Ancestor Guilt

Jones had been greatly depressed; he declared himself a murderer, and would not be comforted. Suddenly he asked me a question. ‘Are not the parents the cause of the birth of their children?’ said he. ‘I suppose so,’ said I. ‘Are not all men mortal?’ ‘That also may be admitted.’ ‘Then are not the parents the cause of the death of their children, since they know that they are mortal? And am I not a murderer?’ I was, I own, puzzled. At last I thought of something soothing. I pointed out to Jones that to cause the death of another was not necessarily murder. It might be manslaughter or justifiable homicide. ‘Of which of these then am I guilty?’ he queried. I could not say because I had never seen the Jones family, but I hear Jones has become a great bore in the asylum by his unceasing appeals to every one to tell him whether he has committed murder, manslaughter, or justifiable homicide!

— F.C.S. Schiller, quoted in Ralph L. Woods, How to Torture Your Mind, 1969

| Crime · Society

Unquote

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“From the earliest times the old have rubbed it into the young that they are wiser than they, and before the young had discovered what nonsense this was they were old too, and it profited them to carry on the imposture.” — Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale, 1930

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The Last Word

The newspaper man, indeed, is a dangerous person to fool with. He is extremely ingenious in his methods of retaliation. Here is another story in point. One Bennett was city editor of the Cincinnati Enquirer somewhere in the sixties. It was Bennett’s plan, if news were scarce, to make small children–offspring of the brain only–fall from the Newport ferry-boat into the Ohio River, where they would infallibly have been drowned but for the gallant rescue of some by-stander, usually a personal friend of Bennett’s. One of these friends, Kellum by name, grew very weary after he had figured several times as a savior of drowning innocents, and requested that Bennett should desist. So, in next day’s Enquirer, Kellum read that a beautiful little girl, child of a prominent citizen in Newport, had fallen into the river, and that Mr. Kellum, who was standing near and could have rescued her, refused to render the slightest assistance. A few minutes later the maddest man in Cincinnati arrived in the Enquirer office, threatening the direst vengeance on Bennett. But Bennett calmly pulled off his coat, and said, ‘See here, Kellum, you are a good enough fellow in your way, but I can’t stand any interference with my department. If I make any statement in the Enquirer you mustn’t come round here contradicting it. That isn’t journalism.’

— William Shepard Walsh, Handy-Book of Literary Curiosities, 1892

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Astral Assault

A most interesting problem …, some years ago, engaged the attention of the courts of Georgia. A man named Simpson, standing in South Carolina, fired a pistol with felonious intent at a person who was in a boat, on water embraced within the territorial limits of Georgia. The bullets went wide of the person at whom they were aimed and splashed in the water. It was held by the courts that the defendant was guilty of an assault with intent to murder in Georgia, ‘because,’ said the judge, ‘the balls did strike the water of the river in close proximity to him (the prosecuting witness) within this State, and it is therefore certain that they took effect in Georgia.’

For the purposes of the case the judge held further that the defendant, when he fired the shots, was constructively in the State of Georgia. This holding was upon a theory of the law that where one puts in force an agency for the commission of crime, he, in legal contemplation, accompanies the same to the places where it becomes effectual.

— “Historic Legal Puzzles,” The Green Bag: A Useless but Entertaining Magazine for Lawyers, August 1899

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Devil’s Advocate

Calling Halloween “the devil’s holiday,” in 1986 Ralph P. Forbes of London, Ark., filed suit to prevent the public schools from letting kids wear costumes to school.

He filed the suit on behalf of himself, all Christian children, and Jesus Christ. The defendants included the Arkansas Department of Education, “high priests of secular humanism,” and Satan.

U.S. District Judge George Howard Jr. continued the case, whereupon attorney John Wesley Hall Jr. offered to represent Satan pro bono. He pointed out that the Dark One doesn’t transact business, own property, or commit torts in Arkansas, and asked the judge to drop him as a defendant.

