Blattitudes

Attempts To Be Right and Not Trite

by William M. Blatt

For amost ten years I have been working on a project dear to my heart, to take the epigrams that my grandfather wrote and have Albert Lamb draw cartoons for them. This project is finally finished and we have just received the first books, 100 pages of cartoons and epigrams! It's amazing to see how my grandfather's epigrams have stood the test of time, having been written more than 50 years ago.

Education Revolution readers certainly know Albert Lamb, who was editor of Education Revolution Magazine for several years and whose New Yorker-style cartoons dotted the publication.

This book would certainly make a great holiday present.

-Jerry Mintz

Introduction from Blattitudes
Jerry Mintz When I was a young boy, my grandfather, William M. Blatt, would ask me what kind of story I wanted, fact or fiction. I always opted for fact. Fiction seemed like lies to me. Some of my earliest memories are of my parents going into Boston with us from our home town of Worcester every week or two.

Grandpa, also known as Billy to his friends, would spend what seemed like hours to me just telling stories and answering my questions. People must have thought he was crazy, discussing with a seven year old things like Freud's id, ego and superego, agnosticism, theories of humor, the roots of the Second World War, great discoveries in science, etc. But I understood everything he taught me, and it had a profound influence on my life.

He was born in 1876 in east Orange, New Jersey of Jewish parents. His mother was also born in the US, making the family one of earlier ones to settle here. He received his law degree from Boston University and practiced law for 60 years. He was a member of the Massachusetts bar and the bar of the United States Supreme court and a professor of law at Portia Law School. He was president of the Law Society of Massachusetts in 1936 and 1937.

But his real passion was writing. He was such an expert on Shakespeare that he was able to write a series of extra acts of Shakespeare's plays, in Shakespearean style, called "After the Curtain Falls." These were performed in the United States and Europe. He wrote a series of plays, mostly comedies, which we also performed widely. He also wrote a lot of comic poetry, but what I knew the most about were his epigrams. He wrote several books of them. He'd wake up in the middle of the night and write them down. I clearly remember sitting at our dining room table as our family would read each one of them, deciding which merited being put in one of his books. For quite a while, a major Boston Newspaper used to put one of his epigrams above the headline every day.

In looking at one of the epigram books, a folded piece of paper fell out. Written on the paper was a note to my father, written after some sort of argument. It said, "Dear Dad: Read Blattitudes #5, 8, 29, 53, 62, 77, 96, 122, 183, and 202 before talking to me. Jerry."

These are some of them:
5. Everyone is entitled to a few hundred faults.
8. Forgiving is a great luxury. Only the rich in spirit can afford it.
29. Tolerance is the willingness to admit that you may be wrong. as for me, I am never wrong.
53. Conscious ignorance is helpful, unconscious ignorance is dangerous.
77. The kind of people who can't say "no" to themselves can say it very easily to others.
183. Don't assume that because your children love you that they approve of you.

It must have been some argument!

I lent one of the epigram books to a Russian friend. I expected to get it back soon, but she recently told me that she carries it with her, finding one or two to cheer her up when facing difficulties.

Strangely, as close as I was to my grandfather, I hardly felt any loss when he died. Perhaps it was because he had suffered with cancer, or because we had moved further away to New York. But I have always felt that the real reason was because he is still inside of me, keeping me company with his ideas and wit. And now I will have a chance to share some of that with you.

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