Decorum

In Notorious there’s a strangely chaste scene of passion in which Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant hold one another, gaze into each other’s eyes, and declare their love, but only intermittently kiss. Grant even places a phone call during the clinch. The reason is the Hays code, a set of moral guidelines that Hollywood had adopted in 1930. Among other things, it declared that:

The sanctity of the institution of marriage and the home shall be upheld … Excessive and lustful kissing, lustful embraces, suggestive postures and gestures, are not to be shown.

The practical rule was that a screen kiss must not last more than 3 seconds. So Alfred Hitchcock simply toed that line. Bergman later recalled, “We just kissed each other and talked, leaned away and kissed each other again … the censors couldn’t and didn’t cut the scene because we never at any one point kissed for more than three seconds … we nibbled on each other’s ears, and kissed a cheek, so that it looked endless.” In fact it lasted two and a half minutes.

April 8, 2018 | Entertainment · Society

Personal

Victorian England had a vogue in “confession albums,” in which friends asked each other to record their answers to such questions as “What do you consider the most beautiful thing in nature?” and “What peculiarity can you most tolerate?” According to Evan Kindley in Questionnaire, “They functioned as a kind of intimate currency among the literate classes,” sometimes serving as a prop in courtship rituals.

And occasionally some prominent intellectuals submitted to them. Here’s Karl Marx:

The quality you like best: Simplicity
In man: Strength
In woman: Weakness
Your chief characteristic: Singleness of purpose
Your favourite occupation: Glancing at Netchen [his cousin]
The vice you hate most: Servility
The vice you excuse most: Gullibility
Your idea of happiness: To fight
Your idea of misery: To submit
Your aversion: Martin Tupper [an English writer of moralistic verses]
Your hero: Spartacus, Keppler [Johannes Kepler, the astronomer]
Your heroine: Gretchen [of Goethe’s Faust]
The poet you like best: Aeschylus, Shakespeare
The prose writer you like best: Diderot
Your favourite flower: Daphne
Your favourite dish: Fish
Your maxim: Nihil humani a me alienum puto [Nothing human is alien to me]
Your motto: De omnibus dubitandum [Doubt everything]

Some other responses: Friedrich Engels’ idea of misery was “to go to a dentist,” Arthur Conan Doyle’s present state of mind was “jaded,” and Oscar Wilde’s distinguishing characteristic was “inordinate self-esteem.”

April 6, 2018April 6, 2018 | Literature · Society

The F-Scale

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ADORNO_by_LGdL.JPG — Image: Wikimedia Commons

In 1947 Theodor Adorno devised a test to measure the authoritarian personality — he called it the F-scale, because it was intended to measure a person’s potential for fascist sympathies:

Although many people may scoff, it may yet be shown that astrology can explain a lot of things.
Too many people today are living in an unnatural, soft way; we should return to the fundamentals, to a more red-blooded, active way of life.
After we finish off the Germans and Japs, we ought to concentrate on other enemies of the human race such as rats, snakes, and germs.
One should avoid doing things in public which appear wrong to others, even though one knows that these things are really all right.
He is, indeed, contemptible who does not feel an undying love, gratitude, and respect for his parents.
Homosexuality is a particularly rotten form of delinquency and ought to be severely punished.
There is too much emphasis in college on intellectual and theoretical topics, not enough emphasis on practical matters and on the homely virtue of living.
No matter how they act on the surface, men are interested in women for only one reason.
No insult to our honor should ever go unpunished.
What a man does is not so important so long as he does it well.
When you come right down to it, it’s human nature never to do anything without an eye to one’s own profit.
No sane, normal, decent person could ever think of hurting a close friend or relative.

Adorno hoped that making the questions oblique would encourage participants to reveal their candid feelings, “for precisely here may lie the individual’s potential for democratic or antidemocratic thought and action in crucial situations.”

“The F-scale … was adopted by quite a few experimental psychologists and sociologists, and remained in the repertoire of the social sciences well into the 1960s,” writes Evan Kindley in Questionnaire (2016). But it’s been widely criticized — Adorno and his colleagues assumed that any attraction to fascist ideas was pathological; the statements were worded so that agreement always indicated an authoritarian response; and people with high intelligence tended to see through the “indirect” items anyway.

Ironically, the test’s dubious validity might be a good thing, Kindley notes: Otherwise, “If something like the F-scale were to fall into the wrong hands, couldn’t it become a vehicle of tyranny?”

March 31, 2018 | Science & Math · Society

Podcast Episode 194: The Double Life of Clarence King

American geologist Clarence King led a strange double life in the late 1800s: He invented a second identity as a black railroad porter so he could marry the woman he loved, and then spent 13 years living separate lives in both white and black America. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll consider the extraordinary lengths that King went to in order to be with the woman he loved.

