Music to Muse By
Sir:
TIME rings the bell again with its fine sense of connotation in "Mood Menace" [Aug. 12]. A pox on all pretentious, middlebrow music, not good enough to be good and not honest enough to be vulgarly bad.
F. R. FARROW JR. Haddonfield, NJ.
Sir:
How long before a sincere music lover will have to look for his choice in terms of something like Music to Listen to Rachmaninoff's Second Symphony By?
WALDEN P. PRATT
Stanford, Calif.
Sir:
My husband and I have often chuckled over an imaginary percussive album called Music to Argue By.
MRS. REGINALD HUBLEY Cleveland
Sir:
May we submit our list for potential albums? Music to Take a Bath By: Scrub, Brother, Scrub; La Mer; The Fountains of Rome.
BARB EATON Madison, Wis.
Faith & Doubts
Sir:
I am rather amused at Jesuit Father Davis' "distress at what he feels is a Jewish tendency to put Jewish interests before those of the rest of society," incidents of which, he says, "puzzle and at times provoke Catholics" [Aug. 12]. This sell-righteousness does not become an official of a church that has a long record of looking out for its own interests first.
KURT GINGOLD Cos Cob, Conn.
Sir:
The good Jesuit Father Davis should get down on his knees and thank God for the pervading U.S. Protestant culture into which his Catholics and Jews have been immersed.
(MRS.) MARGARET S. SCOTT Philadelphia
Sir:
Many people will probably condemn Father Davis for his views; I cheer him out loud.
LARRY NIGHTINGALE Philadelphia
Sir:
Father Davis loses me completely when he speaks of Spanish-Jewish "coexistence." I would like some clarification on this point. Does he mean that the Spaniards of Torquemada's time agreed to let the Jew coexist with them as long as he became a Catholic? To a Humanist like myself, the sugar-coating of history is the greatest of all "sins."
REUBEN LANDAU Brooklyn
Sir:
My reference to Jewish-Catholic "coexistence" in Spain referred, of course, to the period before 1492. Of this era, R. Trevor Davies writes in The Golden Century of Spain, 1501-1621:
"Medieval Spain had been the most tolerant land in Europe. There, Christian, Mohammedan and Jew had lived side by side in peace and, sometimes, in the closest friendship. Christian had fought Christian in alliance with Mohammedan. The proudest Christian families in Spain had intermarried with Jews; and Hebrew blood flowed in the veins of the greatest prelates in the land."
THURSTON N. DAVIS, S.J. Editor-in-Chief America New York City
Civil Rights
Sir:
This is to express my surprise at the unexpectedly subdued tone of your latest report on civil rights and Senator Russell. You almost, but never quite stated the South's case. It is simply this: strangers who are both totally ignorant of, and completely unsympathetic toward our society simply must keep their big, wide mouths and their big, fat paws out of our personal problems if we are ever to solve them.
ECK G. PRUDHOMME JR., M.D.
Fort Worth
Sir:
It is unbelievable that there exists in your country a Siberia of Southern states where people are denied the right to vote. There does not seem to be much difference betwixt you Americans and the Russians.
T. P. CASSIM Badulla, Ceylon
Sir:
You said that "... the verdict was a hard slap in the face of a nation generally trying to live up to its own constitutional guarantees." What Constitution? Only Communists, criminals and colored have any constitutional guarantees now.
FON GAIL Mobile, Ala.
Sir:
Seeing such liberal stalwarts as Senators Kennedy, Kefauver, O'Mahoney and Magnuson behind the Southern efforts to amend the bill to death certainly must discourage those Americans who had always counted them the champions of "the little man." How hollow the Democratic claim to be "the party of the people" sounds now!
DENIS MCLAUGHLIN JR.
San Francisco
It Ain't Bad Grammar?
Sir:
About the TV show The Last Word [Aug. 5]: Is not the popularity of this show a kind of snobbishness in reverse? This excessive concern with grammar and its usage is on the level of whether one should wear this or that color, or use this or that fork, i.e., social insecurity. I have always said "I ain't." The only incorrection is to use the form in other persons: that is, you ain't. Dull people will always speak in a dull manner, whether it is correct or not.
