The Other Half

Who’s Who invites its contributors to list their recreations. Some responses are unusual:

Charles Causley: “Playing the piano with expression.”

John Faulkner: “Intricacies and wildernesses.”

John Fowles: “Mainly Sabine.”

Bevis Hillier: “Awarding marks out of ten for suburban front gardens.”

James Kirkup: “Standing in shafts of sunlight.” (In old age he changed this to “Standing in shafts of moonlight.”)

Edward Lucie-Smith: “Walking the dog; malice.”

Frederic Raphael: “Painting things white.”

Constant Hendrick de Waal: “Remaining (so far as possible) unaware of current events.”

Keith Waterhouse: “Lunch.”

Roy Worskett: “Looking and listening in disbelief.”

In 1897 George Bernard Shaw listed his recreations as “cycling and showing off.” In 1980 Sir Harold Hobson listed “Bridge; recollecting in regretful tranquillity the magical things and people I may never see again — the Grand Véfour, Lasserre, Beaumanière; Proust’s Grand Hotel at Balbec (Cabourg); Sunday afternoon teas at the Ritz; the theatrical bookshop in St Germain-des-Prés; the Prado; Edwige Feuillère, Madeleine Renauld, Jean-Louis Barrault, François Perier; collecting from ephemera of the Belle Epoque the cartoons of Steinlen; and always and inexhaustibly talking to my wife.”

(Via John Julius Norwich, More Christmas Crackers, 1990.)

02/05/2025 UPDATE: John Cleese lists his as “gluttony and sloth.” (Thanks, Bryan.)

| Humor · Society

The Engine

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Engine_(Gulliver).png

Gulliver’s Travels describes a device by which “the most ignorant person, at a reasonable charge, and with a little bodily labour, might write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, laws, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study”:

He then led me to the frame, about the sides whereof all his pupils stood in ranks. It was twenty feet square, placed in the middle of the room. The superfices was composed of several bits of wood, about the bigness of a die, but some larger than others. They were all linked together by slender wires. These bits of wood were covered, on every square, with paper pasted on them; and on these papers were written all the words of their language, in their several moods, tenses, and declensions; but without any order. The professor then desired me ‘to observe; for he was going to set his engine at work.’ The pupils, at his command, took each of them hold of an iron handle, whereof there were forty fixed round the edges of the frame; and giving them a sudden turn, the whole disposition of the words was entirely changed. He then commanded six-and-thirty of the lads, to read the several lines softly, as they appeared upon the frame; and where they found three or four words together that might make part of a sentence, they dictated to the four remaining boys, who were scribes. This work was repeated three or four times, and at every turn, the engine was so contrived, that the words shifted into new places, as the square bits of wood moved upside down.

As it permutes sets of words, it’s arguably a forerunner of the modern computer.

| Literature · Technology

Fundamentals

In 1955, the editor of a Michigan high school newspaper wrote to E.E. Cummings, asking his advice for students who wanted to follow in his footsteps. He sent this reply:

A Poet’s Advice to Students

A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feeling through words.

This may sound easy. It isn’t.

A lot of people think or believe or know they feel — but that’s thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling — not knowing or believing or thinking.

Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.

To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

As for expressing nobody-but-yourself in words, that means working just a little harder than anybody who isn’t a poet can possibly imagine. Why? Because nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time — and whenever we do it, we’re not poets.

If, at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you’ve written one line of one poem, you’ll be very lucky indeed.

And so my advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world — unless you’re not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die.

Does this sound dismal? It isn’t.

It’s the most wonderful life on earth.

Or so I feel.

(From the Ottawa Hills Spectator, Oct. 26, 1955.)

| Literature · Society

Freight

A problem from Cambridge mathematician J.E. Littlewood’s Miscellany (1953):

Is it possible to pack a cube with a finite number of smaller cubes, no two of which are the same size?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Overheard

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Natural_History,_Birds_-_Nightingale.jpg

Song of a neighborhood nightingale transcribed in 1868 by German naturalist Johann Matthäus Bechstein:

Tioû, tioû, tioû, tioû.
Spe, tiou, squa.
Tiô, tiô, tiô, tiô, tio, tio, tio, tix.
Coutio, coutio, coutio, coutio.
Squô, squô, squô, squô.
Tzu, tzu, tzu, tzu, tzu, tzu, tzu, tzu, tzu, tzi.
Corror, tiou, squa pipiqui.
Zozozozozozozozozozozozo, zirrhading!
Tsissisi, tsissisisisisisisis.
Dzorre, dzorre, dzorre, dzorre, hi.
Tzatu, tzatu, tzatu, tzatu, tzatu, tzatu, tzatu, dzi.
Dlo, dlo, dlo, dlo, dlo, dlo, dlo, dlo, dlo.
Quio, tr rrrrrrrr itz.
Lu, lu, lu, lu, ly, ly, ly, liê, liê, liê, liê.
Quio, didl, li lulylie.
Hagurr, gurr quipio!
Coui, coui, coui, coui, qui, qui, qui, qui, gai, gui, gui, gui.
Goll goll goll goll guia hadadoi.
Couigui, horr, he diadia dill si!
Hezezezezezezezezezezezezezezezeze couar ho dze hoi.
Quia, quia, quia, quia, quia, quia, quia, quia, ti.
Ki, ki, ki, ïo, ïo, ïo, ioioioio ki.
Lu ly li le lai la leu lo, didl ïo quia.
Kigaigaigaigaigaigaigai guiagaigaigai couior dzio dzio pi.

