Such a thing happened the other day in Chicago. It happens every few minutes all over the earth. The only way to get out of such a mess is _to get out of it_—detectives, jails, families and friends to boot. Follow through! Make it real! Your friends can’t afford to be very real: one of them probably has a family to support and the others probably couldn’t stand the horror of being in the papers! But a girl or a boy can stand up to _anything_. If they can’t their old age will find them among the rest of the botched and the weak. Ed Nolan says that the fear of death is the beginning of slavery. I think it may be that the fear of life is the very beginning. ---------- [1] The facts of the bomb case in detail will be found on page 29. And—— There is Frank Harris’s _Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions_—a book that will never disturb Wilde’s legend here, his peace of mind where he has gone, nor his reputation as an artist anywhere. * * * * * Chicago—always bragging about having a sooner eye for Art.... And Sokoloff out here in San Francisco.... And the Chicago Orchestra being led on to the goal of music by efficiency like the Germany army getting to Paris. * * * * * At the Grand Opera in Paris, in the première of _The Miracle_, an opera by two young Swiss, I saw the great Marthe Chenal, who will sing in the Chicago Opera Company this winter. I have had a creative memory of her for five years. But I wonder what will become of it up against that pinnacle of earthly glory, Mary Garden. * * * * * A. C. H. in _Poetry_ has done all that can be done for the new quarterly _Form_. “Form”—that’s a name to start hope and the imagination; and then ... we have a story we’ll print sometime called “The Funny Shape.” * * * * * Why so much comment on John Cowper Powys’s _One Hundred Best Books_? Powys should never write anything. People like Q. K. in The New Republic come about as near to getting Powys as they would come to catching a comet. Powys is not for culture-snatchers, matinee girls, or glorifiers of the obvious. He is merely for those possessed enough of their imaginations to fall for a miracle when they see one. Who goes to hear a lecture on Nietzsche and Dostoevsky to find out what Powys thinks of those men? You go—hoping through the gloom of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky to catch a flash of Powys. Powys is the best thing that has come to us—that mad wolf! I always feel sorry for Velasquez that he never had a chance at him. * * * * * “Everything is just perfect,” as our Editor so ecstatically says: Paderewski will make three concerts in San Francisco this month. * * * * *