Remarks by Bill Nye

B >> Bill Nye >> Remarks

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35

Come Back.

Personal.--Will the young woman who used to cook in our family, and who
went away ten pounds of sugar and five and a half pounds of tea ahead of
the game, please come back, and all will be forgiven.

If she cannot return, will she please write, stating her present address,
and also give her reasons for shutting up the cat in the refrigerator when
she went away?

If she will only return, we will try to forget the past, and think only of
the glorious present and the bright, bright future.

Come back, Sarah, and jerk the waffle-iron for us once more.

Your manners are peculiar, but we yearn for your doughnuts, and your style
of streaked cake suits us exactly.

You may keep the handkerchiefs and the collars, and we will not refer to
the dead past.

We have arranged it so that when you snore it will not disturb the night
police, and if you do not like our children we will send them away.

We realize that you do not like children very well, and our children
especially gave you much pain, because they were not so refined as you
were.

We have often wished, for your sake, that we had never had any children;
but so long as they are in our family, the neighbors will rather expect us
to take care of them.

Still, if you insist upon it, we will send them away. We don't want to
seem overbearing with our servants.

We would be willing, also, to give you more time for mental relaxation
than you had before. The intellectual strain incident to the life of one
who makes gravy for a lost and undone world must be very great, and tired
nature must at last succumb. We do not want you to succumb. If anyone has
got to succumb, let us do it.

All we ask is that you will let us know when you are going away, and leave
the crackers and cheese where we can find them.

It was rather rough on us to have you go away when we had guests in the
house, but if you had not taken the key to the cooking department we could
have worried along.

You ought to let us have company at the house sometimes if we will let you
have company when you want to. Still, you know best, perhaps. You are
older than we are, and you have seen more of the world.

We miss your gentle admonitions and your stern reproofs sadly. Come back
and reprove us again. Come back and admonish us once more, at so much per
admonish and groceries.

[Illustration: "WE HOPE YOU WILL DO THE SAME BY US."]

We will agree to let you select the tender part of the steak, and such
fruit as seems to strike you favorably, just as we did before. We did not
like it when you were here, but that is because we were young and did not
know what the custom was.

If a life-time devoted to your welfare can obliterate the injustice we
have done you, we will be glad to yield it to you.

If you could suggest a good place for us to send the children, where they
would be well taken care of, and where they would not interfere with some
other cook who is a friend of yours, we would be glad to have you write
us.

My wife says she hopes you will feel perfectly free to use the piano
whenever you are lonely or sad, and when you or the bread feel depressed
you will be welcome to come into the parlor and lean up against either one
of us and sob.

We all know that when you were with us before we were a little reserved in
our manner toward you, but if you come back it will be different.

We will introduce you to more of our friends this time, and we hope you
will do the same by us. Young people are apt to get above their business,
and we admit that we were wrong.

Come back and oversee our fritter bureau once more.

Take the portfolio of our interior department.

Try to forget our former coldness.

Return, oh, wanderer, return!

A New Play.

The following letter was written, recently, in reply to a dramatist who
proposed the matter of writing a play jointly.

Hudson, Wis., Nov. 13, 1886.

Scott Marble, Esq.--Dear Sir: I have just received your favor of
yesterday, in which you ask me to unite with you in the construction of a
new play.

This idea has been suggested to me before, but not in such a way as to
inaugurate the serious thought which your letter has stirred up in my
seething mass of mind.

I would like very much to unite with you in the erection of such a
dramatic structure that people would cheerfully come to this country from
Europe, and board with us for months in order to see this play every
night.

You will surely agree with me that someone ought to write a play. Why it
has not been done long ago, I cannot understand. A well known comedian
told me a year ago that he hadn't been able to look into a paper for
sixteen months. He could not even read over the proof of his own press
notices and criticisms, to ascertain whether the printer had set them up
as he wrote them or not, simply because it took all his spare time off the
stage to examine the manuscripts of plays that had been submitted to him.

But I think we could arrange it so that we might together construct
something in that line which would at least attract the attention of our
families.

