Chamblee54

Towards the end of his Booknotes chat, Nat Hentoff talked about censorship. As a journalist, his views were predictable.
Mr. HENTOFF: Any words at all. Words are–I mean, there is a great–there was a great scene in New York once when Lenny Bruce, who was a friend of mine, was on trial for his words. And Richard Cue, the assistant district attorney, was making a name for himself trying to blast all of the witnesses for the defense. And he got Dorothy Kilgallen, who was a very famous then syndicated columnist, a devout Catholic, a conservative and a great admirer of Lenny Bruce. And he con–he strung together, Cue did, all of the words in Lenny’s monologues that could be considered terribly offensive, and he hit her with them. It was a barrage. `What do you think then, Ms. Kilgallen?’ `Well,’ she said, `they’re words. They’re words. That’s all. Words.’ That’s the way I feel.
When PG heard this, he remembered reading about this trial. With the aid of Mr. Google, a transcript turned up. If you like to read about lawyers saying dirty words, this is the place for you.
Dorothy Kilgallen was, to put it mildly, a piece of work. She wrote for the N. Y. Journal American, and stepped on more than a few toes. A biography, Kilgallen, tells a few of the tales. Today, Miss Kilgallen is best known as one of the original panelists on “Whats My Line?”
The People v Lenny Bruce (Cafe Au Go Go Trial) was tried June 16, 1964 to July 28, 1964 in New York City. The Per Curium Opinion of Judge John Murtagh sets the tone. “All three performances of the defendant, Lenny Bruce, were obscene, indecent, immoral and impure within the meaning of Section 1l40-a of the Penal Law. While no tape is available as to the first performance [past midnight, March 31-April 1], this monologue, according to the testimony, was essentially the same as that of the second [April 1, after 10:00 p.m.] and third [April 7, after 10:00 p.m.] performances. In the latter two performances, words such as “ass,” “balls,” “cock-sucker,” “cunt,” “fuck,” “mother-fucker,” “piss,” “screw,” “shit,” and “tits” were used about one hundred times in utter obscenity. The monologues also contained anecdotes and reflections that were similarly obscene.
Dorothy Kilgallen was called as an “expert witness”. In lawyerly fashion, the prosecutor claimed she was not a genuine expert. After her credentials were established, there were questions like “Will you tell us what the artistry, or the social value, or the merit, or the good is, in the Bruce story of sexual intercourse with a chicken?” After the testimony described by Mr. Hentoff, Miss Kilgallen talks about something that does offend her.
Q. I wouldn’t take much time, but we did discuss before Lenny Bruce’s use of the words ‘mother fucker’ at his audience. Can you tell me when James Jones or Norman Mailer or Arthur Miller has called his audience ‘mother fucker?’
Mr. Garbus: Your Honor, may I object? We are talking about books against monologue. It’s completely an irrelevant question.
Judge Murtagh: We will allow it. Objection overruled.
A. I can’t tell you anything verbatim from the books, because I read them a couple of years ago or more. I would imagine–this would be my best guess–that they did not call their audiences anything. There’s another book called The Naked Lunch which I couldn’t even finish reading, but it’s published, and I think the author should be in jail and he used–
Q. Unfortunately we can’t do everything at once, Miss Kilgallen. Are you judging the non-obscene quality and the artistic quality of Bruce by the fact that The Naked Lunch is a book which, as of this date, is sold in the community?
A. No, I’m not. I just mentioned it because you asked me for some books.
Q. And The Naked Lunch is a book you found impossible to read, is that correct?
A. Yes, I found it revolting.
Q. What was revolting about it?
A. Just the way it was written.
Mr.Garbus: Objection, your Honor.
Judge Murtagh: Objection overruled.
A. It seemed to use words for shock value, not for any valid reason, and I object to that.
Q. And when Lenny Bruce–I ask you to turn to the April 1st tape . . . and read the portion starting–‘tits and ass, that’s what is the attraction, is just tits and ass and tits and ass’–and goes on all through the page, and ask you if you find some shock value in that?
A. No, I don’t think it’s particularly shocking, it’s just a word.. . .
Q.. Do you, in your column, use the words tits and ass?
A. Never.
Q. You know exactly what Lenny Bruce was talking about?
A. Yes. . . . I think there he’s being critical of the monotony of what is on view in Las Vegas.
Dorothy Kilgallen died November 8, 1965. Lenny Bruce died August 3, 1966. Kilgallen biographer Lee Israel was convicted of selling forged celebrity letters. Nat Hentoff died January 7, 2017. This is a repost. Pictures today are from The Library of Congress. These images are Union soldiers from the War Between the States. The spell check suggestion for Kilgallen: Millennial.

