Thursday's Flurry of Words

Thursday’s flurry of words is a dose of the past. We start in Boston, one of America’s most historic cities, where the financially strapped Globe has found a way to stay alive. This news coincides with the Red Sox beating the Yanks seven times in seven tries this season -– the last time that happened they won all 14 of their meetings, opened Fenway Park and took the World Series. Here’s hoping that never happens again. Now let’s zip down to New York. Thomas Paine’s funeral may only have attracted six attendees, but 200 years later his writings continue to attract and influence the tenets of social democracy. Peter Dougherty wants to modernize university presses. Samuel Johnson was not that disagreeable; it could have been his S&M lifestyle. The “In Case You Missed It” department completes our trip in time, as David Masiel delves into the past sexual exploits of merchant seamen. He reminds us that truth is second to a good story. — Andrew Geer (devoted Yankee fan)

– The New York Times Co. has hired an investment bank to manage the possible sale of The Boston Globe, and the company plans to request bids for Boston’s major daily in the next couple of weeks, according to two people who say they may make offers on the newspaper.  The Times Co., which has declined to comment in recent months on whether it is selling the Globe, has hired Goldman Sachs, the same Wall Street investment bank the Times Co. has hired to sell its 17.5 percent stake in the Boston Red Sox, the potential bidders say. – For Sale in The Boston Globe

– At the end of President Obama’s inaugural address in January 2009, he alluded to a small passage that appeared in Thomas Paine’s Common Sense.  Faced with an American economy wracked by nervousness and self-doubt Obama noted Paine’s rallying cry that galvanised and gave hope to the despairing: “Let it be told to the future world…that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive…that the city and the country alarmed at one danger, came forth to meet [this danger].” — Thomas Paine in History Today

–In 1948, the University of Illinois Press published Claude Shannon’s brief and profoundly influential book The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Shannon’s work, which explained how words, sounds, and images could be converted into blips and sent electronically, presaged the digital revolution in communications. — Peter Dougherty in The Chronicle of Higher Education

– As time goes by, it generally softens asperities in the character of men and women from the past. We have quite a cuddly image of Ben Franklin, but to those who met him he could seem truculent and abrasive. Something rather different has happened in the case of Samuel Johnson. He used to be presented as a formidable figure—an overbearing literary potentate, if not a clubroom bore whose table you would avoid in the dining room. People thought him domineering and arrogant, qualities reflected in his nickname “the Great Cham.” Oldstyle British actors gave him a plummy upper-class bark, even though the evidence showed that he spoke with a strong Midlands accent, not too far from the nasal intonation you can hear on the streets of Birmingham today. — Samuel Johnson in The New Criterion

– My introduction to sea stories didn’t come from literature, but from my paternal grandfather, who was a river pilot and a tanker captain. He would tell stories to anybody who would listen, and then he’d tell them five or six times for good measure. It was how he interacted with the world, or at least how he interacted with me. When I was older and working at being a writer, I tape-recorded hours of him talking about the old days on the Sacramento River and at sea. Though his stories were based on truth, it was somehow understood that the truth was always worth bending for a good story. — David Masiel at Powell’s Books