famous men at all, but about invisible men––poor men, women and children. Most didn't like having their pictures taken, some were too worn down to protest. Viewers took umbrage, but it brought poverty into the open where people felt obliged to do something about it. For a while anyway. After the Depression was over, poverty went back in the back of the closet. After World War II, Walker Evans spent twenty years taking pictures for Fortune magazine, and he and his wife moved to Connecticut. He appears five times in A Book of Ages.

(Other photographers appear in the book too: Henri Cartier-Bresson, Ansel Adams, Mathew Brady, Louis Lumiére, Alfred Stieglitz, Alberto Korda, Lewis Carroll, Annie Lebowitz, Abraham Zapruder among them.)

Shaw, Icarus and Keith Richards

I am reminded by today's Writer's Almanac that George Bernard Shaw died on this day in 1950. He was 94, too old to be climbing trees, but that's what he was doing. Not whimsically or playfully. He died of injuries after falling out of the tree he was pruning.

Which makes me think of Keith Richards who fell out of a palm tree while vacationing in Fiji in 2006. Richards survived, and he continues to defy the actuaries' predictions about his lifespan. Based upon his smoking and drinking and carrying on they had arrived at a life expectancy of 52. He is now pushing 66. I doubt he will rival George Bernard Shaw, though, who was a teetotaler, vegetarian and a bit obsessive about physical fitness. I am sure pruning a tree seemed a sensible thing to do at the time. Mr. Richards and Mr. Shaw appear several times each in A Book of Ages.

Cheerleading and Unwarranted Optimism

I learned during my random reading this morning that cheerleading was invented 111 years ago today. At the University of Minnesota of all places, which makes me either proud or embarrassed or both. There are no cheerleaders or former cheerleaders in A Book of Ages. George W. Bush's cheerleading career was edited out last fall. W. did have an interesting rollercoaster life, full of cautionary notes and alarming incidents. He might have been an excellent baseball commissioner.

It was on this day in 1967 that Lyndon B. Johnson and his privy counselors decided that Americans should be fed a sugar-coated account of "progress" in the Vietnam War. Cheerleading began almost immediately. The daily briefings began to sound chirpier, more upbeat, like something being written by a chamber of commerce booster or a public relations writer.

The war was a trap Johnson had been caught in. After Truman's experience at the hands of the McCarthyites no Democrat dared step back from a fight, afraid of being labelled "soft on Communism". So in we waded, right up to our necks. Johnson didn't send himself or his wife or daughter to fight and die there, but he did sacrifice his beloved Great Society to avoid losing a war. Vietnam has become a metaphor for avoidable failure and political quagmire, taking the place of the term "albatross" which had been put into service by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the 1800s.

The unnecessary war is a recurring theme in A Book of Ages, seen through episodes in the lives of LBJ and JFK, Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr. who got into fights over it, Daniel Ellsberg, and Richard Nixon who sent his plumbers after Ellsberg, and Bob Woodward who told us about the plumbers, and Henry Kissinger who won a Nobel after washing his hands thoroughly, and Walter Cronkite and one Lieutenant Calley. We see Lieutenant Calleys in every war. A sad business all around, but probably no more rife with cockups than any war, except that it was foolish to begin with. Like Iraq, some say. Which should remind us why we need newspapers and clear eyed journalists, even though they are expensive to send places. They are our eyes and ears.

Stephen Crane

It's Stephen Crane's birthday. He was born in 1871 and died in 1900 at age 28. Several diseases and conditions conspired to kill him, but his life had already worn him to the bone. He went everywhere covering wars and exploring hardships, acquiring yellow fever and malaria and no doubt a level of pessimism that made it harder to survive his illnesses. A Book of Ages began with the details of his short life. I was curious about people who lived to be famous and then died young. He appears in the book four times, writing his masterpiece at age 24, being shipwrecked, marrying a former bordello owner, settling in England, writing his way out of serial poverty––he told a friend he couldn't afford a typewriter. Stephen Crane is the model for every modern writer-adventurer, the reckless youths who travel to dangerous places and eat strange things and write about them for our safe amusement.

