Jews as a universal language?

"They are, indeed, so disseminated through all the trading Parts of the world that they are become the Instruments by which the most distant Nations converse with one another, and by which Mankind are knit together in general Correspondence. They are like the Pegs and Nails in a great Building, which, though they are but little valued in themselves, are absolutely necessary to keep the whole Frame together."

from a 1712 article by Joseph Addison in The Spectator, which he founded and edited. Addison went on to ban drinking on the Tube.

Quiz! True or false? - Tolstoy wrote for the first ever Esperanto journal.

True!

The first ever Esperanto journal, a monthly entitled La Esperantisto, was founded in Nuremberg in 1889, supervised by the inventor of Esperanto himself, Ludwig Zamenhof. "This journal continued to appear on a regular basis, despite financial difficulties, until 1895 when it included an article by Leo Tolstoy on 'Reason and belief', to which the Russian censors took exception. The ban imposed on La Esperantisto throughout the Tsarist empire cost the journal nearly three-quarters of its readership. (Esperanto publications were not again allowed in Russia until after the 1905 Revolution.)"

from The Artificial Language Movement by Andrew Large

"One night in a doss-house in Dorset Street Scabby came in with a parcel of fish and chips. He offered the chips round, which was the custom then and still is. But one drunken fool took his piece of fish instead of just the chips and started eating it. Scabby had a knife in his hand, because he was about to cut a loaf of bread. When he realised what had happened he stabbed the man fatally. he was put on trial for murder, pleaded provocation and was acquitted. Later after drinking the Frying Pan, a pub at the corner of Thrawl Street and Brick Lane, he crossed the road, walking into Mother Wolff’s, picked up a penny cake and walked out of the shop without paying, after using some threats. He was charged with stealing a penny cake and sentenced to 12 months jail. Such is justice."

from East End Underworld: The Life of Arthur Harding by Raphael Samuels

"But now that we leftist intellectuals can no longer be Leninists, we have to face up to some questions Leninism helped us evade: Are we more interested in alleviating misery or in creating a world fit for Socrates, and thus for ourselves? What is behind the regret we feel when we are forced to conclude that bourgeois democratic welfare states are the best we can hope for? Is it sadness at the thought that the poor will never get all the way out from under the rich, that the solidarity of a collective commonwealth will never be attained? Or is it, instead, sadness at the thought that we, the people who value self-consciousness, may be irrelevant to the fate of humanity? That Plato, Marx, and we ourselves may just be parasitical eccentrics living off the surplus value of a society to which we have nothing in particular to contribute? Was our thirst for world-historical romance, and for deep theories about deep causes of social change, caused by our concern for human suffering? Or was it at least in part a thirst for an important role for ourselves?"

- Richard Rorty, from "The End of Leninism, Havel, and Social Hope"

Galton on writing Hereditary Genius:

“I had been overworked, and unable to give as close attention as desirable while correcting the proofs, so mistakes were to be feared. Happily there were not many, but one was absurd, and I was justly punished. It was due to some extraordinary commingling for notes on the families of Jane Austen and of Austin the jurist. In my normal state of health the mistake could not have been overlooked, but there it was. I was at that time a member of the Committee of the Athenaeum Club, among whose members there happened to be a representative of each of the above families, who “gave it to me hot”, though most decorously.”

In 1949, they counted the number of people sleeping rough on the streets of London, and found only six.

Auden on Chandler

"Mr. Raymond Chandler has written that he intends to take the body out of the vicarage garden and give murder back to those who are good at it. If he wishes to write detective stories, i.e., stories where the reader's principal interest is to learn who did it, he could not be more mistaken; for in a society of processional criminals, the only possible motives for desiring to identify the murder are blackmail or revenge, which both apply to individuals, not to the group as a whole, and can equally well inspire murder. Actually, whatever he may say, I think Mr. Chandler is interested in writing, not detective stories, but serious studies of a criminal milieu, the Great Wrong Place, and his powerful but extremely depressing books should be read and judged, not as escape literature, but as works of art."

- The Guilty Vicarage, Harpers, May 1948

Galton as the first existentialist:

'Many years later, I was so harassed with the old question of Determinism, which would leave every human action under the control of Heredity and Environment, that I made a series of observations on the actions of my own mind in relation to Free Will. I emply the word not merely as meaning ‘unhindered’ but in the special sense of an uncaused and creative action. It was carried on almost continuously for six weeks, and off and on for many subsequent months. The procedure was this. Whenever I caught myself in an act of what seemed to be ‘Free Will’, in the above sense, I checked myself and tried hard to recollect what had happened before, made rapid notes and then wrote a full account of the case. To my surprise, I found, after some days’ work, that the occasions were rare in which there seemed room for the exercise of Free Will as defined above. I subsequently reckoned that they did not occur oftener that once a day. Motives for all the other events could be traced backwards in succession, by orderly and continuous steps, until they led into a tangle of familiar paths. It was curous to watch the increase of power, given by practice, of recalling mental actions which, being usually overlooked, give the false idea that much has been performed through a creative act, or by inspiration, which is really due to straightfoward causation... The general result of the inquiry was to support the views of those who hold that man is little more than a concious machine, the slave of heredity and environment, the larger part, perhaps all, of whose actions are therefore predictable.'

