Sic
vos non vobis mellificatis apes
— So
d o yo u b e e s m a k e h o n e y , n o t f o r yo u r s e lv e s .
Virgil
2017 Newsletter of the Signet Society of Harvard College 4 6 D u n s t e r S t r e e t , C a m b r i d g e , M a ss a c h u s e t t s 0 2 1 3 8 • 6 1 7 - 5 4 7 - 0 5 2 6 • S i g n e t S o c i e t y . o r g
The Signet Switched To LEDs, And You Can, Too We were wondering what the Signet can do to help solve the world’s problems (which can seem so large), and thought we’d work on reducing our carbon footprint. Light bulbs are a place to start. Don’t build any coal plants on our account! The Signet has 152 bulbs (we think), in at least 8 different types of fixtures. We had migrated to fluorescents wherever we could, but they have downsides like mercury content, requiring special disposal. Worst have been the curly-tail types, which would occasionally smoke before burning out. If their glass portion breaks, users are sinisterly advised to “leave the area for 10 minutes,” which isn’t practical in a collegiate environ.
It’s the economics that will persuade you. Their operating cost can be a tenth of incandescents and a third of fluorescents. With almost no heat, they reduce air conditioning costs in warmer months. LEDs that replace fluorescent tubes have a directional angle of 140°, so you’re not lighting what you don’t care about.
Some styles are still not available, like the giant mogul bases in our library torchieres, and some artfixture halogens. But given the rapid pace of new styles retrofitted to existing fixtures, these are no doubt on the way.
Happily, the price of LED bulbs has dropped dramatically in the past year, with many more bulb types available in pleasing colors. More than 100 of our replacements cost between $1.50 and $3.50. Some are actually cheaper than the incandescents, fluorescents, and halogen bulbs they replace, especially if you shop at a certain online retailer whose name starts with “A.” We like the warm look of 2700K, which has the homey, yellow aspect of incandescents. (4000K, often called ‘Daylight,’ has the bluer cast of many fluorescent tubes; 5000K is like a dentist’s office, and 6000K is like a Walmart parking lot.)
Our Bulb-Changer-In-Chief, Mark Hruby ’78, points out that “Most students have never paid an electric bill, so they don’t think about turning off lights when they leave a room. They should, but it’s a lot less irksome when the operating cost is so much less.”
These are all LED bulbs, now inexpensively available for many fixture types, in the color spectrum you’d enjoy in your own home.
The best part of LEDs is their very long life. Most claim to last at least 10,000 hours. Replacements for halogen spotlights can last 25,000 hours—art gallery owners should be ecstatic. So, depending on how old you are, there’s an increasing chance that you’ll never have to change that light bulb again!
Help Write Our History for Our Upcoming Sesquicentennial Book The Signet Society will be 150 years old in 2020—a few quick years away. As part of our celebration, we plan to publish a new edition of the Signet Catalogue. You may remember the last one—the “gray book” from which electees have often had a few minutes to absorb our substantial history before conveying it to current members during inductions. It featured lists of all Signet members by class and alphabetically, charters and by-laws, images of Signet memorabilia, and a history of the Society. The last history was compiled by Nath-
an C. Shiverick ’52 and ends in 1969. Our challenge is to extend it with the history all of us have lived a portion of in the past fifty years. Spoiler alert: it won’t be gray! Accordingly, we seek your help. Do you have a story, observation, anecdote, profile, or insight that we might incorporate? We make no guarantees of inclusion, but we’ll read every submission carefully and try to integrate as much as we can into a record that Signet drones can rely on until 2070, when perhaps another catalogue will be published. As a reminder of what’s happened, we admitted women, hosted Kurt Vonnegut and Allen Ginsburg for
Overdue Books: Better Late Than Never
John Updike’s medal award, were blessed by the guidance of John Marquand and Peter Gomes, enjoyed the tales of Ian Graham, and saw countless Signet grads launch careers in an ever-broadening range of the arts and letters.
When T.S. Eliot ’10 returned to the Hive in 1953? as a famous poet, he gave us his rose, a hand-written transcription of his Journey of the Magi, and a signed copy of his Selected Essays. We framed the rose and the poem. (Patrick O’Donnell ’67 has commissioned and donated a print version of the poem which is much easier to read and now graces our library.) The signed essay collection eventually disappeared.
We’re fortunate: the digital age should make this task easier than the letterpress days of 1969. We hope to post an online draft of the book in 2019. You’ll be able check the accuracy of your listing and our history draft before the print publication. And we will have done our part in keeping the Signet up-to-date. To the Society!
This summer, we received a fountain pen letter from Cambridge, England. A former Montana rancher named Alec Rainey informed us that, in the 1980s, he came upon a pile of books thrown out of a window in Notting Hill, then a seedy part of London. He took a few home and didn’t think much further about them. This summer, while perusing them, he came across this inscription (see photo). He looked us up, and wondered if we’d like the book back?