At some point in the discussion, someone talked about a speech Rand Paul made in the senate. Senator typewriter talked about two Kentuckians, Henry Clay and Cassius Clay. The only Cassius Clay that PG knows is the retired boxer, known as Muhammad Ali. For a man who was uncertain whether he would vote for the cival rights act, this was a curious subject for a speech. When you can fake sincerity , you have got it made.
Regarding the Rand Paul speech (comparing Henry Clay to Cassius Clay to Rand Paul)…
1- Someone should tell our younger viewers who Cassius Clay was.
2- When Clay the younger converted to Islam, and changed his name to Muhammed Ali, didn’t he denounce his birth name as a “slave name”?
3- Someone should ask Sen. Paul if he would have voted to end slavery. This is about as relevant as asking him if he would have voted for the civil rights act.
4- With the current demonization of Islam, this is a curious line of rhetoric.
POSTSCRIPT I have looked at the speech from Sen. Paul. Apparently, it is a different Cassius Clay.
PG should have read the speech, by Sen. Paul, before he expressed his opinions. There was a Cassius Clay that was a cousin of Henry Henry Clay. While Senator Clay compromised, and kept the Union together, Cassius Clay was an abolitionist through and through. Sometimes you have to wonder which is the best course to take.
Arguably, if the war had come in 1820, the south would have won. The fact that the Union was intact until 1860 allowed the North to grow strong enough to whip the South. But, this came at the cost of forty years of slavery. And no one knew this in 1820, or 1860, or at the Constitutional Convention.
When PG was in the fourth grade (and Rand Paul in diapers), three events took place that history would remember. John Kennedy was killed. The Beatles were on the Ed Sullivan Show. Cassius Clay defeated Sonny Liston, for the World Heavyweight Championship. Mr. Clay soon revealed that he was a Black Muslim, and his new name was Muhammed Ali. He was in the spotlights, with controversy close behind, for the next fifteen years.
Pictures are from The Library of Congress. This is a repost. In 1970, Mr. Ali fought in Atlanta GA.

much less than a friend.
A sort of brother, I suppose?
Oh, brothers! I don’t care for brothers.
My elder brother won’t die,
and my younger brothers seem never to do anything else.

These 33 words are from “The Portrait of Dorian Gray” by Oscar Wilde.
The text is from The Gutenberg Project.
The pasting project is facilitated by Trifecta.
This repost is written like Kurt Vonnegut.

Two days ago, 99invisible posted a show, The Bathtubs or the Boiler Room . It seems as though an NPR reporter likes to go places she is not supposed to be in. In the basement of the US Capitol, she found a bathtub, carved out of a chunk of Italian marble.
“The bathtubs were installed around 1860 during the expansion of the Capitol. DC is known for its swampy summers, and legend has it that senators could be banished from the chamber if they were too smelly. But lawmakers—like most Americans at the time—didn’t have indoor plumbing at home. They needed a place where they could wash up. So, the Architect of the Capitol ordered six marble bath tubs, each three by seven feet and carved by hand in Italy, to be installed in the Capitol basement—three on the House side, three on the senate.”
The tubs were imported from Italy, and sent to the port of Baltimore. They arrived just in time for the War Between The States. They were quite a luxurious item. Today, they are forgotten, surrounded by HVAC machines, with one covered with plywood and file cabinets.
Pictures are from The Library of Congress. This is a repost.

