In El Pais, a story of how the Spanish Civil War became a training ground for the spies of the Cold War.

When, in 1937, The Times of London published an interview with General Francisco Franco, those in the know will have had a hearty chuckle. For the man standing next to the caudillo was a Soviet spy.

The article was reprinted in Spanish newspaper ABC several days later. At the time, Franco was the man spearheading the war against the Republic. The man in the picture next to him, who is looking at Franco with an intense look of concentration on his face as he points at a map, was supposedly a journalist. The photo shows him to be an impeccably dressed man in his thirties. He is thin, with dark eyes, sharp features and combed back hair. Protruding from his top jacket pocket is a handkerchief, coquettishly arranged, giving him a dandyish appearance that was to the liking of the Burgos authorities—for it added a touch of respectability to the fact that an Englishman was taking such an interest in the future dictator and his opinions.

The hilarity the photo caused the spy’s bosses must have been even greater when they found out that Franco had seen fit to award him with a military cross of merit. Franco’s heads of press liked his balanced, well-written chronicles, which were somewhat favorable to the fascist cause.

The reporter’s name was Harold Adrian Russell Philby, although his friends preferred to call him Kim.

Gérard Prunier in Le Monde Diplomatique:

Why is the international response so weak? The US position is ambiguous. Beneath the firm entreaties is a mixture of tricks, double talk and impotence. Since 11 September 2001 Washington has considered that Khartoum has earned a good behaviour ticket in the fight against terrorism. The Sudanese secret services have a good cop, bad cop routine in which Nafi Ali Nafi, former interior minister and adviser to Bashir, plays the bad cop, while his deputy, Salah Abdallah “Gosh”, plays the good guy. Ali Nafi is denounced as an extremist while Gosh (one of the main authors of repression in Darfur) is invited to discussions with the CIA and considered an ally in the war against terror.

The practical results of this compromising collaboration have yet to be seen. Washington’s official declarations remain firm but are not followed up by concrete measures even when encouraged by President George Bush’s own political allies. California’s Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, passed a law obliging California public bodies to sell any shares in US or foreign companies working in Sudan. This disinvestment policy, which enabled human rights activists to force the Canadian oil company Talisman Energy to withdraw from Sudan in 2003, was not supported by the White House. The first victim of US double-dealing was Bush’s own special envoy, Andrew Natsios, former director of the US Agency for International Development. When he ran out of resources he threatened Bush with a mysterious plan B if plan A, which was UN deployment, failed. When pressed by journalists, Natsios was unable to provide any details about plan B.

Amitava Kumar in The Hindu:

I BEGAN writing my novel Home Products in the summer of 2003, a few weeks before my wife gave birth to our first child.

But even before I began work on the book I bought a black hardcover sketchbook. In its pages, I started writing down whatever I liked in what I happened to be reading. Among the earliest journal entries is the opening line of a review that had appeared, in the New York Times, of the film “The Hours”. This was also the opening line of a novel by Virginia Woolf. I cut it out and pasted it in my journal. “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”

There are no notes around that neatly cut out quote but I can imagine why it had appealed to a first-time novelist. You read Woolf’s line and are suddenly aware of the brisk entry into a fully-formed world. No fussing around with irrelevant detail and back-story. And I began to write various opening lines.

In my mind there was an image of a man sitting in a room in a prison near Patna. When he gets out, he would like to make a film. But nothing I wrote promised a swift entry into a fictional world that already existed, and I went over the same lines for at least a fortnight without any success.

Erik Stostad in ScienceNOW:

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform today released documents edited by political appointees in the Bush Administration that “appear to portray a systematic White House effort to minimize the significance of climate change,” according to committee staff. Current and former appointees who made the changes appeared today before the panel and testified that they were trying to introduce scientific uncertainty in the reports.

The hearing followed one in January by the committee on whether the White House had politicized climate science (ScienceNOW, 30 January). Last year, Representative Henry Waxman (D-CA), who chairs the committee, had requested that the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) turn over documents related to reports on climate science and policy. At the first hearing, Waxman complained that his staff had received only a handful of documents. Last month, CEQ agreed to release more documents and has provided eight boxes’ worth to the committee.