The Sargent Palette Returns The curators at the Harvard Art Museums have completed their study of many artifacts from the studio of painter John Singer Sargent, and they report this about our palette: This palette is one of two given to William James by Emily Sargent after her brother’s death. It is suggested that William James bequeathed the palettes to his son, William James Jr., who donated one of the palettes to the Signet Society of Harvard University and the other to the Tavern Club of Boston. The Signet palette holds a large amount of paint arranged around the edge from the thumb-hole in the general order of white, yellow, red, brown, blue, green, and brown/black. There has been a large amount of mixing between the colours, created by numerous small dabs of a paintbrush which blurs the definition of each colour, as well as significant darkening of the surface, in particular for the green and blue. With UV illumination two different white pigments are clearly visible, as well as a fluorescent red lake likely to be madder. The central portion has been cleaned, evidenced by tide marks on the paint along the edges. There appears to be a darkened paint layer underneath the top layer, especially visible underneath the white paint, which suggests that the palette has been reused without full cleaning. There are numerous droplets of resinous material which fluoresces orange in UV, scattered predominantly around the white paint, and one reasonably large blob of wax on the palette surface. Areas of glossy paint are visible on the surface, as well as thought cracks in the top paint layer. Most of the paint blobs applied directly from the tube onto the palette are flattened, presumably from having an object placed on top before the paint had fully dried. There is also evidence of paper on the top of the largest blob of flattened red paint. The pigments include lead white with and without zinc, vermilion, red lake, red ochre, yellow ochre, cadmium yellow, a chromium-containing green, Prussian blue, cobalt blue, ultramarine and umber. Julia Heyneman had written in the 1890s that his: ‘… palettes were weighted, and a zinc fence prevented the wet paint from slipping down to the sleeve. The Signet palette is the only example described here that is both weighted and has a zinc fence (confirmed by XRF analysis) still intact.
Yes, we would! We offered to pay postage, but Mr. Rainey asked that we either obtain for him a state map of Montana, or perhaps we knew of an American publisher who was interested in a science fiction novel about animal intelligence, specifically dolphins on an alien planet, about 55,000 words long. We happened to have a map of Montana and mailed it off. Now, T.S. Eliot’s book is back home at the Hive.
2017 Senior Thesis Topics Of the 12 theses written by last spring’s seniors, four received Hoopes Prizes, indicated here with an asterisk. Cherline Bazile This Is War* English Serena Eggers Mater Admirabilis* Visual & Environmental Studies Jennifer Kim Convulsive or Not at All: The Endurance Politics of an Experimental Art Collective Hoopes Prize winner in Anthropology Ari Korotkin like ones also stir, for voice and electronics and Hear What I Mean: An Ethnographic Study of Digital Electronics, the Voice, and Musical Composition* dual-component thesis in Music & Anthropology David Kurlander “Capture the Rapture”: A Cultural History of Malt Liquor, 1950-1980* History & Literature Auguste Roc “With Every Tear Comes Redemption”: Heartbreak as a Form of Protest in Blues, Beyoncé and #BLACKLIVESMATTER, 1939-2016 History & Literature—American Studies
Talia Rothstein La Mulata and the Nation: Narratives of Fear and Desire in Post-Revolutionary Mexico History & Literature Juliana Sass Speed, the Sea, Midnight: An Adaptation of Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse for the Screen Comparative Literature Maia Silber “River of Living Water”: The Croton System and the Transformation of Westchester County, New York 18351895 History & Literature Kevin Xiong From Nodes to Nudes: Gallery Network Attributes as Predictors of Artist Auction Performance Economics Yunhan Xu A Small Study of Epic Proportions: Toward a Statistical Reading of the Aeneid* Statistics Kathleen Zhou The Golod-Shafarevich Theorem and the Class Field Tower Problem Mathematics
Your Donations Brought Our Piano Back To Life Thanks—to the fiftytwo of you who contributed to the restoration of our 1911 Steinway this past year. With a new pin block, strings, action, and pedal mechanism, it sounds even better than it looks. Your generosity allows a new generation of pianists to create art and live it on the keyboard. Mathematician, singer-songwriter, and satirist Tom Lehrer was not a Signet member as an undergraduate, but he is reported Home at last, and ready for another to have held forth on century of collegiate love! our piano during the 1960s when he returned to Harvard as a lecturer and may even have composed at it. Did anyone witness this? Tell us the story! We like to think his brio still inhabits it.
Lunches & Access We serve lunch at 1 p.m. each Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday during the school year. If you plan to join us or would like to bring a guest, please sign up at SignetLuncheon.org . We’ve simplified the system for payment by graduates, associates, and your guests— meals are $20 a head. We still have the very popular “5 tickets for $75” deal if you’re regularly around. And remember, you’re a member for life. If you would like an access card to come by when we’re open, please email the office at <sigsoc@fas.harvard.edu> and we’ll send you one.
S A V E T H E D A T E ! S AT U R D A Y A P R I L 2 1 2 0 1 8 SIGNET ANNUAL DINNER K I R K L A N D H O U S E
Executive Committee Prof. Thomas Forrest Kelly, President Bryan Eric Simmons ’83, Vice-President Winthrop G. Minot ’71, Treasurer John H. Finley IV ’92, Clerk Matthew C. Lee ’91, At Large Finance Committee Winthrop G. Minot ’71, Chair Stephen Gauster ’92 Christopher Laconi Thomas F. Moore ’98 Geoffrey H. Movius ’62 House Committee Bryan Eric Simmons ’83, Chair Prof. Amanda Claybaugh Stephen Coit ’71 Devon Guinn ’17 Sam Hagen ’18 Mark S. Hruby ’78 Prof. John Stilgoe Ezra Stoller ’15 Board of Associates Jill Abramson ’76 Susan Stevenson Borowitz ’81 Mimi Brown ’97 Prof. Amanda Claybaugh Stephen Coit ’71 Prof. Diana Eck John H. Finley IV ’92 Stephen Gauster ’92 John W. Gillespie, Jr. ’76 Joel Henning ’61 Kenneth M. Kaufman ’69 Amanda Keidan ’99 Prof. Thomas Forrest Kelly Daniel Kim ’97 Christopher Laconi Matthew C. Lee ’91 Winthrop G. Minot ’71 Thomas F. Moore ’98 Geoffrey H. Movius ’62 Philip Munger ’95 Patrick O’Donnell ’67 Bryan Eric Simmons ’83 Prof. John Stilgoe Artist-in-Residence Ezra Huang Stoller ’15