Exercises

Around Christmas 1921, 16-year-old Vera Howley began to take singing lessons from Owen Richard Williams, the choirmaster of a local Presbyterian church. He had an odd way of working:

On the occasion of the second singing lesson on January 17 the appellant said that she was not singing as she should and was not getting her notes properly and told her to lie down on a settee. He then removed a portion of her clothing and placed upon the lower part of her body an instrument — which was in the nature of an aneroid barometer and according to the evidence was not in working order and would not in any event have been affected by the breathing of the girl — and then told her to take a deep breath three times. He looked at the instrument and purported to write something in a book. He then dropped on to her and proceeded to have sexual intercourse with her. She said: ‘What are you going to do?’ He said: ‘It is quite all right; do not worry. I am going to make an air passage. This is my method of training. Your breathing is not quite right and I have to make an air passage to make it right. Your parents know all about it, it has all been arranged; before God, Vera, it is quite right. I will not do you any harm.’ The girl made no resistance, as she believed what he told her and did not know that what he did was wrong — nor did she know that he was having sexual intercourse with her. The appellant had sexual intercourse with the girl a second time on April 28 in similar circumstances.

Vera told her parents, and Williams was tried at the Liverpool Assizes. He argued that she’d given consent; the court ruled that she’d consented to what she thought was a medical or surgical operation, not intercourse. Williams served 7 years for rape and 12 months for indecent assault.

(King v. Williams [1923] 1 K.B. 340. From Ralph Slovenko, Tragicomedy in Court Opinions, 1973.)

| Crime

Above and Below

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The Man to the Fish:

You strange, astonished-looking, angle-faced,
Dreary-mouthed, gaping wretches of the sea,
Gulping salt-water everlastingly,
Cold-blooded, though with red your blood be graced,
And mute, though dwellers in the roaring waste;
And you, all shapes beside, that fishy be,–
Some round, some flat, some long, all devilry,
Legless, unloving, infamously chaste:–

O scaly, slippery, wet, swift, staring wights,
What is’t ye do? What life lead? eh, dull goggles?
How do ye vary your vile days and nights?
How pass your Sundays? Are ye still but joggles
In ceaseless wash? Still nought but gapes, and bites,
And drinks, and stares, diversified with boggles?

A Fish answers:

Amazing monster! that, for aught I know,
With the first sight of thee didst make our race
For ever stare! O flat and shocking face,
Grimly divided from the breast below!
Thou that on dry land horribly dost go
With a split body and most ridiculous pace,
Prong after prong, disgracer of all grace,
Long-useless-finned, haired, upright, unwet, slow!

O breather of unbreathable, sword-sharp air,
How canst exist? How bear thyself, thou dry
And dreary sloth? What particle canst share
Of the only blessed life, the watery?
I sometimes see of ye an actual pair
Go by! linked fin by fin! most odiously.

— Leigh Hunt

| Poems

Magic

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mesto_conjuring_a_breeze.jpg

If you move each of its letters to the mirror position in the alphabet (A <-> Z, B <-> Y, etc.), WIZARD becomes DRAZIW.

A word-level palindrome:

“Is it crazy how saying sentences backwards creates backwards sentences saying how crazy it is?”

| Language

“To a Baby Born Without Limbs”

From Kingsley Amis’ 1966 novel The Anti-Death League:

This is just to show you whose boss around here.
It’ll keep you on your toes, so to speak,
Make you put your best foot forward, so to speak,
And give you something to turn your hand to, so to speak.
You can face up to it like a man,
Or snivvle and blubber like a baby.
That’s up to you. Nothing to do with Me.
If you take it in the right spirit,
You can have a bloody marvelous life,
With the great rewards courage brings,
And the beauty of accepting your LOT.
And think how much good it’ll do your Mum and Dad,
And your Grans and Gramps and the rest of the shower,
To be stopped being complacent.
Make sure they baptise you, though,
In case some murdering bastard
Decides to put you away quick,
Which would send you straight to LIMB-O, ha ha ha.
But just a word in your ear, if you’ve got one.
Mind you DO take this in the right spirit,
And keep a civil tongue in your head about Me.
Because if you DON’T,
I’ve got plenty of other stuff up My sleeve,
Such as Leukemia and polio,
(Which incidentally your welcome to any time,
Whatever spirit you take this in.)
I’ve given you one love-pat, right?
You don’t want another.
So watch it, Jack.

