George Parsons Lathrop - "A Study Of Hawthorne"

Thomas Wentworth Higginson - "Black Rebellion"

Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller - "Einige Gedichte"

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Remarks by Bill Nye

B >> Bill Nye >> Remarks




He found that he was elected, and in answer to a telegram started off for
'Frisco to see a dying relative. He did not get back till the first of
January. Then he filed his bond and sailed into the office. He fired
several sedentary deputies who had been in the place twenty years just
because they were good "workers." That is, they were good workers at the
polls. They saved all their energies for the campaign, and so they only
had vitality enough left to draw their salaries during the balance of the
two years.

This man raised the county scrip from sixty to ninety-five in less than
two years, and still they busted him in the next convention. He was too
eccentric. One delegate asked what in Sam Hill would become of the country
if every candidate should skin out during the campaign and rusticate in
the mountains while the battle was being fought.

Says he, "I am a delegate from the precinct of Rawhide Buttes, and I
calklate I know what I am talkin' about. Gentlemen of the convention, just
suppose that everybody, from the President of the United States down, was
to git the nomination and then light out like a house afire and never come
back till it was time to file his bond; what's going to become of us
common drunkards to whom election is a noasis in the bad lands, an orange
grove in the alkali flats?

"Mr. Chairman, there's millions of dollars in this broad land waiting for
the high tide of election day to come and float 'em down to where you and
I, Mr. Chairman, as well as other parched and patriotic inebriates, can
git a hold of 'em.

"Gentlemen, we talk about stringency and shrinkage of values, and all such
funny business as that; but that's something I don't know a blamed thing
about. What I can grapple with is this: If our county offices are worth
$30,000, and there are other little after-claps and soft snaps, and
walk-overs, worth, say $10,000, and the boys, say, are willing to do the
fair thing, say, blow in fifteen per cent, to the central committee, and
what they feel like on the outside, then politics, instead of a burden and
a reproach, becomes a pleasing duty, a joyous occasion and a picnic to
those whose lives might otherwise be a dreary monotone.

"Mr. Chairman, the past two years has wrecked four campaign saloons, and a
tinner who socked his wife's fortune into campaign torches is now in a
land where torchlights is no good. Overcome by a dull market, a financial
depression and a reserved central committee, he ate a package of Rough on
Rats, and passed up the flume. He is now at rest over yonder.

"Such instances would be common if we encouraged the eccentric economy of
official cranks. It is an evil that is gnawing at the vitals of the
republic. We must squench it or get left. There are millions of dollars in
this country, Mr. Chairman, that, if we keep it out of the campaign, will
get into the hands of the working classes, and then you and I, Mr.
Chairman, and gentlemen of the convention, can starve to death. Keep the
campaign money away from the soulless hired man, gentlemen, or good-bye
John.

"Mr. Chairman, excuse my emotion! It is almighty seldom that I make a
speech, but when I do, I strive to get there with both feet. We must
either work the campaign funds into their legitimate channels, or every
blamed patriot within the sound of my voice will have to fasten on a tin
bill and rustle for angle-worms amongst the hens. You hear me?"

[Terrific applause, during which the delicate odor of enthusiasm was
noticed on the breath of the entire delegation.]




A Goat in a Frame.

Laramie has a seal brown goat, with iron gray chin whiskers and a breath
like new mown hay.

He has not had as hard a winter as the majority of stock on the Rocky
mountains, because he is of a domestic turn of mind and tries to make man
his friend. Though social in his nature, he never intrudes himself on
people after they have intimated with a shotgun that they are weary of
him.

When the world seems cold and dark to him, and everybody turns coldly away
from him, he does not steal away by himself and die of corroding grief; he
just lies down on the sidewalk in the sun and fills the air with the
seductive fragrance of which he is the sole proprietor.

One day, just as he had eaten his midday meal of boot heels and cold
sliced atmosphere and kerosene barrel staves, he saw a man going along the
street with a large looking glass under his arm.

The goat watched the man, and saw him set the mirror down by a gate and go
inside the house after some more things that he was moving. Then the goat
stammered with his tail a few times and went up to see if he could eat the
mirror.

When he got pretty close to it, he saw a hungry-looking goat apparently
coming toward him, so he backed off a few yards and went for him. There
was a loud crash, and when the man came out he saw a full length portrait
of a goat with a heavy, black walnut frame around it, going down the
street with a great deal of apparent relish.

Then the man said something derogatory about the goat, and seemed offended
about something.

Goats are not timid in their nature and are easily domesticated.

There are two kinds of goat--the cashmere goat and the plain goat. The
former is worked up into cashmere shawls and cashmere bouquet. The latter
is not.

The cashmere bouquet of commerce is not made of the common goat. It is a
good thing that it is not.