In today’s nearly 5-hour questioning of witnesses, Waxman and other representatives focused on changes made to drafts of three documents. Beginning in 2001, CEQ officials suggested 113 edits to the Administration’s draft Strategic Plan of the Climate Change Science Program that Waxman says played down the role of human activities in global warming. Another 181 changes either exaggerated or emphasized scientific uncertainties, such as changing “will” to “may” in the draft sentence “Warming temperatures will also affect Arctic land areas.”

Halleh Ghorashi in signandsight:

I first saw Ayaan Hirsi Ali in 2002, when she appeared in a discussion on Dutch television. At that time I saw a strong woman who fought for her ideas: someone who dared to distance herself from her traditional Islamic background and in so doing, positioned herself against the traditional Islamic community in the Netherlands. Her arguments on the incompatibility of Islamic belief and women’s emancipation were sharp.

I found Hirsi Ali’s approach to the emancipation of Islamic women attractive and identified with her for different reasons. Firstly because 18 years ago I left my homeland Iran as a refugee from an Islamic regime, whose suppression in the name of Islam I had experienced both because of my political background (as a leftist) and because of my gender. Secondly, I was also greatly concerned with the emancipation of women, particularly of women who share my own background: women from Islamic countries.

However, my identification with Ayaan did not last long. Someone I initially considered a pioneer for the emancipation of Islamic women turned out to hold dogmatic views that left little room for nuances. I soon realized that Ayaan had become part of the dominant “rightist” discourse on Islam in the Netherlands that pictures Islamic migrants as problems and enemies of the nation. Then I realized that our roads had diverged. But before pursuing my discussion, let me put it in context.

In the Economist:

AT SOME point in his career—neither date nor time being important—Jean Baudrillard took a large red cloth, draped it over a chair in his apartment, and sat on it. He may have smoked or thought for a while, or scratched his nose; a large, doughlike nose, supporting glasses. He then got up, leaving an impression of his body behind. The image pleased him: so much so, that he took a photograph.

Since he made no comment on the event (beyond the fact that the chair was later broken), the exact details are conjectural. But by putting the cloth on the chair, and sitting on it, Mr Baudrillard added to the plethora of signs, objects and symbolic acts that made up, in his philosophical system, the whole woof and warp of the 20th century. By getting up, he left behind a “simulacrum” of himself: the truth, as he teasingly put it, that hid the fact that there was no truth there. And by photographing the chair he made it “hyperreal”: an image, which could be reproduced unendingly, of an object that claimed to have meaning and, in fact, had none.

Then he went to lunch.

From MSNBC:

Nuthatches appear to have learned to understand a foreign language — chickadee. It’s not unusual for one animal to react to the alarm call of another, but nuthatches seem to go beyond that — interpreting the type of alarm and what sort of predator poses a threat. When a chickadee sees a predator, it issues warning call — a soft “seet” for a flying hawk, owl or falcon, or a loud “chick-a-dee-dee-dee” for a perched predator.

The “chick-a-dee” call can have 10 to 15 “dees” at the end and varies in sound to encode information on the type of predator. It also calls in other small birds to mob the predator, Christopher Templeton of the University of Washington said in a telephone interview. “In this case the nuthatch is able to discriminate the information in this call,” said Templeton, a doctoral candidate.

More here.

From Nature:

A map of one of the strangest and most complex entities in mathematics should be a powerful new tool for both mathematicians and physicists pursuing a unified theory of space, time and matter. The strange ‘thing’ that has been mapped is a ‘Lie group’ called E8 — a set of maths that describes the symmetry of an (unimaginable to most) 57-dimensional object.

The creation of this map, which took 77 hours on a supercomputer, resulted in a matrix of 453,060 ? 453,060 cells, containing more than 205 billion entries — “all related in intricate and complex ways”, says Jeffrey Adams, the project leader and a mathematician at the University of Maryland. This represents 60 gigabytes of data, enough data to store 45 days of MP3 music files, or fill a piece of paper the size of Manhattan (about 60 square kilometres). The human genome takes up 1 gigabyte.

The finished product is essentially a database of information, which should come in very handy to theoretical physicists tackling grand unified theories of everything. “Now that it’s done, mathematicians and physicists can use the results very easily,” says Ian Stewart of the University of Warwick, UK. Adams agrees: “It’s going to be a fabulous tool.”

More here.

Anita Flejter. “Why?”. 2005

Linocut.

More here.