It is a question for the ages…why do telephones have 123 on the top row of the keypad, while computers have 789? The best answer is , we don’t know.
Calculator/computer keypads were an improvement on cash registers. These devices had a matrix of buttons, with the 9 row on top. The row at the far right had single digits, and the row next to them had digits ending in one zero. To ring up a sale for $1.95, you had to push 100, 90, and 5. This evolved into the adding machine configuration of three rows of three buttons, with 0 on the bottom row and 789 on the top row.
When we got started, the telephone used a dial. 1 was at the top, and 0 was at the bottom. The early phone systems used letters as part of the phone number. The first three letters of the seven digit code were two letters and five numbers. (This is what PG remembers from childhood. It may have been different before then).
The two letters referred to an exchange, or part of town where the number was located. The two letters referred to a word. An example would be PG’s grandmother. Her number was TR2 2345. The TR stood for Trinity. Many numbers in midtown Atlanta still start with 87.
In the sixties, ma bell started to develop a keypad to use for what were then called push button phones. In a break with the adding machine tradition, the numbers 123 went on the top row. There are a few ideas why this is, but nothing is certain.
In the early days, the phone switching equipment was not as fast as today. Some thought that by switching the numbers to the top of the keypad, people would have to slow down a bit to “dial” the number. This answer does not make sense to those of us who have grown up with these keypads, and who learned to punch in numbers fast, no matter what system is used. (Anyone using a rotary phone, after getting used to touch tone, is shocked at how slow it is.)
Another concept is the phone company wanting to model the new keypad after the dial phones. This would mean putting the 1 at the top, and 0 at the bottom. Also, with the letters assigned to each number, it would make a lot more sense to have 123/abc def ghi on the top row.
It was suggested that the calculator keypad was patented in the 789-on-top format. Western Electric did not want to pay royalties on this important piece of equipment, so it designed another one. There is also the thought that the calculator was on a desk shelf, where the lower numbers should be at the bottom of the keypad. At the same time, the telephone was on the lower part of the desk, and having 123 on top would be easier to use.
This is a repost. This comment was left on facebook, after the first post.
I won’t pretend to know exactly their reasons, but I will say that I can see some logic in doing it this way. In a numerical context (calculator/computer), you’d want zero next to one, which is where it is in the number sequence. However on… a telephone, 0 has a special meaning: call the operator (at least, it used to mean this).
The guys at Bell Labs took this into consideration when they implemented the “touch tone” or DTMF dialing system. Old style pulse dialing was annoying because it would literally send a pulse for each number (two pulses for two, nine pulses for nine, etc). I meant larger numbers took longer. To change this, and also in anticipation of the fact that eventually phones would be connected to computers, they instead put all the numbers on a grid with each row and column assigned a unique frequency. Each key on the pad combined the two frequencies to produce a tone. In order to accommodate ten numbers, you need a grid of at least 4X3, which they actually increased to 4×4 because they wanted some additional tones (A-D) for extra network functionality.
This is a repost. Pictures are from The Library of Congress.

There is a tasteful bit of white guilt porn on the innertubes. The video is from the Guardian, a British enterprise. Are you racist? ‘No’ isn’t a good enough answer. The transcript has 365 words, one for each day of the year. The word for today is and. The most recent tally shows 4,714,039 views on facebook, which does not pay royalties.
The talk is an exercise in semantics. Either you are non-racist, or anti-racist. The possibilities that you are a known-racist is not considered, as is the concept that attitudes about race are nobody else’s business. The speaker, Marlon James, instructs the listener that you MUST be anti-racist. Nothing else will do. This means that you must take some type of action against racism. What exactly you are supposed to do is not specified, but you need to do something.
Mr. James lists five points that the mythical non-racist uses to justify their non-ness. “I’m not a bigot. I don’t sing that ’n’ word when my favorite rap jam comes on. I didn’t vote for that guy. I’m not burning any crosses. I’m not a skinhead.” From these five nots, a certain lifestyle emerges. “What you end up with is an entire moral stance, an entire code for living your life and dealing with all the injustice in the world by not doing a damn thing. That’s the great thing about “non-”: you can put it off by simply rolling over in your bed and going to sleep. So why are you sitting at home and watching things unfold on TV instead of doing something about it? Because you’re a non-racist, not an anti-racist.” Or maybe you are an uncle-racist, and auntie-racist won’t let you do anything.
At no point is a course of anti-racist action suggested. Should you go block traffic on the interstate? Should you vilify a member of your community who expresses incorrect opinions on facebook? Should you go to the state capitol, and talk to your representative about laws you are not familiar with? Exactly what are you supposed to do? Will this action do more harm than good? Is this action any of your business? Do you know what you are talking about? Maybe the effect of your action is not important, as long as you are doing something.
The monolog takes a strange turn now. “Now, do this for me: take the “c” out of racist and replace it with a “p”. “I’m not a rapist. I’m not friends with any rapist. I didn’t buy that rapist’s last album.” All these things that you’re not doing. Meanwhile, people are still getting raped, and black boys are being killed. It’s not enough that you don’t do these things.”
Ok, so now we need to take meaningless action against rape, and black boy murder. Again, what are you supposed to do? There is also the matter of privilege. Is it really the white person’s business that black boys are shooting other black boys? And what are we supposed to do about this? Maybe you can say rude things about police.
The video comes to a merciful end with the words “We need to stop being “non-” and start being “anti-”. Or take action against glamorous issues that have no effect on most people, but make you feel good to talk about. The Academy Award nominations have been announced, and not enough POC have been nominated. We can take action on twitter, as this tweet illustrates. #oscarssowhite that pointed hoods will be included in the swag bags this year.
The pictures today are from The Library of Congress. These details are from picture #06666, documenting “First Internation[al] Pageant of Pulchritude & Seventh Annual Bathing Girl Review at Galveston, Texas.” It was taken in 1926. This is a repost.