Learning

Goodbye to the Cuckoo’s Nest

Cathy LaGrow 10 Comments

Massive old buildings have always fascinated me. I mean, really, who doesn’t want to wander around one for hours, imagining every fantastic and ordinary and wondrous and sordid thing that took place within its walls?

Or is it only writers who do that?

In September of 2008, the Oregon State Hospital in Salem (where they filmed the classic movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) orchestrated a series of tours of the facility, since large chunks of it were about to be torn down. The tours, though unpublicized, quickly became the hottest ticket in town. (Besides the Hollywood connection, the Hospital gained notoriety in 2005 when The New York Times published a story detailing how the unclaimed “cremains” of 3,489 former patients had been found in a storage room, in mouldering cans whose labels had rotted off.)

So what did I do when this fabulous opportunity to see a historic building presented itself?

I had a baby that month, and missed the entire thing. Continue reading →

Five Little Dionnes and Where They Grew

Cathy LaGrow 12 Comments

Mercifully (for her, for us), Kate Gosselin has mostly disappeared from the weekly covers of the tabloids. For a while there, it seemed as if Kate and her reverse mullet were going to be with us until the Lord returned.

A couple of months ago, I checked out the first season of “Jon & Kate + 8” from the library. I can see why people watched the show – it was fascinating, but also, it makes you think to yourself, Hey, I don’t have it so bad! I can handle two toddlers, easy-peasy! Say what you will about Kate (and there is plenty to say); there are very few women who could manage to care for two toddlers and six babies at the same time, few people who could keep things organized and keep everyone fed and clean, without losing their own minds.

Of course, one can easily raise objections to the very idea of putting children on display like that. But the Gosselins were not the first (or the most egregious) example of the media (and people’s curiosity) exploiting a set of multiples. That sad distinction belongs to five sisters who were born in a snowy hamlet in Ontario, in the middle of the Great Depression. Their survival was a miracle; their lives were a tragedy.

In late 1933, a 25-year-old farmwife became pregnant for the seventh time in eight years (a thought, by the way, that just clobbers me.) This time, Elzire Dionne suspected she was carrying twins, but when she went into labor in May, two months early, her doctor delivered five identical baby girls. Combined, they weighed less than 14 pounds.

The odds of conceiving quints naturally is 1 in 65 million (it’s probably less for identicals, but I couldn’t find the stats.) In 1934, there were no NICU’s – and there were no known cases of quints surviving, ever. The Dionne’s doctor wrapped the tiny babies in old napkins, placed them on a corner of the bed, and waited for them to die.

Unbelievably, the babies lived. They were kept in a wicker laundry basket next to the stove, and fed water and corn syrup. Once newspapers got wind of the story (“World’s First Surviving Quintuplets!”), it spread across the globe. The new babies were an international sensation.

Within four months, the government of Ontario had declared the Dionnes to be “unfit parents” (but only for the quints, evidentally), and took the babies from their parents. For the next nine years, the Canadian government turned the girls into Ontario’s biggest tourist attraction.


A large compound was built across the road from the Dionne farmhouse and was opened to visitors. The babies lived there with a doctor, some nurses, and a handful of policemen. Their playground was a “public observation area” where, eventually, 6,000 people per day filed by to gawk at the girls. Their mother (who had three more babies after the quints) ran a souvenir shop on the premises, selling cups and postcards and candy bars covered with pictures of her daughters.

The girls were required to follow a strict schedule, and were regularly subjected to inspections and testing. They were used to sell a wide variety of popular products, and were featured in several Hollywood films. Hollywood celebrities filed by, along with the masses, to stare at the girls.

Their compound, dubbed “Quintland,” was surrounded by barbed wire.

When the girls were nine years old, their parents won back custody, but the fractured family found it impossible to mend itself. The girls were unhappy and felt isolated, and they left home at eighteen, severing almost all contact with their family. One of the sisters died two years later, after entering a convent. Another one died at 35. The surviving sisters wrote a scathing book about their ordeal. Two sisters are still living today.

******

The comparisons between the Dionne sisters and the current rash of mega-family media darlings are obvious and easy to draw (although by any measure, the Dionne case was the most extreme, and the most tragic.) But all of this makes me think about the much broader issue of “celebrity,” that monstrous sub-culture we have created.

Human beings who accomplish or produce monumental things are legitimately famous (or infamous.) People who are known simply for being born, or because of how they behave, are spectacles.

In the Dionne’s case, what is so appalling is that those girls had no say in the matter – they were victims in every sense of the word. In today’s world, however, there are masses of people who make spectacles of themselves, in order to be famous – famous for, um, making spectacles of themselves. (As a naturally shy person, this concept just confounds me to no end. I don’t want anyone staring at me. Pretty much ever.)

Look, no one is more curious than I am. I understand the fascination with sociology, with anomalies. Here is the problem, though, with the slippery slope of curiosity: when we train our attention on something, we begin to consume it, to use it up, whether that thing is a book or a snowboard or a meatball sandwich. Or a person.