Doug Johnstone reviews The Eye: A Natural History by Simon Ings, in the London Times:

To read this book has an odd and unsettling side effect. This is not through any fault of Simon Ings, who is a fine science writer, his prose precise and clear, his research meticulous and comprehensive. Nor is there any problem with the subject matter – the eye is a truly fascinating organ, its complex development, myriad forms and idiosyncratic workings across the animal kingdom making for a truly absorbing read.

Furthermore, Ings argues convincingly that the eye has had a profound effect on our language, perception, philosophy and even consciousness. No, the strange side-effect is brought about because – after reading 300 pages on how the eye works, its little quirks and foibles, its often counter-intuitive processes and processing – you become almost compulsively aware of what your own eyes are doing all the time, which is a bit off-putting.

Try reading this sentence without your eyes jolting from position to position across the page. You can’t, can you? That’s because every third of a second your eye “saccades”, or snaps from location to location, a restless activity brought about by the need to detect motion.

“The eye exists to detect movement,” Ings writes. “Any image, perfectly stabilised on the retina, vanishes. Our eyes cannot see stationary objects, and must tremble constantly to bring them into view.”

This extensive natural history of the eye is full of such delightful and disturbing little revelations.

More here.

Reviewed by Anita Sethi in The Independent:

“The rasping feeling of loss” percolates the pages of this powerful debut novel. Tahmima Anam traces a “country splitting”, in the 1971 Bangladesh war of independence, through the breaking heart of a widow. Rehana Haque loses custody of her two children, Maya and Sohail, to the care of her brother-in-law in Karachi on the grounds of “her grief, her poverty, her youth”. As she struggles for the hearts of her children, so a nation struggles to be custodian of its own fate.

When war breaks out, rumour has it that all the animals in Mirpur Zoo die of fright. But Anam’s concern is with human beings finding ways to live in the landscape of war in spite of the “cold fear” at their backs, as “twisted politics” intrudes upon the intimately personal at every turn.

The insidious power of the novel is in a sense of foreboding imbued in both human beings and inanimate objects, which endows the storytelling with a rhythmic, assured force – the chronicle of deaths foretold. Huts tilt towards the water, “as though aware of their fate”; for every monsoon, the rivers steal vast chunks of the land, and yet every year “hopeful little shacks” are rebuilt.

More here.

Enda O’Doherty in The Dublin Review of Books:

Avec Camus, by Jean Daniel.

In August 1944, as General Dietrich von Choltitz defied Hitler’s orders to burn Paris and surrendered the city to Free French and Resistance commanders, two journalists and former résistants, one in his thirty-first year, the other just turned forty-one, were among a small group who took possession of the rue Réaumur premises of the Wehrmacht newspaper the Pariser Zeitung, so hastily evacuated by its former occupants that they left behind their hand grenades.

Albert Camus and Pascal Pia’s acquaintance went back to 1938, when Pia, already an experienced newspaperman, had hired the young Camus as a secrétaire de rédaction (subeditor) on Alger Républicain, a left-wing daily established to oppose fascism and anti-Semitism and support the social and political emancipation of Algeria’s Muslims. The two worked together again at Paris-Soir in spring 1940 as France huddled behind the Maginot line awaiting Germany’s next move. When the blow came, in May, it was swift. French armies collapsed on the eastern front and on June 14th the Germans entered Paris. At first Camus followed the Paris-Soir team as they evacuated to Clermont-Ferrand, then Lyon, in the unoccupied zone. At the end of the year, however, he was laid off by his employer and in January 1941 returned with his new wife, Francine, to Algeria.

It was during a prolonged stay in the mountains of central France in 1942 and 1943, initially undertaken on doctor’s advice to treat his tuberculosis, that Camus first came into contact with active members of the Resistance. Of those he met there he was most drawn to the young Catholic poet René Leynaud, a regional leader of the Combat movement, whose passion and sincerity he found immediately appealing, in spite of their differences over religion. Leynaud was to be one of a large group of prisoners shot by the Germans in Lyon in summer 1944.

It is difficult to know with any precision when Camus himself first became active in the Resistance as in later life he seldom talked about it, but a false identity card issued in May 1943 in the name Albert Mathé suggests one possible starting point. That autumn he moved to Paris and began work as a reader with the Gallimard firm, which had published his first novel, The Outsider, and the philosophical tract The Myth of Sisyphus in the previous year. It was also about this time that Camus, introduced by Pia, joined the editorial team of the clandestine newssheet Combat, operating under the pseudonym Bauchard.

