Judge — July 3, 1920 — page 15: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

BETWEEN Where Are We At? “ OOD morning,” said my wife, coming out of her bent-dream sleep; “how do you feel, dearie?” “Oh, just relative,” I yawned. Drat that fellow Einstein! He’s got me. He hasn't left a positive certainty in my life. Even my relatives are more so than ever. Have I paid my rent this month? Relatively, yes. Positively, I don’t know. Am I writing this? Relatively, yes. Are you reading it? Relatively, yes. How do you know what you are doing? How do you know whom ? You think you are going to Chicago? Why, Chicago y ing to you. If there is no space, then how do you know you are going up to the forty-second story of the Sandwich Tower? If there is no time, then today maybe yesterday. What's the good of saying up for a rainy day if tomorrow is past? The Einstein theory and Daisy Ashford bumped us both at once. Einstein is the Sir James Barrie of science; Barry is the Einstein of literature. Ergo, who struck Billy Patterson? What became of Char- ley Ross? Can two parallel jags meet? Am I or ain't 1? “Your ice is melting!” shouted a relative neighbor at this junc- ture down the relative dumbwaiter, which was relatively motionless. “Prove it!” I shouted back. “Don’t you know that liquefaction of ice is potential, not actual?” Near-motion, near-light, near-ice, near-beer. Where will it all end? Remember Hamlet’s yawp, “O that this too, too solid flesh would thaw and resolve itself into a dew!"? Hamlet von Einstein has pulled the trick. He has thawed out our flesh and brains, time, space and about everything. After answering Hamlet he waltzes off with the Mad-Hatter. Yes, after reading “Easy Lessons in Einstein,” by Edwin E. Slosson (Harcourt, Brace and Howe), I prefer to think of the great Swiss as the Lewis Carroll of science instead of the Barrie of science. Doctor Slosson’s book is as fascinating as ‘Alice in Wonderland.” It has the thrill of great magic. Some Home-Brew Einstein GAIN some onc else has beaten me to it. All my life I have post- poned writing a book that I thought no other human being would ever think of ‘The title of the book was to be “The Good Results of Bad Habits.” I must have talked too much about it, for here comes a book along by J. Edgar Park (Houghton, Mifflin & Co.) called ‘The Bad Results of Good Habits,” ‘This is apparently the very opposite of my own title, but it really in the end is the same thing, Einsteinically speaking, Whatever you say or think may. as well be the opposite, for if all parallel lines mect and a straight line is really a circle, then black may only be white with an edge on. And by Golly! Od Zooks! and Gee Whiz! here is a Puritan pagan, a naughty Nietzschean from down home ways, a genuine Back Bay immoralist! ‘These little essays go to daring lengths never conceived of in the philosophy of Elbert Hubbard and Doctor Crane. * ‘There is some fine tabasco ia this book, and it may be that Mr. Park is the herald of the Big Stick of Personal Liberty. Among daring things he has nominated old Jack Falstaff for President! He Bent Light, Home Brew and a ‘‘Chink”’ By Benjamin De Casseres COVER S says outright that all ‘‘good” people can go to—oh, well, Terre del Fuego; that heaven is no place for regular fellows; that live wires are not afraid of the devil; that respectability is so busy watching its step that it has forgotten how to dance; that a jest, and that if you think it is anything more serious the Bogie Man'll get you—all of which I indorse with an hurrah, three slaps on the back and a six per cent. twinkle in my eye. A real Book of the Hour, in a way, that ought to be in the hands of every American who is sick to the center of his Fourth of July soul at the way we are being Prussianized, Rus- sianized and burlezoned. “Well,” said Old Pop Emerson after a third tankard of Old Musty with Nat Hawthorne, “If I am the Devil’s child, I will live unto the Devil!” Something in that! and we congratulate Mr. Park on hit- ting the trail with the Live and Let Livers. The Dime-Novel Emotion HERE are two things I am ashamed to admit—that I never miss the circus and that I revel in detective stories. If you have kept the Dime Novel Emotion intact, you are still young. Remember that John Roach Stratons of those days who used to thunder from the pulpit every Sunday that the Youth of America was going plumbtoell because of Satan Beadle, Old Nick (alias “Cap”) Collier and other delectable thrill-chefs: 1 Like “Huck” Finn, Billy Shakespeare and Benny Cellini, I never had much use for school. Under my spelling-book, open on my desk, there was always a rattling gun-play story or a blood-curdling detec- tive serial. The pleasures of having your blood curdle in your veins! Blood- curdle and goose-flesh are the indelible physical characteristics of your real fiction lover. Of course when you were playing intellectual hooky in school it was very awkward in the middle of a blood-and- thunder page to have your teacher suddenly hurl at you:— “William, spell isosceles.” Of course, you couldn’t, William—just at that moment, anyhow. Frenzied Frank was in trouble, and what is an isosceles in the aesthetic dimension of boyhood? Those “weeklies” were the “movies” of our golden days. The grown-ups read them now—at $2.00 net. Turning to page 151 of “The Pointing Man,” by Marjorie Douie (E. P. Dutton & Company), I find this old-time line, “Thy friend is under the hands of devils.” I couldn’t resist—the Dime Novel Emotion surged into my nerves; Tread on and on and on till daylight drove the cats off the back fence. It all happened in the Orient, where things still happen (in America things only are licensed to take place). Mtooh Pah, the Burmese, and Leh Shin, the Chinaman, have a little bone to pick, and when they pick bones out there they have a regular doggone time of it. ‘The white man who is the Mayor Hylan of this Burmese-village has the job of ferreting out in this little feud who side-swiped some of the Caucasian lookers-on. Detective work and adventure galore, with fakirs and Houdinis run in for good measure. Moral: Palefaces had better lay off when the Yellow Perils are settling an esoteric argument among themselves. comicbooks.com