Selling a Better Afterlife

On October 31st, 1517, Martin Luther composed a ninety-five point complaint against the Catholic church and nailed it to the door of his church in Wittenberg, Germany. He was especially angry that the church charged people to see holy relics and sold “indulgences” in exchange for fewer years in Purgatory. He was 33 and had no idea what he was unleashing. He considered himself a Catholic till the day he died. Luther appears one time in A Book of Ages.

Halloween is as good a day as any to think about the afterlife. Where can you buy one? Are the specs guaranteed by any reputable rating agency? Why aren't reliable afterlifes available through your bank or insurance agent? (Discuss.)

The Crash

Eighty years ago this week Wall Street laid an egg. That, at least, was the famous headline in Variety. It began on a Thursday, Black Thursday, October 24th. Thursday was followed by Black Friday. Then Black Monday, when losses set in in earnest. By the time Black Tuesday closed stocks traded on the New York Exchange had lost 17% of their value. And the slide would continue, jigging up and then dropping like a stone into 1931. The lives of millions of Americans changed dramatically. Some knew it immediately. For others the realization would dawn more slowly, like a landscape adjusting to a drought. Even those who survived relatively intact, employed and fed and housed, carried scars from the experience.

Writing this book I developed the habit of looking at people's dates. Looking at anyone's life that began in the few decades before the Crash, rich or poor, famous or not, you can think about 1929 as a pivot point. It's been said that people who purchased stocks in 1929 never saw them recover their value during their lifetime. The Crash, and then the Depression, created several generations characterized by caution and insecurity. But there were still risk takers. Some took chances on new ideas because they had nothing to lose. Ideas were their capital. And ruin was commonplace enough to make failure less stigmatizing. There was less to be cautious with. A generation that had grown up during the Depression was perhaps readier––fatalistically or realistically––to undertake a World War. Perhaps their parents made that war more likely by being afraid to confront it early and boldly.

Great lives have defining moments. FDR arrived at his inauguration prepared to deal with a paralyzing crisis because he had experienced his own in 1921, at age 39, when polio took away the use of his legs. He had the necessary courage and resolution, but it was Eleanor whose eyes and ears told him what was happening on Main Streets and back streets across America. Harry Truman had already experienced the failure of a small business. He'd been there. William F. Buckley Jr. was four years old at the time of the Crash, living in Paris with his family, and had yet to learn English. His family had experienced reverses, mostly because of the revolution in Mexico, though they were hardly paupers. Far from it. Winston Churchill, who visited Wall Street on Black Thursday, lost most of his money and began writing books for a living. He was 55 and considered a failure by most observers. Ninety year-old John D. Rockefeller lost half of his fortune but still had enough left to build Rockefeller Center, found the Museum of Modern Art, restore Colonial Williamsburg and buy enough of Jackson Hole to create a national park. Richard Nixon never forgot being poor and eating ketchup sandwiches for lunch. Lyndon Johnson saw poverty firsthand. He was a 21 year-old school teacher in 1929. F. Scott Fitzgerald's father had lost his business when Scott was a boy. Scott's fiction forever balanced on that razor's edge between euphoria and ruin. In 1929 he was spending much of his income on Zelda's care in private asylums. The Crash informed the films made by Frank Capra and John Ford, the novels written by John Steinbeck and Ralph Ellison, the poems of Langston Hughes, the film performances of Henry Fonda and James Stewart, the songs written by Yip Harburg and Johnny Mercer and sung by Billie Holiday, the music composed by Aaron Copland. References to the Great Depression appear at different points in many lives throughout A Book of Ages. It all began during one late October week eighty years ago.