In his 1795 Natural History of Cage Birds, he notes that some captive birds “never sing unless confined within narrow limits, being obliged, as it would appear, to solace themselves, for the want of liberty, with their song,” and so should never be given freedom within a room.

See Bird Talk, Bird Songs, and Who’s Who.

| Science & Math

Some Lost Snowmen

In his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550), Giorgio Vasari notes that in January 1494, while Michelangelo was working on his first full-scale stone figure, “there was a heavy snowfall in Florence and Piero de’ Medici, Lorenzo’s eldest son … wanting, in his youthfulness, to have a statue made of snow in the middle of his courtyard, remembered and sent for Michelangelo and had him make the statue.”

A heavy snowfall did occur that month: One chronicler wrote, “There was the severest snowstorm in Florence that the oldest people living could remember.” And it was a tradition on such occasions for outstanding artists to sculpt large snow figures, including the Marzocco, the heraldic lion that is the city’s symbol. But “What snow figure Michelangelo fashioned is not known,” writes critic Georg Brandes, “only that it stood in the courtyard of the Palazzo Medici.”

Seventeen years later, Brussels residents protested the wealthy Habsburgs by building 110 satirical snowmen, more than half of which were said to be pornographic. There’s no visual record of that, either. It’s known as the Miracle of 1511.

| Art · Oddities · Society

“Good and Clever”

If all the good people were clever,
And all clever people were good,
The world would be nicer than ever
We thought that it possibly could.

But somehow ’tis seldom or never
The two hit it off as they should,
The good are so harsh to the clever,
The clever, so rude to the good!

So friends, let it be our endeavour
To make each by each understood;
For few can be good, like the clever,
Or clever, so well as the good.

— Elizabeth Wordsworth

| Poems

A Magic Box Cube

https://carresmagiques.blogspot.com/2024/09/magic-box-cubes-rubiks-cubes-and-twisty-puzzles.html
Image: William Walkington (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Reader William Walkington devised this “hollow” cube of order 4, each of whose faces is a magic square that draws on numbers from 1 to 56. The lines of four numbers in each row, column, long diagonal, and even some of the broken diagonals, produce the magic sum 114. Further, remarkably, when the figure is “scrambled” like a Rubik’s cube, the result is often another magic box cube:

https://carresmagiques.blogspot.com/2024/09/magic-box-cubes-rubiks-cubes-and-twisty-puzzles.html
4 Images: William Walkington (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

For more information, see his site. (Thanks, William.)

| Science & Math

“A Sound of Clinking Waiters”

“Description of things and atmosphere” from the notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald:

  • “The island floated, a boat becalmed, upon the almost perceptible curve of the world.”
  • “The first lights of the evening were springing into pale existence. The Ferris wheel, pricked out now in lights, revolved leisurely through the dusk; a few empty cars of the roller coaster rattled overhead.”
  • “Farther out in the water there were other lights where a fleet of slender yachts rode the tide with slow dignity, and farther still a full ripe moon made the water bosom into a polished dancing floor.”
  • “It was a cup of a lake with lily pads for dregs and a smooth surface of green cream.”
  • “A region of those monotonous apartment rows that embody the true depths of the city — darkly mysterious at night, drab in the afternoon.”
  • “Spring came sliding up the mountain in wedges and spear points of green.”
  • “The music indoors was strange in the summer; it lay uneasily upon the pulsing heat, disturbed by the loud whir of the fans.”
  • “Drawing away from the little valley, past pink pines and fresh, diamond-strewn snow.”
  • “And perhaps, on the widest and shadiest of the porches there is even a hammock left over from the hammock days, stirring gently in a Victorian wind.”
  • “Bundled up children were splattering in for tea as if the outdoors were tired of them and wanted to change its dress in quiet dignity.”
  • “Out the window, the snow on the pine trees had gone lilac in the early dusk.”
  • “The sun had gone behind Naples, leaving a sky of pigeon’s blood and gold, and as they rounded the bay and climbed slowly toward Torredell Annunziata, the Mediterranean momentarily toasted the fading splendor in pink wine.”
  • “The sea was dingy grey and swept with rain. Canvas sheltered all the open portions of the promenade deck, even the ping-pong table was wet.”
  • “Is there anything more soothing than the quiet whir of a lawnmower on a summer afternoon?”
  • “In Spring when there was no leaf dry enough to crackle and the loudest sound was a dog barking in the next county.”
  • “The deep South from the air — a mosaic of baseball diamonds set between dark little woods.”

In his 1925 story “Love in the Night,” a “limousine crawled crackling down the pebbled drive.”

| Literature