Academic censorship?

Borodin (1833-87) composed a “Piano Concerto for One Leg” especially for Larry Adler, whom he wrongly believed to have lost the use of his right leg in a food-liquidizing accident. Adler’s hands he mistakenly assumed to be surgically attached to his harmonica. When it was indicated to him that Adler was not due to be born until 1914, he went into a tremendous sulk and refused to perform on his pogo-stick for the amusement of the Empress Eugénie, leading directly to the Russo-Japanese War. But if you mention any of this to the present generation of musical historians they say something about having to make a phone call, hurry out of the room and never return.

What other vital facts are ignored by contemporary scholars?

-- Rex (rex@waitrose.com), December 26, 2001

Answers

Louis Armstrong (quitealongtimeago - comparativelyrecently) was another musician whose most startling innovation has been ignored by the Establishment. Not many people now realise that all his recorded trumpet solos from the 1930s onwards were played with his nose(following an unfortunate dentistry accident) instead of his mouth. Not only does this incontrovertible fact make his prowess all the more remarkable, but it led him also to invent the technique of miming to the record, apparently in order to avoid inappropriate audience amusement during concert performances. Without this latter invention many of the most talented boy- and girl-groups of our time might never have had a hearing, yet do we ever hear of Armstrong's essential contribution? Had you heard of it? I thought not.

(The characteristic vocals of "It's a Wonderful World" were inspired by the later, "cool" style of President Woodrow Wilson, but that's another story.)

-- Peter J Ross (peter.j.ross@btinternet.com), January 01, 2002.

It is never mentioned among academics, but Soren Kierkegaard was a terrible practical joker. One of his favorite jokes required an invitation to a party. He would arrive dressed all in black. Then he would act as morosely as possible. He would steer every conversation to a discussion of how life was painful, ugly, meaningless, hollow, and dark.

When he judged the moment was prime, he would leap to the center of the room, waving a pistol that he had grabbed from his pocket and declare that he was determined to end it all. Before anyone could overpower him or snatch the gun away, he would dramatically place the barrel in his mouth and, with a flourish, pull the trigger. Usually, the whole room would freeze with tension for a split second.

The gun, of course, would not be loaded. Soren would pull the gun out of his mouth, point it around the room, clicking the empty chambers to demonstrate its harmlessness. Then he'd dissolve into gales of helpless laughter, tears running down his cheeks.

There were other jokes involving mannequins dressed in his clothes and hanging by a noose that he'd leave for unsuspecting cleaning ladies to discover, and (of course) his elaborate send up of liturgical songs with altered lyrics.

Soren was really a 'fun guy' to be around. But you'd never know it from the "official" version of his life.

-- Aimless (aimless@ national_raffle_association.org), January 12, 2002.

It is not terribly well known that Jacques Derrida, the famous French Deconstructionist, approriately enough, does not exist. He is yet another of the false identities assumed by the mild-seeming Peter Parker, whom an unsuspecting world knows as Spiderman. How he finds the time to be an innocuous college student, a superpowered crime- fighting and a leading light of Post-Structuralism I don't know; it is I suppose apt that the author of such masterpieces of obfuscation as "Of Grammatology" should spend some of his time spinning tangled webs of quite another nature.

-- Saullie (saulj@btinternet.com), January 20, 2002.

Worse than that-wasn't Peter Parker Chairman of British Rail as well?

-- Veronica (vmod@britishlibrary.net), January 20, 2002.

Veronica demonstrates just how the breakup of British Rail was contrived so it might become one of the great moments of modern deconstruction, and for that matter, one of the few times when critical theory played a major part in the management of the nation's infrastructure. In his little known monograph "Intensional Encounters with Reading", Derrida not only parodies the concept of a rail-air link but brilliantly anticipates the fate of First Great Western passengers attempting to adhere to the bourgeois notion of "getting there on time". Of course, all of this was exactly what it said on Lacan.

-- TRD (wellmeaning@hotmail.com), January 21, 2002.

Peter Parker – man of myriad talents – has also written The Old Lie: The Great War and the Public School Ethos (Constable, 1987) plus a biography of J R Ackerley, author of We Think The World Of You, in the film version of which the Ackerley figure is played by Alan Bates, who after a rough night can look remarkably similar to Baroness Williams of Crosby, ex-girlfriend of Peter Parker, Chairman of British Rail! Quod erat demonstrandum, methinks.

-- Rex (rex@waitrose.com), January 24, 2002.

When I was last in Berlin, I met a man whose first cousin's wife's father met Kierkegaard as a boy. Unfortunately I was not able to shed much further light on whether he meant Kierkegaard had been youthful or the retaler of the amusing anecdote had himself been a boy at the time. Have any of you inveterate imbibers met a philosopher as a boy: I mean by this when you were a boy (or girl, of course) not when the philosopher was a boy (or girl, it goes without saying in these days of sexual equality, of course!). Gunther.

-- Gunther Splitz (splitz_gunther@hotmail.com), January 29, 2002.

My parents like to tell me how, when I was a babe in arms, I was kissed by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz, but since it was General Election time and he was canvassing for the Natural Law Party, I attribute no special significance to the incident.

-- Bertrand Rustle of Sweet-Papers (peter.j.ross@btinternet.com), January 29, 2002.