The Satirist's Satirist

Evelyn Waugh was born on this day in 1903. He was the second son of a prominent London publisher whom he cordially loathed. It was a childhood of mutual disappointment. In true English lower-upper-middle-class fashion Evelyn worked very hard at appearing not to try or to care and unsurprisingly failed at everything. He scorned everything valued by the society he grew up in while secretly coveting it all. He was sent down from Oxford after two years, considered becoming an illustrator, learned fancy cabinet-making, failed as a schoolteacher, attended parties with the Bright Young Things of the time. When he was 24 he attempted suicide by swimming out to sea. He turned back after being stung by a jellyfish.

At age 26, on a madcap impulse, he married the daughter of a Lord. She was also named Evelyn, and they became known as She Evelyn and He Evelyn, a matched set of semi-androgynous wits. He was 27 when they divorced. It was a cruel blow to his ego, but by this time he'd become a bestselling novelist, turning his disappointments into fiction.

His style is one of joyful malice, but reading about his life it's hard to tell whether he or the world was guilty of the first cruelty. Was he unloved or unlovable? Judging by his letters and books he seems thoroughly misanthropic, but he was much loved and had many friends. He climbed into the fashionable Country House set he admired but dressed and behaved in an aggressively unfashionable manner, which outraged everyone––but amused them privately. His most successful novel was probably his worst, a soppy, sentimental hymn to a rapidly declining aristocracy. His best novels are his earliest, funniest, bitterest ones, Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies and Scoop. Evelyn Waugh appears six times in A Book of Ages, and could have appeared a half dozen more.

It's worth noting that he passed his gifts along to his children. One son, Auberon, became an even more cynical, amusing, pitiless scold than his father.

Mao Played by a Tenor

On October 27, 1987, Mao Zedong was played by a tenor wearing a Mao suit in the premier of John Adams’ Nixon In China at the Houston Grand Opera. Mao had been dead for eleven years. Nixon was 74 and still living, but didn't attend, nor did Madame Mao, who was in a Chinese prison for her part in the Cultural Revolution. (The Cultural Revolution, by the way, was not a reenactment of the Italian Renaissance.) The Nixon part was sung by a baritone. My favorite number from the opera is The Chairman Dances. Mao Zedong appears five times in A Book of Ages. Fellow revolutionaries Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Ché Guevara, Malcom X, George Washington, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Robespierre and Jesus of Nazareth also appear several times each.

John and Abigail

Twenty-eight year-old John Adams married Abigail Smith on October 25, 1764. The lawyer, founding father and second president appears five times in A Book of Ages.

I Get a Kick Out of You

On October 24, 1937, Cole Porter went for a ride at the Piping Rock Club on Long Island. The horse shied and fell on top of him, crushing both of his legs. While waiting to be rescued he passed the time trying to come up with witty lyrics to the song “At Long Last Love.” He was 46, and would live the remainder of his life in constant pain. Cole Porter appears six times in A Book of Ages.

Arthur Rimbaud: Poet, Arms Dealer

On October 22, 1885, the former poet Arthur Rimbaud wrote to his mother from Ethiopia, telling her he was giving up coffee trading in favor of gun-running. Rimbaud appears three times in A Book of Ages.

Jackie and Ari

On this day in 1968, Aristotle Onassis married Jackie Kennedy. He was 62. She was 38. After five years as the grieving widow of a martyred president she suddenly became Jackie O. Her new husband was rich, magnetic, mysterious, but to a public accustomed to pairing beauty with glamor he seemed strange and a bit creepy. Aristotle Onassis appears six times in A Book of Ages, emigrating penniless from Turkey, working as a dishwasher, smuggling cigarettes and opium, sleeping with Evita Peron and Maria Callas.

George Sand and Frederic Chopin

In October 1836, Frederic Chopin met George Sand at a party at the Paris apartment of Franz Liszt’s mistress. Chopin was 26, Sand was 32. She was assertive and self-possessed and he took an instant dislike to her. In spite of this they became one of the most famous couples in the history of art and literature. He played the piano and coughed a lot. She wrote sensational novels and wore men's clothes. Having seen the film Impromptu I can't help picturing Hugh Grant and Judy Davis. Grant is prettier, but Davis is more interesting. Together and separately, Chopin and Sand appear seven times in A Book of Ages.