A goat that has always been treated with uniform kindness and never
betrayed, may be taught to eat out of the hand. Also out of the flour
barrel or the ice-cream freezer.




To a Married Man.

Adelbert G. Grimes writes as follows: "I am a young man not yet twenty-two
years of age. I am said to be rather attractive in appearance and a fluent
conversationalist. Three years ago I very foolishly married and settled on
a tree claim in Dakota, where we have three children, consisting of one
pair of twins and an ordinary child, born by itself. We are a considerable
distance from town, and to remain at home during the winter with no
company besides my wife and children is very irksome, especially as my
wife has never had the advantages that I have in the way of society. Her
conversational powers are very inferior, and I cannot bear to remain at
home very much. So I go to town, where I can meet my equals and enjoy
myself.

"I fear that this will lead to an estrangement, for, when I return at
night, my wife's nose is so red from sniveling all day that I can hardly
bear to look at her. If there is anything in this world that I hate, it is
a red-eyed, red-nosed woman who sheds tears on all occasions.

"Of course all this makes me irritable, and I say sharp things to her, as
I have a wonderful command of language at such times. She surely cannot
expect a young man twenty-two years old to stay at home day after day and
listen to squalling children, when he is still in the heyday of life with
joy beaming in his eye.

"Of course I do say things to my wife that I am afterward sorry for, but I
made a great mistake in marrying the woman I did, and although some of my
lady friends told me so at the time, I did not then believe it. Do you
think I ought to bury myself on a tree claim with a woman far my inferior,
while I have talents that would shine in the best of society? I am greatly
distressed, and would willingly seek a legal separation if I knew how to
go about it. Will you kindly advise me? What do you think of my
penmanship?"

I hardly know how to advise you, Adelbert. You have got yourself into a
place where you cannot do much but remain and take your medicine.
Unfortunately, there are too many such young men as you are, Adelbert.
You are young, and handsome, and smart. You casually admit this in your
letter, I see. You have a social nature, and would shine in society. You
also reluctantly confess this. That does not help you in my estimation,
Adelbert. If you are a bright and shining light in society, you are
probably a brunette fizzle as a husband. When you resolved to take a tree
claim and make a home in Dakota, why didn't you put your swallow-tail
coat under the bed and retire from the giddy whirl and mad rush of
society, the way your wife had to?

I dislike very much to speak to you in a plain, blunt way, Adelbert,
being a total stranger to you, but when you convey the idea in your
letter that you have made a great mistake in marrying at the age of
nineteen, and marrying far beneath yourself, I am forced to agree with
you. If, instead of marrying a young girl who didn't know any better
than to believe that you were a man, instead of a fractional one, you
had come to me, and borrowed my revolver and blown out the fungus
growth which you refer to as your brains, you would have bit it. Even
now it is not too late. Yon can still come to me, and I will oblige
you. You cannot do your wife a greater favor at this time than to leave
her a widow, and the sooner you do so the less orphans there will be.

[Illustration: "I HAVE A WONDERFUL COMMAND OF LANGUAGE."]

Did it ever occur to you, Adelbert, that your wife made a mistake also?
Did it ever bore itself through your adamantine skull that it is not an
unbroken round of gayety for a young girl to shut herself up in a lonesome
house for three years, gradually acquiring children, and meantime being
"sassed" by her husband because she is not a fluent conversationalist?

Wherein you offend me, Adelbert, is that you persist in breathing the air
which human beings and other domestic animals more worthy than yourself
are entitled to. There are too many such imitation men at large. There
should be a law that would prohibit your getting up and walking on your
hind legs and thus imposing on other mammals. If I could run the
government for a few weeks, Adelbert, I would compel your style of
zoological wonder to climb a tree and stay there.

So you married a woman who was far your inferior, did you? How did you do
it? Where did you go to find a woman who could be your inferior and still
keep out of the menagerie? Adelbert, I fear you do your wife a great
injustice. With just barely enough vitality to hand your name down to
posterity and blast the fair future of Dakota by leaving your trade-mark
on future generations, you snivel and whine over your blasted life! If
your life had been blasted a little harder twenty years ago, the life of
your miserable little wife would have been less blasted.

If you had acquired a little more croup twenty years ago, Dakota would
have been ahead. Why did you go on year after year, permitting people to
believe you were a man, when you could have undeceived them in two minutes
by crawling into a hollow log and remaining there?

Your penmanship is very good. It is better than your chances for a bright
immortality beyond the grave. Write to me again whenever you feel lonesome
or want advice. I was a young married man myself once, and I know what
they have to endure. Up to the time of my marriage, I had never known a
harsher tone than a flute note; my early life ran quiet as the clear brook
by which I sported, and so on. I was a great belle in society, also. I
attended all the swell balls and parties in our county for years. Wherever
you found fair women and brave men tripping the light bombastic toe, you
would also find me. "Sometimes I played second violin, and sometimes I
called off."