More here.

Stephen Wilson in The Dublin Review of Books:

Point To Point Navigation: A Memoir, 1964 to 2006, by Gore Vidal,

There is an old joke about a man – Murphy is as good a name as any other – whose continual name-dropping and bragging about his intimacy with the great, the good and the famous so exasperates his workmates that they resolve to expose him as a liar at the first opportunity. When Murphy announces that he is going to spend the weekend in Rome “with a few friends” and that he will tell them all about it on Monday they see their chance and gleefully club together to send one of their number to keep tabs on him and gather the necessary evidence.

At first all goes well, but once in Rome the appointed shadow loses track of his quarry and, after wandering around disconsolately for a few hours, decides that as he is in the vicinity he might as well go and see the Pope. So he joins the crowd of pilgrims in front of St Peter’s and after half an hour or so the Holy Father emerges onto his balcony, followed almost immediately by none other than Murphy. The shadow is still reeling from shock when his neighbour turns to him and asks: “Who’s that fella in the frock up there with Murphy?” This, as I have said, is not a new joke (nor indeed a very good one) but it does convey something of the experience on one level of reading a Gore Vidal memoir.

More here.

Michael Hopkin in [email protected]:

Most people tend to think of the tropics as the hottest scene on the planet when it comes to spawning new life. But Canadian zoologists have found that it is actually the world’s temperate zones where new species evolve and become extinct the fastest.

The discovery by Jason Weir and Dolph Schluter of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver threatens to overturn the theory that because tropical regions contain the greatest overall species diversity, that they must also have the fastest rates of ‘speciation’ — the emergence of new species.

“Our findings contradict the conventional view by suggesting that temperate zones, and not the tropics, are the hotbeds of speciation,” says Weir.

In Democratiya, Irfan Khawaja reviews Richard Posner’s Not a Suicide Pact: The Constitution in a Time of National Emergency.

According to Posner, rights are ‘created’ by engaging in a pragmatic cost-benefit analysis and tying this analysis in a very loose way to the generalities we find in the Constitution. In other words, when it comes to national emergencies like the current one, pragmatism requires us to ‘balance’ the interests of liberty against those of security, choose an arrangement that gets us the optimal amount of both, and find a (rough) textual rationale for doing so. ‘Ideally,’ he writes,

in the case of a right (for example the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures) that could be asserted against government measures for protecting national security, one would like to locate the point at which a slight expansion in the scope of the right would subtract more from public safety than it would add to personal liberty and a slight contraction would subtract more from personal liberty than it would add to public safety. That is the point of balance, and it determines the optimal scope of the right. (p. 31)

Unfortunately (Posner continues) American judges, with the connivance of civil libertarian ideologues, have pushed things away from the ‘point of balance,’ that is, too far in the direction of personal liberty and too far away from the requirements of national security. Though problematic enough in the case of ordinary crime, in the case of Islamist terrorism, this ‘rights fetish’ (p. 150) imperils our very existence. The time has therefore come to push things in the reverse direction (albeit only as regards Islamist terrorism). To this end, Posner argues, we should reinterpret the principle of habeas corpus to allow for the indefinite detention of suspected terrorists (p. 56); reinterpret the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution so as to deny its applicability to suspected terrorists (pp. 88-91); allow torture for purposes of intelligence-related information gathering (pp. 86-87); allow unlimited electronic surveillance (and perhaps physical searches) without warrants or probable cause (pp. 99-101); and reinterpret the First Amendment so as to allow for the censorship of ‘hate speech’ by and against Muslims (p. 124).

To some, Posner’s recommendations will sound like a sober resolution of the problem with which I opened this review. To others, the same recommendations will sound like an outright apology for dictatorship. I incline toward the latter interpretation. Despite the sobriety and sincerity of his prose, Posner’s book amounts in the end to a wild and incoherent defense of dictatorship. His arguments are premised on tacit claims he does not defend, and explicit claims he cannot defend. Once we consider and reject these claims, there turns out to be little left of the book.

Michael Wood in the LRB:

When I left the cinema I had a title of Flannery O’Connor’s running in my head: A Good Man Is Hard to Find. But there is another title that provides a much better clue to the moral preoccupations of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s first full-length film, The Lives of Others: Brecht’s Good Person of Szechuan. It was Brecht, too, who in response to the distribution of a leaflet announcing (in 1953) that the people of the DDR had ‘forfeited the confidence of the government’ wondered with mock innocence:

Would it not be easier

In that case for the government

To dissolve the people

And elect another?