Tonstant Weader Fwowed Up

On October 20, 1928, Dorothy Parker reviewed "The House at Pooh Corner" in the New Yorker magazine. It was an inspired pairing. A. A. Milne was a cozy writer most famous for light verse about bunnies and honeybees. Parker was the most savage wit of the Algonquin round table, whose remarks were avidly recorded by the New York columnists. Parker's book reviewing byline was Constant Reader. Not surprisingly Parker found Milne's book about stuffed animals painfully twee, and she decided to say so in the appropriate baby voice. When she got to the part where Pooh is feeling "hummy" she announced that "Tonstant Weader fwowed up." But books of this type are immune to sarcasm. Pooh's devotees thought Parker was just being mean. A new book of Pooh stories has just appeared, with a new author channeling Milne's sensibility and a new illustrator imitating the inimitable Shepard. Ms. Parker is no doubt throwing up in her grave. Dorothy Parker appears six times in A Book of Ages, Christopher Robin Milne also appears six times.

Burning the Husband's Erotica

On October 19, 1890, explorer, Orientalist, and translator of erotica, Richard Francis Burton died in Trieste. He was the first non-Muslim to visit the holy city of Mecca, completing the trek in mufti, speaking the native tongues. Burton also spent years searching for the source of the Nile (it was ultimately discovered by his erstwhile exploring partner, John Hanning Speke) but he died in more mundane circumstances. Hoping to save his reputation, his wife lit a bonfire in the backyard of their house in Mortlake outside London. Among the things she burned were his unpublished translation of the erotic classic The Scented Garden, which he’d been working on for 14 years. She was offered the astounding sum of £6,000 to publish it. Burton was 69. Burton appears four times in A Book of Ages.

Tchaikovsky's Last Symphony

On October 16th, 1893, Piotr Ilyach Tchaikovsky premiered his Sixth Symphony in St. Petersburg. He was full of plans: trips to Odessa and Moscow, an opera based on a story by George Eliot, or perhaps The Merchant of Venice. The symphony was a great success, but audiences were puzzled by how it ended. One critic sensed a premonition of death in the Adagio. Nine days later the composer was dead of cholera at age 53. Tchaikovsky appears four times in A Book of Ages.

Marie Antoinette

On October 16, 1793, Marie Antoinette was guillotined in the center of what is now the Place de la Concorde in Paris. She was 37. During the previous four years in prison her hair had turned white. The charges that led to her death were high treason and illicit sexual practices, but most of the resentment was over how much she spent on jewelry. Marie Antoinette appears twice in A Book of Ages.

Lincoln's Beard

On October 15, 1860 Abraham Lincoln received a letter from eleven year-old Grace Bedell of Westfield, New York, in which she advised him to grow a beard. He did so, and a month later won the Presidency. He was 51. Abraham Lincoln appears eight times in A Book of Ages.

The First Family

In October 1962, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, 26 year-old lounge pianist Vaughn Meader recorded a comedy album. In those days people used to sit around in apartments, drinking cocktails and eating canapés, listening to comedians on the stereo. Meader called his album The First Family. It featured his dead-on imitation of President Kennedy, speaking in that odd way he had––half Boston sophisticate, half Cape Cod fisherman. The album was a huge hit, selling 200,000 copies in its first week, 7.5 million in 12 months, and winning the Grammy for album of the year. JFK, supposedly, sent a hundred copies as Christmas gifts. Meader appeared on Ed Sullivan. Then, on November 22, 1963, Kennedy was assassinated, and it was all over. Comedian Lenny Bruce sighed and said “Vaughn Meader is screwed.” Meador lived another 41 years, playing the occasional piano gig in small bars. He never did his JFK bit again. Vaughan Meader appears once in A Book of Ages.