- from Memories of my Life by Francis Galton, 1908

'The following experiments on Human Faculty are worth recording; they have not been published before. In the days of my youth I felt, at one time, a passionate desire to subjugate the body by the spirit, and among other disciplines determining that my will should replace automatism by hastening or retarding automatic acts. Every breath was submitted to this process with result that the normal power of breathing was dangerously interfered with. It seemed as though I should suffocate if I ceased to will. I had a terrible half-hour; at length, by slow and irregular steps the lost power returned...

'A later experiment was to gain some idea of the commoner feelings in insanity. The method tried was to invest everything I met, whether human, animate or inanimate, with the imaginary attributes of a spy. Having arranged plans, I started on the morning’s walk from Rutland Gate, and found the experiment all too successful. By the time I had walked one and a half miles, and reached the cabstand in Piccadilly at the east end of the Green Park, every horse on the stand seemed to be watching me, either with pricked ears or disguising its espionage. Hours passed before this uncanny sensation wore off, and I feel that I could only too easily reestablish it.

'The third and last experiment of which I will speak was to gain an insight into the abject feelings of barbarians and others concerning the power of images which they know to be of human handiwork. I had visited a large collection of idols gathered by missionaries from many lands, and wondered how each of those absurd and ill-made monstrosities could have obtained the hold over the imaginations of its worshippers. I wished if possible, to enter into those feelings. It was difficult to find a suitable object for trial, because it ought to be in itself quite unfitted to arouse devout feelings. I fixed on a comic picture, it was that of Punch, and made believe in its possession of divine attributes. I addressed it with much quasi-reverence as possessing a mighty power to reward or punish the behaviour of men towards it, and found little difficulty in ignoring the possibilities of what I professed. The experiment gradually succeeded; I began to feel and long retained for the picutre a large share of the feelings that a barbarian entertains towards his idol, and learned to appreciate the enormous potency they might have over him.'

- from Memories of my Life by Francis Galton, 1908

Three great Wikipedia pages I found today:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry: "The salesman is put on trial for treason, but reveals that the encyclopedia article for the star system... is a fictitious entry included in the encyclopedia to detect plagiarism..."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bielefeld_Conspiracy: "the [Bielefeld] city council released a press statement titled Bielefeld gibt es doch! (Bielefeld does exist!)..."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinamen

"The melody was above all very stable, neither joyful or melancholy; instead, it seemed to be the essence of knowledge itself, the gold of truth, constant behind our stormy extremes as the sun is behind the clouds." - James Wood on Beethoven 109, from The Book Against God, 2003

I think, unintentionally, this expresses exactly why I usually find classical music so boring.

"The personal drama of Fitzgerald's failure promises to outlive his few successful novels." - What Has Happened To The American Novel by Diana Trilling, Harpers, May 1944.

He really was the Amy Winehouse of his day.

"We are working with the auroral current."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora_Borealis#Auroral_events_of_historical_significance

During the Depression, "Americans resorted to extraordinary shifts. In Kentucky miners ate wild greens, violet tops, forget-me-nots and ‘such weeds as cows eat’. In Pennsylvania they devoured roots and dandelions. Some of the unemployed availed themselves of scraps kindly donated by Princeton dining clubs. Others consumed leftovers from restaurants, as recommended by Secretary of War Patrick Hurley. In Kansas farmers burned wheat to keep warm – a bushel now fetched only around $0.30, as compared to $3 in 1920. Corn, too, was cheaper than coal; as it blazed in stoves all over the prairies the air turned thick with blue smoke and a smell rather like that of coffee roasting. In Washington State lumberjacks started forest fires to earn money fighting them. In Arkansas families lived in caves. When the Russians advertised for 6,000 skilled workers, more than 100,00 applied to go to the Soviet union. Nearly 30 states established systems of barter and in Washington State stores issued and accepted wooden currency. To prevent the school system from collapsing entirely, teachers were oftne boarded out with families in a rota basis. Students found every more ingenious methods to work their way through college – at Ohio State University two young men started a ‘dog laundry’, washing and coiffing the pets of the opulent."

- from The Dark Valley by Piers Brendon