‘You are a good person,’ an actress says to a Stasi captain in the film: ‘Sie sind ein guter Mensch.’ She doesn’t at this moment know he is the melancholy master of surveillance who is tracking every detail of her and her partner’s life. Is he a good person? Why is he spying on them? Have they done something to arouse the suspicion of the authorities? No, but they will. They do, or one of them does. Did we imagine the secret police of the DDR pursued people for nothing?

The Stasi captain, Gerd Wiesler, wonderfully played by Ulrich Mühe, who looks like a depressed and introverted Michel Piccoli, asks this last question near the beginning of the movie. It is in turn one of the standard, sardonic lines of Hitler’s SS, and has what is no doubt its secret sharer in the opening of Kafka’s The Trial. But Wiesler is not being sardonic, he is being sadly sincere. He knows the guilty often look innocent, but he’s not fooled. He knows that guilty people repeat their stories of innocence verbatim, and that innocent people get angry at their interrogation, while guilty people go quiet. We see him grilling a suspect on the basis of these principles, and we see him teaching his expertise at the Stasi college. The students are disturbed, but impressed. The time is 1985.

For those of you who haven’t be following, the blogosphere discussion/debate about the virtues and vices of the Economist has been drawing more and more voices into its ambit. (Donning the persona of Rudolph Hilferding, a younger Rudolph Hilferding, I suppose, I asked on a post on the Economist over at Crooked Timber, what else would we expect from the unofficial mouthpiece of international finance capital. As long as we remember its biases in full, meaning what it is likely to do to set up a story, what assumptions it makes, what relevant factors it will not consider, and filter them, the magazine is not a bad one. It’s not as good as it can be and, as DeLong rightly suggests, certainly not as good as the FT.)

Tom Scocca’s advice to Time that it not try to emulate the Economist and, especially, Henry Farrell’s spot on description of its tone seems to have started the discussion. Scocca:

The Economist is less provocative than it is aggressively boring: “The last time he ran for president John McCain spent months rolling around New Hampshire in a bus, the Straight Talk Express.” “In the absence of reliable, up-to-date information, markets go awry.” The layout is even duller—thick columns of type wrapping from page to page, like a cross between the old New Republic and the telephone book. The back page is filled with currency tables (for those who would convert the 16 different cover prices longhand). The only nod to magazine aesthetics is the sheen of the paper stock.

Stupefaction is its own form of power. “When a Garuda Indonesia airliner crashed and burst into flames at Yogyakarta airport in central Java on March 7th it naturally saddened the nation.”

Taken seriously, the content becomes inscrutable. A dispatch about Cote d’Ivoire declares that a peace agreement had settled the “vital” issue of “identification”: “Millions of Ivorians do not have identity papers, so northerners like [rebel leader Guillaume] Soro and his fighters have been obstructed from getting the Ivorian citizenship that is rightfully theirs.” Are identity papers the same thing as citizenship? How did millions of people come to be without them? The story, unperturbed, moves on, like a scene from a commuter-train window.

The audience for this is not people who care about the world, but people who believe it is important to care about the world. When other magazines say they want to be like The Economist, they do not mean they wish to be serious. They mean they wish, by whatever means, to be taken seriously.

If you think that’s harsh, here’s DeLong:

As a longtime reader of the Economist, let me just say that in the past six years I have come to the conclusion that in five important issue areas–U.S. politics, U.S. economics, finance (U.S. and global), Middle Eastern politics, and African politics–anything the Economist states that I did not already know is likely to be wrong. That’s a terrible thing to have happened.

But I think Henry Farrell’s resurrection of James Fallows on the Economist is what has really gotten people going, especially of this description by Fallows:

The other ugly English trait promoting The Economist’s success in America is the Oxford Union argumentative style. At its epitome, it involves a stance so cocksure of its rightness and superiority that it would be a shame to freight it with mere fact.

American debate contests involve grinding, yearlong concentration on one doughy issue, like arms control. The forte of Oxford-style debate is to be able to sound certain and convincing about a topic pulled out of the air a few minutes before, such as “Resolved: That women are not the fairer sex.” (The BBC radio shows “My Word” and “My Music,” carried on National Public Radio, give a sample of the desired impromptu glibness.)

