Word: madman
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...furious, smashing action against the ribs and head of his opponent. The little fighter's flat nose, freshly broken, bubbled redly as he snorted for breath. His head rocked as punch after punch landed on it. But on & on he went, crowding, slamming, tearing in like a madman trying, to whip a triphammer. Madison Square Garden, jammed to the eaves, thundered with bloodthirsty applause and excitement...
Somewhere in Germany, in the year 1919, three young painters and a camera-man hatched an idea for a new film. They wanted to use that impersonal and reportorial tool, the camera, to tell a tale from a madman's brain and show the world through a mad-man's eyes. They wanted to becloud the lens, to forsake realism to gain artistic reality. In 1920 this film was finished, and "Dr. Caligari" made his crooked bow to Europe. In those days nothing like it had been seen. Devotees of the arts went to marvel, and there was talk...
Ludwig II would have given his right ear to have invented the ingenious piano which Bechstein put on the market last week. Combination piano, spinet, harmonium, phonograph and radio receiver, it is no madman's dream, no impractical curiosity, but a precise, scientific musical instrument, substituting electrical apparatus for the standard piano sounding-board. The electrical engineering is the work of Walther Nernst, German physicist: electrical equipment by Siemens & Halske A. G.; pianobuilding by C. Bechstein. "Claviphone" is one of the names suggested for it. Principle is. simply, that microphones pick up the vibrations, fundamental tones and overtones...
...When Hertz sees that Hoff is determined to give himself up, he shoots himself. By the time Hoff gets to the police his brain has begun to give way; he will implicate nobody, and when the only witness fails to recognize him the police take him for a harmless madman. Hoff's frenzy increases; they take him to an asylum. There he goes through hell: Herr Neumann calls it "katatonic excitement." Just as he is dying Hoff manages to make what he thinks is a convincing confession. The doctor pretends to believe him, and he dies happy...
...rest of the book contains: three short stories, all readable, one Kiplingesque, one (about an intelligent madman) first-class; a notebook section with the first and last chapters of an autobiography of God; a three-act play of post-War morals and emotions, in which there are two suicides (one Lesbian, one oldfashioned hypocrite), one murder (of a homosexual husband), no arrests, and no solution in sight. Perhaps not meant to be acted, the play mulls over many an idea. Central theme: that the greatest calamity in history was not the late great War but an earlier, unperceived event, when...