Would you mind telling me, for instance, how you write a play? You have
been in the business before, and you could tell me, of course, some of the
salient points about it. Do you write it with a typewriter, or do you
dictate your thoughts to someone who does not resent being dictated to?

Do you write a play and then dramatize it, or do you write the drama and
then play on it? Would it not be a very good idea to secure a plot that
would cost very little, and then put the kibosh on it, or would you put up
the lines first, and then hang the plot or drama, or whatever it is, on
the lines? Is it absolutely necessary to have a prologue? If so, what is a
prologue? Is it like a catalogue?

I have a great many crude ideas, but you see I am not practical. One of my
crude ideas is to introduce into the play an artist's studio. This would
not cost much, for we could borrow the studio evenings and allow the
artist to use it daytimes. Then we would introduce into the studio scene
the artist's living model. Everybody would be horrified, but they would
go. They would walk over each other to attend the drama, and we would do
well. Our living model in the studio act would be made of common wax, and
if it worked well, we would discharge other members of the company and
substitute wax. Gradually we could get it down to where the company would
be wax, with the exception of a janitor with a feather duster. Think that
over.

But seriously, a play, it seems to me, should embody an idea. Am I correct
in that theory or not? It ought to convey some great thought, some maxim
or aphorism, or some such a thing as that. How would it do to arrange a
play with the idea of impressing upon the audience that "the fool and his
money are soon parted?" Are you using a hero and a heroine in your plays
now? If so, would you mind writing their lines for them, while I arrange
the details and remarks for the young man who is discovered asleep on a
divan when the curtain rises, and who sleeps on through the play with his
mouth slightly ajar till the close--the close of the play, not the close
of his mouth--when it is discovered that he is dead. He then plays the
cold remains in the closing tableau, and fills a new-made grave at $9 per
week.

I could also write the lines, I think, for the young man who comes in
wearing a light summer cane and a seersucker coat so tight that you can
count his vertebrae. I could write what he would say without great mental
strain, I think. I must avoid mental strain or my intellect might split
down the back and I would be a mental wreck, good for nothing but to strew
the shores of time with myself.

Various other crude ideas present themselves to my mind, but they need to
be clothed. You will say that this is unnecessary. I know you will at once
reply that, for the stage, the less you clothe an idea the more popular it
will be, but I could not consent to have even a bare thought of mine make
an appearance night after night before a cultivated audience.

What do you think of introducing a genuine case of small-pox on the stage?
You say in your letter that what the American people clamor for is
something "catchy." That would be catchy, and it would also introduce
itself.

I wish you would also tell me what kind of diet you confine yourself to
while writing a play, and how you go to work to procure it. Do you live on
a mixed diet, or on your relatives? Would you soak your head while writing
a play, or would you soak your overcoat? I desire to know all these
things, because, Mr. Marble, to tell you the truth, I am as ignorant about
this matter as the babe unborn. In fact, posterity would have to get up
early in the morning to know less about play-writing than I have succeeded
in knowing.

If we are to make a kind of comedy, my idea would be to introduce
something facetious in the middle of the comedy. No one will expect it,
you see, and it will tickle the audience almost to death.

A friend of mine suggests that it would be a great hit to introduce, or
rather to reproduce, the Hell Gate explosion. Many were not able to be
there at the time, and would willingly go a long distance to witness the
reproduction.

I wish that you would reply to this letter at an early date, telling me
what you think of the schemes suggested. Feel perfectly free to express
yourself fully. I am not too proud to receive your suggestions.

The Silver Dollar.

It would seem at this time, while so little is being said on the currency
question, and especially by the men who really control the currency, that
a word from me would not be out of place. Too much talking has been done
by those only who have a theoretical knowledge of money and its eccentric
habits. People with a mere smattering of knowledge regarding national
currency have been loquacious, while those who have made the matter a
study, have been kept in the background.

At this period in the history of our country, there seems to be a general
stringency, and many are in the stringency business who were never that
way before. Everything seems to be demonetized. The demonetization of
groceries is doing as much toward the general wiggly palsy of trade as
anything I know of.