To an Embryo Poet.

The following correspondence is now given to the press for the first time,
with the consent of the parties:

Wm. Nye, Esq.--_Dear Sir_-I am a young man, 20 years of age, with fair
education and a strong desire to succeed. I have done some writing for the
press, having written up a very nice article on progressive euchre, which
was a great success and published in our home paper, But it was not copied
so much in other papers as I would like to have saw it, and I take my pen
in hand at this time to write and ask you what there is in the article
enclosed that prevents its being copied abroad all over our broad land. I
write just as I hope you would feel perfectly free to write me at any
time. I think that writers ought to aid each other. Yours with kind
regards,

Algernon L. Tewey.

P.O. Box 202.

I have carefully read and pondered over the dissertation on progressive
euchre which you send me, Algernon, and I cannot see why it should not be
ravenously seized and copied by the press of the broad, wide land referred
to in your letters. If you have time, perhaps it would be well enough to
go to the leading journalists of our country and ask them what they mean
by it. You might write till your vertebrae fell out of your clothes on the
floor, and it would not do half so much good as a personal conference with
the editors of America. First prepare your article, then go personally to
the editors of the country and call them one by one out into the hall, in
a current of cold air, and explain the article to them. In that way you
will form pleasant acquaintances and get solid with our leading
journalists. You have no idea, Algernon, how lonely and desolate the life
of a practical journalist is. Your fresh young face and your fresh young
ways, and your charming grammatical improvisations, would delight an
editor who has nothing to do from year to year but attend to his business.

Do not try to win the editors of America by writing poems beginning:

Now the merry goatlet jumps,
And the trifling yaller dog,
With the tin can madly humps
Like an acrobatic frog.

At times you will be tempted to write such stuff as this, and mark it with
a large blue pencil and send it to the papers of the country, but that is
not a good way to do.

Seriously, Algernon, I would suggest that you make a bold dash for success
by writing things that other people are not writing, thinking things that
other people are not thinking, and saying things that other people are not
saying. You will say that this advice is easier to give than to take, and
I agree with you. But the tendency of the age is to wear the same style of
collar and coat and hat that every other man wears, and to talk and write
like other men; and to be frank with you, Algernon, I think it is an
infernal shame. If you will look carefully about you, you will see that
the preacher, who is talking mostly to dusty pew cushions, is also the
preacher who is thinking the thoughts of other men. He is "up-ending" his
barrel of sermons annually, and they were made in the first place from the
sermons of a man who also "up-ended" his barrel annually. Go where the
preacher is talking to full houses, and you will discover that his sermons
are full of humanity and originality. They are not written in a library by
a man with interchangeable ideas, an automatic cog-wheel thinker, but they
are prepared by a man who earnestly and honestly studies the great, aching
heart of humanity, and full of sincerity, originality and old-fashioned
Christianity, appeals to your better impulses.

How is it with our poetry? As a fellow-traveler and sea-sick tourist
across life's tempestuous tide, I ask you, Algernon, who is writing the
poetry that will live? Is it the man who is sawing out and sandpapering
stanzas of the same general dimensions as some other poet, in which he
bewails the fact that he loved a tall, well-behaved, accomplished girl,
sixteen hands high, who did not require his love?

Ah, no! He is not the poet whose terra cotta statue will stand in the
cemetery, wearing a laurel wreath and a lumpy brow. Show me the poet who
is intimate with nature and who studies the little joys and sorrows of the
poor; who smells the clover and writes about live, healthy people with
ideas and appetites. He is my poet.

I apologize for speaking so earnestly, Algernon, but I saw by your letter
that you felt kindly toward me, and rather invited an expression of
opinion on my part. So I have written more freely, perhaps, than I
otherwise would. We are both writers. Measurably so, at least. You write
on progressive euchre, and I write on anything that I can get hold of. So
let us agree here and promise each other that, whatever we do, we will not
think through the thinker of another man.

The Great Ruler of the universe has made and placed upon the earth a good
many millions of men, but He never made any two of them exactly alike. We
may differ from every one of the countless millions who have preceded us,
and still be safe. Even you and I, Algernon, may agree in many matters,
and yet be very dissimilar. At least I hope so, and I presume you do also.




Eccentricities of Genius.