William the Conqueror

On October 14, 1066, William, Duke of Normandy, defeated Harold, the last of the Saxon kings of England, at the Battle of Hastings. The decisive moment comes when William pretended to withdraw his force, luring the Saxons out of their defensive position. At age 38, Duke William became known as William the Conqueror and King of England. He appears once in A Book of Ages.

Nero

On this day in 54 A.D. Nero was made Emperor of Rome on the death of Claudius. He was 16. According to Tacitus, Claudius was poisoned by Nero’s mother Agrippina. The helpfulness of mothers is a recurring theme in A Book of Ages.

Paul Isn't Dead

Forty years ago this week a rumor raced around the world that Paul McCartney was dead. He was 27. The main evidence, apparently, was the message heard by teenage fans who played Revolution 9 backwards. McCartney had also been photographed walking ominously barefoot on the cover of Abbey Road, and there was that hand of benediction over his head on the cover of Sgt. Pepper. How could anybody doubt it?

The rumor began in September with an article in a student newspaper at Duke University. Then on October 12, a listener called WKNR FM in Detroit, announcing that "Paul is dead", and supplying elaborate evidence, including the phrase "Turn me on, Dead Man" on Revolution 9. Two days later an article spelling out more details appeared at the University of Michigan. On the 21st, an overnight disc jockey discussed it incoherently and at length on WABC in New York. Celebrity lawyer F. Lee Bailey hosted an hour-long television program exploring the evidence, but nobody went to the effort to pick up the phone and call McCartney. If Paul wasn't dead, though, the Beatles were. The band had broken up, and Paul verified the fact in an October 24th magazine interview. The interview appeared in LIFE magazine. Paul McCartney appears seven times in A Book of Ages.

(I remember hearing this rumor, just as I remember hearing about the Kennedy assassination and the murders committed by the Manson Family, on the school bus.)

Naked Lunch

William Burroughs published his seminal work in October 1959, in Paris, where novels of this sort were usually published. Then to be smuggled back into England and the U.S. in the suitcases of graduates of the Sorbonne, and young women who had gone to France to "be finished." I have a feeling, though, that the last of the Beat novelists would have blushed at some of the passages in Updike and Roth. Despite looking as if he'd slept the previous night in a seedy hotel, Burroughs was an heir to the Burroughs Adding Machine fortune. He was 45 when he published Naked Lunch. He traveled everywhere with a notebook in which he recorded the things he was doing, reading and thinking in separate columns. In 1994, when he was 80, he did a TV commercial for Nike. Burroughs appears six times in A Book of Ages.

Chez Panisse and Gourmet Magazine

Alice Waters’ restaurant Chez Panisse entered the public consciousness thirty four years ago after a rave review appeared in the October 1975 issue of Gourmet magazine. Waters was 31. Suddenly everything changed. Foodies began to camp outside the restaurant. People started calling from other time zones asking for a reservation. Alice's restaurant is still there, just a few steps up from a busy commercial strip in Berkeley, but Gourmet magazine is ceasing publication this month after 68 years.

I still remember getting my first illustration assignment from Gourmet, twenty years ago. I called their offices on Lexington in the Upper East Side of New York from a phone booth a few blocks away. It was pouring rain. We had just spent an hour at the Frick. The art director was very nice, but too busy to see my portfolio, but he assigned me a feature illustration over the phone. I think it was a map of a wine region. I was 33, and it was a big deal appearing in such a magazine. That winter, on a trip to San Francisco, we drove over the Bay Bridge to Berkeley and had lunch at Chez Panisse. It was delicious. Alice Waters appears five times in A Book of Ages.

The Death of Che Guevara

On October 8, 1967, Che Guevara was leading a small group of revolutionaries in a remote valley in Bolivia when he was captured by government forces. As the soldiers moved in he shouted “Do not shoot! I am Che Guevara and worth more to you alive than dead.” He was executed early the next afternoon. He was 39. The CIA agent who had been hunting for him took Guevera’s Rolex for a souvenir. Che Guevara, motorcyclist, physician, revolutionary and t-shirt icon, appears five times in A Book of Ages.