But I may say, in alluding briefly to the silver dollar, that there are
worse calamities than the silver dollar. Other things may occur in our
lives, which, in the way of sadness and three-cornered gloom, make the
large, robust dollar look like an old-fashioned half-dime.

I met a man the other day, who, two years ago, was running a small paper
at Larrabie's Slough. He was then in his meridian as a journalist, and his
paper was frequently quoted by such widely-read publications as the
_Knight of Labor at Work_, a humorous semi-monthly journal. He boldly
assailed the silver dollar, and with his trenchant pen he wrote such
burning words of denunciation that the printer had to set them on ice
before he could use the copy.

Last week I met him on a Milwaukee & St. Paul train. He was very thin in
flesh, and the fire of defiance was no longer in his eye. I asked him how
he came on with the paper at Larrabie's Slough. He said it was no more.

"It started out," said he, "in a fearless way, but it was not sustained."

He then paused in a low tone of voice, gulped, and proceeded:

"Folks told me when I began that I ought to attack almost everything. Make
the paper non-partisan, but aggressive, that was their idea. Sail into
everything, and the paper would soon be a power in the land. So I
aggressed.

"Friends came in very kindly and told me what to attack. They would
neglect their own business in order to tell me of corruption in somebody
else. I went on that way for some time in a defiant mood, attacking
anything that happened to suggest itself.

"Finally I thought I would attack the silver dollar. I did so. I thought
that friends would come to me and praise me for my manly words, and that I
could afford to lose the friendship of the dollar provided I could win
friends.

"In six months I took an unexpired annual pass over our Larrabie Slough
Narrow-Gauge, or Orphan Road, and with nothing else but the clothes I
wore, I told the plaintiff how to jerk the old Washington press and went
away. The dear old Washington press that had more than once squatted my
burning words into the pure white page. The dear old towel on which I had
wiped my soiled hands for years, until it had almost become a part of
myself, the dark blue Gordon press with its large fly wheel and
intermittent chattel mortgage, a press, to which I had contributed the
first joint of my front finger; the editor's chair; the samples of large
business cards printed in green with an inflamed red border, which showed
that we could do colored work at Larrabie's Slough just as well as they
could in the large cities; the files of our paper; the large wilted potato
that Mr. Alonzo G. Pinkham of Erin Corners kindly laid on our table-all,
all had to go.

"I fled out into the great, hollow, mocking world of people who had
requested me to aggress. They were people who had called my attention to
various things which I ought to attack. I had attacked those things. I had
also attacked the Larrabie Slough Narrow-Gauge Railroad, but the manager
did not see the attack, and so my pass was good.

"What could I do?

"I had attacked everything, and more especially the silver dollar, and now
I was homeless. For fourteen weeks I rode up the narrow-gauge road one day
and back the next, subsisting solely on the sample of nice pecan meat that
the newsboy puts in each passenger's lap.

"You look incredulous, I see, but it is true.

"I feel differently toward the currency now, and I wish I could undo what
I have done. Were I called up again to jerk the Archimedean lever, I would
not be so aggressive, especially as regards the currency. Whether it is
inflated or not, silver dollars, paper certificates of deposit or silver
bullion, it does not matter to me.

"I yearn for two or three adult doughnuts and one of those thick, dappled
slabs of gingerbread, or slat of pie with gooseberries in it. I presume
that I could write a scathing editorial on the abuses of our currency yet,
but I am not so much in the scathe business as I used to be.

"I wish you would state, if you will, through some great metropolitan
journal, that my views in relation to the silver coinage and the currency
question have undergone a radical change, and that any plan whatever, by
which to make the American dollar less skittish, will meet with my hearty
approval.

"If I have done anything at all through my paper to injure or repress the
flow of our currency, and I fear I have, I now take this occasion to
cheerfully regret it."

He then wrung my hand and passed from my sight.

Polygamy as a Religious Duty.

During the past few years in the history of our republic, we have had
leprosy, yellow fever and the dude, and it seemed as though each one would
wreck the whole national fabric at one time. National and international
troubles of one kind and another have gradually risen, been met and
mastered, but the great national abscess known as the Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter Day Saints still obstinately refuses to come to a head.