Alfonso Quanturnernit Dowdell, Frumenti, Ohio, writes to know something
of the effects of alcohol on the brain of an adult, being evidently
apprehensive that some day he may become an adult himself He says:

"I would be glad to know whether or not you think that liquor stimulates
the brain to do better literary work. I have been studying the personal
history of Edgar A. Poe, and learned through that medium that he was in
the habit of drinking a good deal of liquor at times. I also read that
George D. Prentice, who wrote 'The Closing Year,' and other nice poems,
was a hearty drinker. Will you tell me whether this is all true or not,
and also what the effect of alcohol is on the brain of an adult?"

It is said on good authority that Edgar A. Poe ever and anon imbibed the
popular beverages of his day and age, some of which contained alcohol. We
are led to believe these statements because they remain as yet undenied.
But Poe did a great deal of good in that way, for he set an example that
has been followed ever since, more or less, by quite a number of poets'
apprentices who emulated Poe's great gift as a drinker. These men,
thinking that poesy and delirium tremens went hand in hand, became fluent
drunkards early in their career, so that finally, instead of issuing a
small blue volume of poems they punctuated a drunkard's grave.

So we see that Poe did a great work aside from what he wrote. He opened up
a way for these men which eradicated them, and made life more desirable
for those who remained. He made it easy for those who thought genius and
inebriation were synonymous terms to get to the hospital early in the day,
while the overworked waste-basket might secure a few hours of much needed
rest.

George D. Prentice has also done much toward weeding out a class of people
who otherwise might have become disagreeable. It is better that these men
who write under the influence of rum should fall into the hands of the
police as early as possible. The police can handle them better than the
editor can.

Do not try, Alfonso, to experiment in this way. Because Mr. Poe and Mr.
Prentice could write beautiful and witty things between drinks, do not, oh
do not imagine that you can begin that way and succeed at last.

The effect of alcohol on the brain of an adult is to congest it finally.
Alcohol will sometimes congest the brain of an adult under the most trying
and discouraging circumstances. I have frequently known it to scorch out
and paralyze the brain in cases where other experiments had not been
successful in showing the presence of a brain at all.

[Illustration: THINKING ABOUT THE POEM.]

That is the reason why some people love to fool with this great chemical.
It revives their suspicions regarding the presence of a brain.

The habits of literary men vary a good deal, for no two of them seem to
care to adopt the same plan.

I have taken the liberty of showing here my own laboratory and methods of
thought. This is from a drawing made by myself, and represents the writer
in his study and in the act of thinking about a poem.

Last summer I wrote a large poem entitled, "_Moanings of the Moist,
Malarious Sea._" I have it still. The back of it has a memoranda on it in
blue pencil from the leading editors of our broad land, but otherwise it
is just as I wrote it.

The engraving represents me in the act of thinking about the poem, and
what I will do with the money when I get it.

I am now preparing a poem entitled, "_The Umbrella_." It is a dainty
little bit of verse, and my hired man thinks it is a gem. I called it "The
Umbrella" so that it would not be returned.

By looking at the drawing you will see the rapid change of expression on
the face as the work goes on.

I give the drawing in order also, to show the rich furniture of the room.
All poets do not revel in such gaudy trappings as I do, but I cannot write
well in a bare and ill-furnished room. In these apartments there is also a
window which does not show in the engraving. I have tried over and over
again to write a poem in a room that had no window in it, but I cannot say
that I ever wrote one under such circumstances that I thought would live.

You can do as you think best about furnishing your room as I have mine.
You might, of course, succeed as well by writing in a plainer apartment,
but I could not. All my poetical work that was done in the cramped and
plainly furnished room that I formerly occupied over Knadler's livery
stable, was ephemeral.

It got into a few of the leading autograph albums of the country, but it
never got into the papers.

I would not use alcohol, however. Poe and Prentice could use it, but I
never could. After a long debauch, I could always work well enough on the
street but I could not do literary work.

Theatre review: Three Women, Jermyn Street, London
Obituary: Prolific crime novelist, Oscar-nominated screenwriter and man of many pseudonyms

Climbing the walls

Barack Obama is teaming up with Spider-Man in a comic from Marvel, which will see the future president exchanging a fist-bump with the superhero. The story sees one of Spidey's oldest enemies, the Chameleon, trying to stop Obama being inaugurated. Spider-Man's alter ego, Peter Parker, is covering the event as a photographer, and saves the day.

"Ya hear that, Chameleon?" Spider-Man says as he thwacks the villain in the face. "The president-elect here just appointed me ... secretary of shuttin' you up."

He tells Obama: "This is your day, and I know it wouldn't look good to be seen palling around with me" - in a nod to Sarah Palin's comment that Obama had been "palling around with terrorists".

"When we heard that president-elect Obama is a collector of Spider-Man comics, we knew that these two historic figures had to meet in our comics' Marvel Universe," said the publisher's editor-in-chief, Joe Quesada.

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