And human beings were never intended to be feasted upon.

I am no preacher, but here is what I would say to those who would be famous, those individuals who are yearning for attention: Go out and do something, or say something, or write something, or make something. We all cling to the surface of the same earth – by God, contribute something while you’re here. Your life is too valuable and too unique and too vital for you to just stand there, absorbing stares. You are not a tree, or a mountain range, or a sunset, or a shooting star. You are something infinitely more precious. You are flesh and blood and bone and spirit and soul and laughter and sorrow and love and rage and tenderness and joy and determination the likes of which the natural world can only dream of.

You were not created to be a spectacle.

******

By the way: Yvonne. Annette. Cecile. Emilie. Marie.

Those were the Dionne girls’ names.

Just thought we should know.

Tongue-tied

Cathy LaGrow 6 Comments

Did you ever wish that you could speak a foreign language? Yeah, me too.

Did you ever actually go out and learn one? Yeah, me neither.

When I was fourteen, my family traveled to Europe for two weeks on the good graces of my grandmother (and I’ve been pining to go back, ever since.) We had the same tour guide for the entire trip, a lady named Brigitte who was rumored to speak a whopping eight languages. Whether this was an exaggeration or not, she definitely spoke the language of every country we visited: that included German, Dutch, French, and of course, English.

A year previously, I had tried to learn French from a book and tape series. After many weeks of diligent study, I could count to five and say “Where is the toilet” – and that’s it. I didn’t even know how to introduce myself. By the time my family made it to France, we were all at the mercy of the charming Brigitte. I was fascinated; I simply could not believe she could keep that many entirely different languages straight, in her head. I freshened my resolve to learn another language, any language – surely I could manage just one?

A quarter of a century later, I still speak only English.

Recently I read a magazine article that made a passing reference to Sir William Jones (born 1746), a British philologist (someone who studies languages.) Jones was a linguistic prodigy, learning up to 7 languages as a child. By the end of his life, he knew around 40 languages, either fluently or partially, making him a “hyperpolyglot” (a polyglot is a person who uses several languages.)

Jones was amazing. But he looks positively lazy, next to Giuseppe Mezzofanti.


Mezzofanti was born in Italy during Jones’ lifetime. He became an Italian cardinal, and he remains the world’s most famous hyperpolyglot. By the end of his life, it was generally accepted that Mezzofanti spoke 28 languages and 50 dialects fluently, and another 30 languages somewhat less fluently.

Keep in mind, these guys lived in the 18th century, when foreign travel was torturous and time-consuming, and when there was no technological help whatsoever, no way to record anything aurally. The industrial production of paper hadn’t even begun yet. Both men started learning languages as children, which is a key point: most experts agree that the earlier in life an individual starts learning other languages, the easier it is.

So what about the present day – are all the extraordinary linguists long gone? Not quite. Meet Alexander Arguelles.

Arguelles is an American – which is surprising, in itself, since only about 9% of Americans speak more than one language (as opposed to 60-70% of people, worldwide.) In the 1980’s, when he was in college, he studied French, German, Spanish, Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Medieval French, Gothic, Old High German, and Old Norse. He earned his PhD and became a language specialist, subsequently learning a truckload of foreign languages.

In recent years, Arguelles has focused more on reading languages than on speaking them; his website contains a list of the languages he can currently read, and a self-ascribed “score” for each, indicating how well he understands it. There are 33 languages and dialects on the list. The highest score, 100, is for his native English. The lowest score, for Modern Greek, is 80.

So there you have it.

As for me? I would still dearly love to learn another language – but ever since the babies were born, I actually seem to have lost ground in my mastery of the English language. Things aren’t looking so good for ambitious new brain projects.

I still harbor a secret (shhh) dream of living in Italy some day. Perhaps I will just have to pretend I’m deaf, then. (By the time I ever get to Italy, I probably will be deaf.)

Smile and wave, girl, smile and wave.

The Curious Case of the Collyer Brothers

Cathy LaGrow 10 Comments

My hubby and I love the old TV show Frasier. We own every season on DVD (except the first one, which I refused to buy because Kelsey Grammer’s hair was so bad that year.)

We never really watched the show when it originally aired but, after our first baby was born, when we were housebound in the evenings (and stupefied with exhaustion), we started watching Frasier episodes, one after the other, on DVD. Even in our foggy post-baby state, we loved how smart and fearless and funny the show was. The acting was pitch-perfect, the writing was beyond clever – it still makes us laugh today, even after repeated viewings.

Anyway, this post isn’t about Frasier. It’s about a passing reference that was made in one show. In that episode, Frasier and Niles were acting even more neurotic than usual, and Frasier’s dad (an ex-cop) warned them that they could turn out like the Collyer brothers.

Well, that sort of thing is just catnip to me. I headed to the Internet.