I may be a radical monogamist and a rash enthusiast upon this matter, but
I still adhere to my original motto, one country, one flag and one wife at
a time. Matrimony is a good thing, but it can be overdone. We can excuse
the man who becomes a collection of rare coins, stamps, or autographs, but
he who wears out his young life making a collection of wives, should be
looked upon with suspicion.

After all, however, this matter has always been, and still is, treated
with too much levity. It seems funny to us, at a distance of 1,600 miles,
that a thick-necked patriarch in the valley of the Jordan should be sealed
to thirteen or fourteen low-browed, half human females, and that the whole
mass of humanity should live and multiply under one roof.

Those who see the wealthy polygamists of Salt Lake City, do not know much
of the horrors of trying to make polygamy and poverty harmonize in the
rural districts. In the former case, each wife has a separate residence or
suite of rooms, perhaps; but in the latter is the aggregation of vice and
depravity, doubly horrible because, instead of the secluded character
which wickedness generally assumes, here it is the common heritage of the
young and at once fails to shock or horrify.

Under the All-seeing eye, and the Bee Hive, and the motto, "Holiness to
the Lord," with a bogus Bible and a red-nosed prophet, who couldn't earn
$13. per month pounding sand, this so called church hanging on to the
horns of the altar, as it were, defies the statutes, and while in open
rebellion against the laws of God and man, refers to the constitution of
the United States as protecting it in its "religious belief."

In a poem, the patient Mormon in the picturesque valley of the Great Salt
Lake, where he has "made the desert blossom as the rose," looks well. With
the wonderful music of the great organ at the tabernacle sounding in your
ears, and the lofty temple near by towering to the sky, you say to
yourself, there is, after all, something solemn and impressive in all
this; but when a greasy apostle in an alapaca duster, takes his place
behind the elevated desk, and with bad grammar and slangy sentences, asks
God in a businesslike way to bless this buzzing mass of unclean,
low-browed, barbarous scum of all foreign countries, and the white trash
and criminals of our own, you find no reverence, and no religious awe.

The same mercenary, heartless lunacy that runs through the sickly
plagiarism of the Book of Mormon, pervades all this, and instead of the
odor of sanctity you notice the flavor of bilge water, and the emigrant's
own hailing sign, the all-pervading fragrance of the steerage.

Education is the foe of polygamy, and many of the young who have had the
means by which to complete their education in the East, are apostate, at
least so far as polygamy is concerned. Still, to the great mass of the
poor and illiterate of Mormondom this is no benefit. The rich of the
Mormon Church are rich because their influence with this great fraud has
made them so; and it would, as a matter of business, injure their
prospects to come out and bolt the nomination.

[Illustration: THE FAMILY WASH.]

Utah, even with the Edmunds bill, is hopelessly Mormon; all adjoining
States and Territories are already invaded by them, and the delegate in
Congress from Wyoming is elected by the Mormon vote.

I believe that I am moderately liberal and free upon all religious
matters, but when a man's confession of faith involves from three to
twenty-seven old corsets in the back yard every spring, and a clothes line
every Monday morning that looks like a bridal trousseau emporium struck by
a cyclone, I must admit that I am a little bit inclined to be sectarian in
my views.

It's bad enough to be slapped across the features by one pair of long wet
hose on your way to the barn, but to have a whole bankrupt stock of cold,
wet garments every week fold their damp arms around your neck, as you
dodge under the clothes line to drive the cow out of the yard, is wrong.

It is not good for man to be alone, of course, but why should he yearn to
fold a young ladies' seminary to his bosom? Why should this morbid
sentiment prompt him to marry a Female Suffrage Mass Meeting? I do not
wish to be considered an extremist in religious matters, but the doctrine
that requires me to be sealed to a whole emigrant train, seems unnatural
and inconsistent.

The Newspaper.

An Address Delivered Before the Wisconsin State Press Association, at
White-Water, Wis., August 11, 1886.