Economist leaders and the covers that trumpet their message offer Americans a blast of this style. Michael Kinsley, who once worked at The Economist, wrote that the standard Economist leader gives you the feeling that the writer started out knowing that three steps must be taken immediately — and then tried to think what the steps should be.

In response to that Economist staffer Lane Greene answers back:

I’ll resist the urge to answer most of the criticisms here; the only one I’ll respond to is our oft-cited condescension and snobbishness. What bothers me about this is the assumption that a million readers are idiots, or are masochists who enjoy being condescended to by a bunch of upper-class English twits. Who is really condescending here? Us, or James Fallows, Henry Farrell and Tom Scocca, who are think that we’ve somehow snookered these million fools with nothing more than a bit of Oxford-Union sneer? If you think our readers are stupid, that is your right. We rather respect and like them.

But it is Henry Farrell’s response to this which I think gets to the heart of the matter (the whole comments describes one case that illustrates how the Economist journalistically falls short).

(There’s also a discussion over at the Economist’s own blog.)

From Guardian Unlimited:

Despite the difficulty of following a play in seven different languages, the critics have fallen in love with Tim Supple’s visually spectacular production. Acted out by a Sri Lankan and Indian cast and featuring no fewer than seven different languages, Tim Supple’s sensational and sexy version of the play incorporates song, dance and acrobatics.

Designer Sumant Jayakrishnan was widely praised and it was generally agreed that the moment when the fairies entered the stage stole the show. Charles Spencer of the Telegraph claimed it was “one of the greatest – and simplest – stage effects I have ever seen”. He was so enthused by the entire performance that he “left the theatre wanting to catch the next flight to Bombay to rekindle my own dormant love affair with the subcontinent”.

More here.

From Me and my big mouth:

I distinctly remember tackling the first few pages of The Path Unimagined over a cup of tea in my office at Waterstone’s.  An hour later my tea was cold and I was nearly half-way through the book.  When the time came to trot off to the boardroom for a meeting, I found it painful to have to put it down.  It was remarkable: funny, moving, intelligent, beautifully observed.  The amiable confessional style along with short pithy chapters with titles such as Jesus, Spam, Muhammad, Wogs and Spock, reminded me of Nigel Slater’s excellent memoir Toast.  Only with added Islam.  This was an excellent book and I was convinced it could be huge.  But not with a cover like that it wouldn’t.

Here is a small sample to give you an idea of the style and subtle humour:

I came second in the Karachi ‘Bonnie Baby’ contest.  I was wearing a black suit, white shirt and dark tie.  Smartly dressed, suave and handsome, I looked like James Bond, although I was too young to have seen either of his movies.  I was also somewhat unsteady on my feet.  People were particularly impressed by my light skin.

First prize went to the child of the organiser.  The judges were her friends.  This is absolutely typical of third-world, banana-republic unfairness. In the West, the organiser’s child would not be allowed to enter the contest.  I was denied the title of ‘Karachi’s Bonniest Baby’ by blatant nepotism.  I began my lifelong struggle against corruption and injustice.

More here.

Susan Lumenello in Harvard Magazine:

Vita: Edward Gorey
Brief life of an artful author: 1925-2000

Although he died almost seven years ago, Edward Gorey ’50 has just brought out a new book. Amphigorey Again, the fourth anthology of Gorey’s weird and wondrous tales, presents works previously unpublished and uncollected, including the saga of an admonitory hippopotamus and a meditation on the letter Z. Bad things happen to placid people.

To those with an absurdist sense of humor and fondness for the fine line, Gorey is the beloved author and illustrator of such neo-Edwardian tales as The Doubtful Guest, The Curious Sofa, and The Loathsome Couple. To television viewers, he’s the creator of the animation that opens Mystery on PBS. To theatergoers, he’s the Tony Award-winning costumer of Dracula. And to his Harvard classmates—before fame, success, and cult notoriety—Gorey was a campus dandy with a high-speed brain and large-size appetite for art, literature, and music. Born and raised in Chicago, he came to Cambridge, in that first post-World War II year, after a stint as a clerk at Utah’s Dugway Proving Ground, where the army tested poison gas.

If the military left any impact on young Gorey, it didn’t show. He arrived sporting a full-length sheepskin-lined coat, sneakers, and thick rings on his long fingers. His hair was combed forward, Roman style. A typical freshman he was not.

More here.