We’ll also contemplate the dangers of water and puzzle over a policeman’s strange behavior.

See full show notes …

March 26, 2018April 9, 2018 | History · Podcast · Society

Not So Fast

In 1700 the body of John Dryden was arrested pending payment of his debts.

Before 1804 the cadaver of a debtor could be held hostage by the creditor until the dead person’s loved ones could pay the arrears.

Finally in the case Jones v. Ashburnham, Lord Ellenborough declared that the practice was “contrary to every principle of law and moral feeling. Such an act is revolting to humanity, and illegal, and, therefore, any promise extorted by it could never be valid law.”

March 7, 2018 | Death · Society

FWIW

How to get a boy to kiss you, from the advice column in Mirabelle, Nov. 18, 1961:

Here’s a trick a very pretty film star swears by. Look deep into your boy’s eyes. Fine, now you have got his attention. Drop your eyes to take a lingering look at his lips and then raise your eyes to his again. It’s practically irresistible.

March 5, 2018March 5, 2018 | Society

Plea

On Sept. 2, 1945, an American Navy squadron came ashore at Sagami Bay near Yokohama to demilitarize the Japanese midget submarines in the area. They found this notice on the door of a marine biological research station there, left by embryologist Katsuma Dan.

The Americans honored his wish: On the last of 1945 he was summoned by an officer of the U.S. First Cavalry and handed a document releasing the station back to the University of Tokyo.

The notice is on display at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s Marine Biological Laboratory (here’s the full story).

February 26, 2018February 26, 2018 | Science & Math · Society

The Lawyer’s Prayer

In 1765 Samuel Johnson considered taking up the study of law. In his diary he wrote:

Almighty God, the Giver of wisdom, without whose help resolutions are vain, without whose blessing study is ineffectual, enable me, if it be Thy will, to attain such knowledge as may qualify me to direct the doubtful and instruct the ignorant, to prevent wrong, and terminate contention; and grant that I may use that knowledge which I shall attain to Thy glory and my own salvation; for Jesus Christ’s sake. Amen.

He seems to have given up the project, but he maintained his respect for the profession. The following year, when James Boswell mentioned that a friend had jokingly advised him against becoming a lawyer “because I should be excelled by plodding block-heads,” Johnson replied, “Why, Sir, in the formulary and statutory part of law, a plodding block-head may excel; but in the ingenious and rational part of it a plodding block-head can never excel.”

February 21, 2018February 22, 2018 | Society

Podcast Episode 189: The “Wild White Man”

In 1835, settlers in Australia discovered a European man dressed in kangaroo skins, a convict who had escaped an earlier settlement and spent 32 years living among the natives of southern Victoria. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll review the extraordinary life of William Buckley, the so-called “wild white man” of colonial Australia.

We’ll also try to fend off scurvy and puzzle over some colorful letters.

See full show notes …

February 19, 2018February 26, 2018 | History · Podcast · Society

“A Little Saga of Self-Denial”

Hold on to your seats, boys. This one gets complicated.

It seems that on Aug. 12, 1940, there occurred an automobile collision at Forty-second avenue S. and Forty-second street.

A car driven by Leo R. Johnson, Hopkins, and owned by Frank M. Anderson, 2912 Sixteenth avenue S., was in collision with one driven by Francis D. Hall, 3413 E. Minnehaha parkway.

It happened that both owners were insured with the same company, the Westchester Fire Insurance Co., and both had $50 deductible collision policies.

The company paid $65 to Anderson for damages to his car and $300 to Hall for damages to his car.

Then the company started suit in municipal court to recover the money.

Action was started against Hall to recover the $65 paid for damages to Anderson’s car, charging him with negligence, and against Anderson to recover the $300 paid for damages to Hall’s car, charging Johnson, the driver, with negligence. …

Benjamin Rigler, attorney for Hall, then came into court with an answer denying that his client was negligent and charging that the driver of Anderson’s car was the negligent party.

And A.C. Johnston, attorney for Anderson, came into court with an answer denying that Johnson was negligent in driving and charging that Hall was guilty of contributory negligence.

The insurance company then filed replies to both answers, denying them.

Since it denied the answers, it also denied each answer’s charge that the other party was guilty of negligence, and thus denied its own original complaint.

Today the attorneys moved for dismissal on the ground that the reply to the answers was ‘sham and frivolous.’

Municipal Judge William A. Anderson dismissed both cases.

(From William L. Prosser’s The Judicial Humorist, 1952. The author is unknown.)

February 5, 2018 | Society