The Chicago Tribune reported drily that “efforts to reach Satan for comment were unsuccessful.”

| Religion · Society

Mad Love

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Thomas Browne on sex: “I could be content that we might procreate like trees, without conjunction, or that there were any way to perpetuate the world without this trivial and vulgar way of coition. It is the foolishest act a wise man commits in all his life, nor is there anything that will more deject his cooled imagination when he shall consider what an unworthy piece of folly he hath committed.” (1642)

Shaw on marriage: “When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.” (1913)

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Furioso

Common dismissals of the works of great composers by the critics of their day, from Nicolas Slonimsky’s Lexicon of Musical Invective (1965):

  • “Barbarous”: Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Varèse, Wagner
  • “Bizarre”: Beethoven, Berlioz, Bloch, Chopin, Liszt
  • “Crude”: Beethoven, Berlioz, Miszt, Moussorgsky, Schumann
  • “Dull”: Beethoven, Brahms, Gershwin, Liszt, Schumann, Scriabin, Strauss, Stravinsky
  • “Hideous”: Berlioz, Bloch, Bruckner, Harris, D’Indy, Liszt, Moussorgsky, Puccini, Saint-Saëns, Schoenberg, Strauss, Stravinsky, Tchaikovsky, Varèse, Wagner
  • “Monstrous”: Beethoven, Bloch, Krenek, Liszt, Prokofiev, Schoenberg, Shostakovitch, Wagner
  • “Painful”: Bizet, Franck, D’Indy, Wagner
  • “Perverse”: Berg, Chopin, Prokofiev, Strauss, Stravinsky
  • “Rambling”: Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, Schoenberg, Wagner
  • “Repulsive”: Beethoven, Berg, Berlioz,Bizet, Prokofiev, Ravel
  • “Vulgar”: Beethoven, Berlioz, Gershwin, Liszt, Shostakovitch, Sibelius, Tchaikovsky

Highlights of selected reviews:

  • “This is advanced cat music.” — Heinrich Dorn, Aus Meinem Leben, Berlin, 1870, of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde
  • “I can compare Le Carneval Romain by Berlioz to nothing but the caperings and gibberings of a big baboon, over-excited by a dose of alcoholic stimulus.” — George Templeton Strong’s diary, Dec. 15, 1866
  • “A blood-curdling nightmare.” — Boston Herald, Feb. 23, 1896, of Strauss’ Till Eulenspiegel
  • “A farrago of circus tunes.” — E. Chapman, Tempo, September 1946, of Shostakovitch’s ninth symphony
  • “A bomb in a poultry-yard.” — Louis Elson, Boston Daily Advertiser, Dec. 19, 1914, of Schoenberg’s Five Orchestral Pieces
  • “The upsetting of twenty thousand coal-scuttles.” — Henry Labouchère, Truth, London, Feb. 12, 1885, of Liszt’s symphony to Dante’s Divina Commedia
  • “A horde of demons struggling in a torrent of brandy.” — Boston Evening Transcript, Oct. 24, 1892, of Tchaikovsky’s fifth symphony
  • “A catastrophe in a boiler factory.” — Olin Downes, New York Times, Dec. 17, 1924, of Varèse’s Hyperprism
  • “A cat with catarrh.” — Boston Evening Transcript, April 17, 1913, of Webern’s Six Orchestral Pieces

Writing in the New York Evening Post of March 2, 1925, Ernest Newman declared that Edgard Varèse’s Intérales “sounded a good deal like a combination of early morning in the Mott Haven freight yards, feeding time at the zoo and a Sixth Avenue trolley rounding a curve, with an intoxicated woodpecker throw in for good measure.”

| Art · Society

Clued In

Insider trading, like blackmail, is something everyone abhors and no one can say why. Economists have shown that under a variety of plausible circumstances insider trading is actually beneficial for all shareholders and investors, because, for instance, it can be used as a particularly efficient form of incentive compensation for corporate executives. For this reason many shareholders would be perfectly agreeable if their corporation would add a provision into its charter expressly authorizing its executives to engage in insider trading. Yet many people, even after they have grasped the economic case to be made for insider trading, continue to regard it as somehow immoral even if economically desirable. And the law certainly forbids companies to allow their executives to engage in insider trading, even if their shareholders should expressly authorize it. But no one to date has been able to explain why insider trading is immoral and why it continues to be immoral even if the shareholders unanimously authorize the management to engage in it.

— Leo Katz, Ill-Gotten Gains, 1996

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