Mr. President and Gentlemen of the Press of Wisconsin:

I am sure that when you so kindly invited me to address you to-day, you
did not anticipate a lavish display of genius and gestures. I accepted the
invitation because it afforded me an opportunity to meet you and to get
acquainted with you, and tell you personally that for years I have been a
constant reader of your valuable paper and I like it. You are running it
just as I like to see a newspaper run.

I need not elaborate upon the wonderful growth of the press in our
country, or refer to the great power which journalism wields in the
development of the new world. I need not ladle out statistics to show you
how the newspaper has encroached upon the field of oratory and how the
pale and silent man, while others sleep, compiles the universal history of
a day and tells his mighty audience what he thinks about it before he goes
to bed.

Of course, this is but the opinion of one man, but who has a better
opportunity to judge than he who sits with his finger on the electric
pulse of the world, judging the actions of humanity at so much per judge,
invariably in advance?

I need not tell you all this, for you certainly know it if you read your
paper, and I hope you do. A man ought to read his own paper, even if he
cannot endorse all its sentiments.

So necessary has the profession of journalism become to the progress and
education of our country, that the matter of establishing schools where
young men may be fitted for an active newspaper life, has attracted much
attention and discussion. It has been demonstrated that our colleges do
not fit a young man to walk at once into the active management of a paper.
He should at least know the difference between a vile contemporary and a
Gothic scoop.

It is difficult to map out a proper course for the student in a school of
journalism, there are so many things connected with the profession which
the editor and his staff should know and know hard. The newspaper of
to-day is a library. It is an encyclopaedia, a poem, a biography, a
history, a prophecy, a directory, a time-table, a romance, a cook book, a
guide, a horoscope, an art critic, a political resume, a _multum in
parvo_. It is a sermon, a song, a circus, an obituary, a picnic, a
shipwreck, a symphony in solid brevier, a medley of life and death, a
grand aggregation of man's glory and his shame. It is, in short, a
bird's-eye-view of all the magnanimity and meanness, the joys and griefs,
the births and deaths, the pride and poverty of the world, and all for two
cents--sometimes.

I could tell you some more things that the newspaper of to-day is, if you
had time to stay here and your business would not suffer in your absence.
Among others it is a long felt want, a nine-column paper in a five-column
town, a lying sheet, a feeble effort, a financial problem, a tottering
wreck, a political tool and a sheriff's sale.

If I were to suggest a curriculum for the young man who wished to take a
regular course in a school of journalism, preferring that to the actual
experience, I would say to him, devote the first two years to meditation
and prayer. This will prepare the young editor for the surprise and
consequent temptation to profanity which in a few years he may experience
when he finds that the name of the Deity in his double-leaded editorial is
spelled with a little "g," and the peroration of the article is locked up
between a death notice and the advertisement of a patent moustache coaxer,
which is to follow pure reading matter every day in the week and occupy
the top of column on Sunday tf.

The ensuing five years should be devoted to the peculiar orthography of
the English language.

Then put in three years with the dumb bells, sand bags, slung shots and
tomahawk. In my own journalistic experience I have found more cause for
regret over my neglect of this branch than anything else. I usually keep
on my desk during a heated campaign, a large paper weight, weighing three
or four pounds, and in several instances I have found that I could feed
that to a constant reader of my valuable paper instead of a retraction.

Fewer people lick the editor though, now, than did so in years gone by.
Many people--in the last two years--have gone across the street to lick
the editor and never returned. They intended to come right back in a few
moments, but they are now in a land where a change of heart and a palm
leaf fan is all they need.

Fewer people are robbing the editor now-a-days, too, I notice with much
pleasure. Only a short time ago I noticed that a burglar succeeded in
breaking into the residence of a Dakota journalist, and after a long, hard
struggle the editor succeeded in robbing him.

After the primary course, mapped out already, an intermediate course of
ten years should be given to learning the typographical art, so that when
visitors come in and ask the editor all about the office, he can tell them
of the mysteries of making a paper, and how delinquent subscribers have
frequently been killed by a well-directed blow with a printer's towel.

Five years should be devoted to a study of the art of proof-reading. In
that length of time the young journalist can perfect himself to such a
degree that it will take another five years for the printer to understand
his corrections and marginal notes.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35