Turns out, Homer and Langley Collyer, well-educated brothers born in the 1880’s into a distinguished New York family, were quite famous for being eccentric recluses. Once they reached adulthood, they lived together in a large, beautiful brownstone on Fifth Avenue for two decades, shunning human contact and existing without water, electricity or gas because they wouldn’t pay the bills (although they did have money in the bank.) They never threw anything away; instead, they piled up junk in their home and made small tunnels through the mess so they could move around. They were extreme “hoarders” 50 years before the term was coined.

During the last several years of their lives, they were rarely seen in public. In 1947, working on a tip about a terrible smell coming from the house, police entered their home and after hours of tunneling through junk, they found the body of one brother. An extensive search went up for the other brother, while workmen started removing debris from the home. After more than two weeks of this, the body of the other brother was found – just ten feet from where his sibling had been recovered. Here is a police photo:


Langley Collyer had died while crawling through a tunnel to bring food to his brother; a pile of junk had collapsed and crushed him. Homer, who was blind and depended on his brother for survival, starved to death a few days later.

There are so many degrees on the mental health spectrum, from well-adjusted to eccentric to completely mad. Nature, nurture, a little of both? Evidently the boys’ physician father was quite peculiar, paddling a canoe to his job at the hospital and eventually abandoning the family. We’ll never know exactly what the boys suffered from, since they were never treated (although that may have been a blessing, for them – the 1940’s were the heyday of the horrifying lobotomy craze.)

A final note: 130 tons of garbage were eventually taken from the Collyer’s home, and the building had to be razed. Among the items removed from the house were some 25,000 books.

Which is the one part of this story that sounds perfectly normal, to me.

The L.H.C. (Wait…we can DO that?)

Cathy LaGrow 10 Comments

Right now, as we speak, something freaky, mind-boggling, unbelievable (insert your own adjective here) is taking place within a circular tunnel buried underneath France and Switzerland. And it’s entirely possible that you’ve never heard a word about it.

The tunnel, which is 17 miles in circumference and lies some 330 feet below the ground, holds the Large Hadron Collider (LHC, for short), the largest machine ever built (as in, since the beginning of time). It is operated by CERN, the 20-nation European Organization for Nuclear Research. (The U.S., although we chipped in a cool $542 million to build it, does not have an official seat at the table – but there are more American scientists working on the LHC than those from any other country.)

So what is it? The LHC is a particle accelerator (stick with me, this is fascinating), and with it, scientists are hoping to recreate conditions that were present at the beginning of time.

Here is how it works, to the best of my understanding. (Science was actually my worst subject in school, so I’ll make this quick and easy.)

We all know about atoms, those basic units of matter, and how they are comprised of electrons, neutrons, and protons. (And protons and neutrons are composed of even smaller particles, called quarks.) Within the LHC complex, physicists strip electrons from atoms, creating what are called “free protons.”

Two of these protons at a time are beamed into the huge particle accelerator from opposite sides. They are sent around at faster and faster speeds and then, when they reach their maximum speed (more on that in a moment), they are forced to collide. (The first collision of this type took place on March 29, 2010.)

And that’s pretty much it. That’s what this gargantuan, expensive ($9 billion) machine does.

So why have roughly half (7200) of all the particle physicists in the world devoted themselves to this project? According to them, the only way to fill in gaps in our understanding of the “standard model” of particle physics (the building blocks of the universe) is with experimental data. They hope to examine the matter that is created by these “big bang” collisions and learn more about: dark energy; dark matter (which makes up a stunning 96% of the universe); extra dimensions; and, of course, they are hoping to either prove or disprove the hypothetical “Higgs Boson” (which I am not going to go into here.)

Okay, I’m done. Told you it would be quick.

Here are a few fun facts, though, and you may want to be sitting down when you read these:

  • A single magnet in just one of the stations positioned around the LHC has a magnetic field 100,000 times as strong as Earth’s.
  • The LHC’s magnets must be chilled to a temperature of –271 degrees Celsius – which is one degree colder than deep outer space. Thus, somewhere in the bowels of this machine lies the coldest place in the universe.
  • Each proton goes around the entire 17-mile ring an impossible 11,000 times per second. This is 99.999999% of the speed of light. (It is impossible for matter to reach the speed of light – this is about as close as we can get.)

If you are a total nerd like me, and you need to know more, click here to read the excellent article “The Genesis 2.0 Project” from the January 2010 issue of Vanity Fair, which is where I first learned about this.

Click here to see pictures of this amazing machine.

And here is the very chipper, official website for the LHC, which is surprisingly easy to navigate, surprisingly low-tech (I guess they have better things to do than create flashy graphics), and which is written by endearingly enthusiastic people who use lots of exclamation points. As well they should.

(Lastly, I don’t have room in this post to debate the merits or morality of this endeavor, from a resources standpoint. I am probably sympathetic to both camps, pro and con. But as always, you’re more than welcome to leave a comment…)