Misspellings in original. In his memoir Experience, Martin Amis says Yevgeny Yevtushenko asked Kingsley in 1962, “You atheist?” He answered, “Well yes, but it’s more that I hate him.”

| Literature · Poems · Religion

The Hasanlu Lovers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hasanlu_Lovers.jpg

In 1972, archaeologists unearthed a plaster-lined brick bin in the Teppe Hasanlu site in northwestern Iran, an ancient city that had been violently sacked and burned at the end of the ninth century B.C. University of Pennsylvania archaeologist Robert Dyson wrote:

Lying in the bottom of the bin were two human skeletons, a male and a female. The male had one of its arms under the shoulder of the female, while the female was looking into the face of the male and reaching out with one hand to touch his lips. Both were young adults. Neither showed any evidence of injury; there were no obvious cuts or broken bones. There were no objects with the skeletons, but under the female’s head was a stone slab. The other contents of the bin consisted of broken pieces of plaster, charcoal, and small pieces of burned brick but nothing heavy enough to crush the bones.

“Two theories have been suggested to explain this unusual scene,” he wrote. “One, that a pair of lovers had crawled into the bin under some light material of some kind to hide in the hope of escaping the destruction of the citadel, and that this is a very tender moment between them. The other is that they were hiding and one is telling the other not to make any noise. In either case it would appear they died peacefully — probably by asphyxiation.”

| Death · Oddities

Alternative Music

Norwegian musician Terje Isungset plays a trumpet and xylophone made of ice. He calls them “the only instruments you can drink after you’ve finished playing.”

The xylophone’s bars are cut from a Norwegian lake with a chainsaw. Isungset explains to Trevor Cox in The Sound Book, “You can have 100 pieces of ice; they will all sound different. Perhaps three will sound fantastic.”

The First Vienna Vegetable Orchestra, below, carves its instruments an hour before each show and makes them into soup afterward. There must be some way to combine these two …

| Oddities

Whose Who’s

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

What’s the difference between forgery and plagiarism?

“This has been answered clearly by Monroe C. Beardsley: In the case of plagiarism one concerns oneself in ‘passing off another’s work as one’s own’; in the case of forgery, in ‘passing off one’s own work as another’s.'”

— Sándor Radnóti, The Fake: Forgery and Its Place in Art, 1999

| Art · Crime

Orthography

There once was a ,cal fellow,
Who grew .ically mellow;
With a — he was gone
To the town of :
To write for a sheet that was yellow.

She was wooed by a handsome young Dr.,
Who one day in his arms tightly lr.;
But straightway he swore
He would do so no more,
Which the same, it was plain, greatly shr.

A boy at Sault Ste. Marie
Said, “To spell I will not agree
Till they learn to spell ‘Soo’
Without any u
Or an a or an l or a t.”

There was an old maid from Duquesne
Who the rigor of mortis did fuesne;
She came to with a shout,
Saying: “Please let me out;
This coffin will drive me insuesne.”

— Stanton Vaughn, ed., Limerick Lyrics, 1904

| Language · Poems

Thorough Enough

Seven ways to pronounce ough:

  • dough
  • tough
  • hiccough
  • bough
  • ought
  • cough
  • through

A letter to the London Times, Sept. 20, 1934:

Sir,

‘A rough-coated dough-faced ploughman strode coughing and hiccoughing through the streets of Scarborough’ used to be set as a spelling-test at my prep school at Crowborough in the middle nineties.

I am, Sir, your obedient servant,

H. Pirie-Gordon

“If the English language made any sense,” wrote Doug Larson, “lackadaisical would have something to do with a shortage of flowers.”

| Language