FREDERICK MOORE Paris
Sir:
To people who think "Well, that's all we've got time for" is wrong, I would venture a more modest statement: even regarding "got" as perfectly correct and respectable, consideration of the brevity of one's span of life inclines one to observe that most of us simply haven't (omit "got" please) time for such wasteful locutions. I'd rather be wrong than redundant.
EDWARD W. SIEMENS Kirkland, Wash.
Sir:
The Bergen Evans Show makes me wonder what we've got to look forward to. The following might be "Evans 'Elp the Hinglish."
To devilishly dangle is nice, And to utter "It's me," my advice. For "Am I Not," I say "Ain't I," "It is not I," say " 'Tain't I," But my diction is clipped and precise.
EDWARD LEIGH BROWN Newbury, Mass.
Alternative Route
Sir:
On the subject of the Reina del Pacifico and her grounding off Bermuda: in referring to certain passengers' proceeding by alternative .routes to the United Kingdom, you stated [July 22] that the third-class passengers who asked for air passages were told that they could go ahead--at their own expense. This, we would mention, is a gross inaccuracy, as all passengers, first, cabin and third, were informed that alternative means of transportation would be secured for them if they so wished and that this would be entirely at the expense of this company. By far the greater percentage of passengers who did avail themselves of this offer were third class, including 60 Jamaican Boy Scouts and 15 Chilean Boy Scouts for whom a special plane was chartered to bring them to London.
J. J. GAWNE
Pacific Steam Navigation Co. Liverpool, England
P: TIME erred. Third class passengers indeed got transportation, though some of them first thought it necessary to threaten a hunger strike.--ED.
Treatment for the Psychiatrists
Sir:
I suggest that Drs. Johnson and Robinson lay aside their morbid preoccupation with erotic curiosa in respectable American homes [Aug. 12] long enough to consult a good psychiatrist themselves. Undue emphasis on isolated examples of extreme sexual maladjustment can have a bad effect if it puts unhealthy ideas in the minds of previously normal parents, and inhibits them from extending to their children the natural and innocent affection they need.
C. V. MONTAGUE Columbus, Ohio
Sir:
The learned doctors should get the hell out of the homes of mommy-coddled American children to visit the Far East, and explain their Victorian theory in the midst of multifamily bathing and one-room huts that house still-producing parents and their numerous offspring. Perhaps they can go further to explain why this centuries-old way of life and these "sick parents" have failed to create whole nations of "sexual deviates."
GEORGE L. THOMAS Wichita, Kans.
Tito's Take
Sir:
I see Comrade Tito is again making news . by announcing that Russia will give $250 million in aid to Yugoslavia. It would be interesting to see the state of his account book by now, both on the Russian side of the ledger and also the American. Has anyone ever figured his "take"?
A. MIDDLETON Midland, Texas
From Her Majesty's Subjects
Sir:
Three loud huzzahs for Lord Altrincham. Perhaps his forthrightness will result in the phenomenon of Elizabeth looking at the camera when she makes a speech.
D. G. HANSON
Croydon, England
Sir:
The times I have squirmed when hearing the Queen, in a never-varying monotone, reading a dull speech from scraps of paper ! WALTER SCOTT London
Sir:
Why not Lord Altrincham as beau for Princess Margaret ? At least he has the courage to say what he feels and thinks.
STAN OBODIAC Yorkton, Sask.
Which Way Is Up?
Sir:
I enjoyed reading your issue of July 22 upside down so that I could look at my painting [The Fountains of Europe] right side up.
MARK TOBEY
Seattle
P: Let Reader Tobey go on reading upside down if it pleases him. His nonabstract signature is clearly right side up in the lower right corner of TIME'S reproduction. Although he says he sometimes signs his paintings upside down, the owner of The Fountains of Europe, Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, hangs the painting as TIME printed it, and it is hanging that way in the USIA show now in Europe.--ED.
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