America's Favorite Humorist

Will Rogers: His Life And Times 

by Richard M. Ketchum

I grew up in Wisconsin, but my mother was originally from Oklahoma and we would go there most summers to visit my grandmother. One of the highlights of our trips was more than once visiting the Will Rogers memorial in Claremore, Oklahoma. He was one of my mother's favorite celebrities from when she was a young girl. We shared a bit of Cherokee blood through my mother's great grandmother; thus spurring my interest in Will and the heritage of the Cherokee Nation. So, in addition to Claremore we also visited Talequah, the home of the Cherokee Nation, more than once. 

This book has a wealth of photos from Will's life which was quite eventful, both as a humorist and a movie star in the early days of the "talkies". Unfortunately, his life was cut short when his plane crashed in Alaska. This is a great book for anyone interested in the sayings and events of one of America's greatest humorists. 

Will Rogers' quotes:  

"I never met a man I didn't like".

 

"My ancestors didn't come on the Mayflower but they met the boat"

Furry Fun in Space

Hoka! 

by Poul Anderson and Gordon R. Dickson

“So much American science fiction is parochial -- not as true now as it was years ago, but the assumption is one culture in the future, more or less like ours, and with the same ideals, the same notions of how to do things, just bigger and flashier technology. Well, you know darn well it doesn't work that way...”   ― Poul Anderson

What is a Hoka? It is a furry creature living on an earthlike planet called Toka on the edge of the known universe. They are a race unlike any other yet discovered, for although they resemble bears they can change their appearance. This book is a compilation of some of the stories about these creatures written by Poul Anderson and Gordon R. Dickson.

In the prologue to the collected tales we learn that Toka, which means "Earth", has two intelligent species who have evolved into the Hokas and the Slissii. The former are mammalian while the latter are reptiloid. Conflict was endemic until the arrival of the "Interplanetary League" at which time the Slissii were persuaded to abandon the planet for other territories (this apparently led to problems elsewhere). The Hokas on the other hand welcomed the tutelage of the League and in their own unique way adopted the culture and mores of their visitors in an all too literal way.

The stories included in this volume provide evidence of the comedy (mostly) resulting from the literal adoption of the milieus of Baseball (think "Casey at the Bat"), Kipling's Jungle Books, the Napoleonic era, and more. I found the stories quirky enough for smiles and a chuckle or two, but some might find them "laugh out loud" funny. This volume provides an view of what might happen if in the distant future we explore and fail to obey "the Prime Directive".

Inspiration for a Blogger

The History Boys 

by Alan Bennett

"The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours." (p.56)





Today is the birthday of British playwright and humorist Alan Bennet.  I note this because, when in January, 2007, I began this blog in earnest, it was Bennett, more than anything else, that was the inspiration for my doing so; specifically, his play The History Boys and the film version of it that had premiered a few months earlier.

The play is a great read for many reasons and all of them deeply resonated with me.  Most important was the devotion to the importance of language (centered on the "dictionary" boy role of Posner) and music and ideas, more clearly emphasized in the play than in the screenplay for the film (also written by Bennett).  

The play contrasts the differing perspectives on education of the two lead teachers (Hector and Irwin). Without the need to "open up" demanded by film Bennett focuses on the schoolroom and uses subtle effects to demonstrate his dramatic purpose. One aspect of the play that stands out is the multiple narrators throughout the drama. Bennett is at his epigrammatic best and the audiences in New York showed their appreciation of this as noted by the reviews. He is successful in creating a delightful dramatic and comedic portrayal of ideas, all while evoking the spirit of bright young scholars at a key turning point in their lives. With reference to and in the spirit of Shakespeare he dramatizes events in and outside of the classroom touching on both the desires of the heart and the wonders of imaginative young minds.

The battle between educational styles centers on the approaches to teaching of the teachers Hector (the idealistic humanist) and Irwin (practical and pragmatic). The foundation for the boys is Mrs. Lintott's straightforward, perhaps old-fashioned, approach to teaching history which has produced "well taught" boys; however that is not enough to assure them success in achieving entrance to Oxford or Cambridge. The headmaster, in his "wisdom" adds into the mix a young teacher just up from Oxford to give the students an "edge". It is his, Mr. Irwin's, pragmatic method which uses paradox and the subjunctive.  He aims to turn the historical facts upside-down, with little regard for the "truth" of the situation providing the "history boys" the ammunition to go to battle with the methods of Hector, the humanistic "general studies" teacher who attempts to enlist the boys into a conspiracy against the world and the "education" they are supposedly receiving.

"Mrs. Lintott: They're all clever. I saw to that.
Hector: You give them an education. I give them the wherewithal to resist it."
-
"Scripps: But it's all true.
Irwin: What has that got to do with it? What has that got to do with anything?"


With all of this battle of educational styles there added an undercurrent of eroticism, both due to the nature of education itself, as Hector points out, and due to the psychological tensions among Dakin and his two admirers, Posner and Irwin. This combination, which explodes at times to produce riveting moments of theater, is what makes this play great. That and the magnificent literary style of Bennett that has continued to inspire me to this day.

Unlikely Impersonator

Shriver 

by Chris Belden

"Somewhere in this world was a writer named Shriver who was expected at this conference, but it was not him.  What should he do?  He'd committed to attending, and had even been sent what looked like genuine airline tickets.  He checked the date on the itinerary---just three days away!" ((p 7)





What would it be like to be mistaken for someone famous? This novel explores that situation with the added attraction that the famous person is a reclusive writer (think of Salinger) and the person who is the subject of the mistake is also an author who, fortunately or not, has nothing in common with the reclusive celebrity other than his name. The unfortunate protagonist is invited to writers' conference and, against his better judgment, decides to attend. He appears to be succeeding in his unlikely impersonation, but just as things start to calm down he becomes involved in unexpected and certainly unintended episodes.  First, one of the other guest authors disappears, and he becomes the central subject of the investigation; second, a journalist begins to take an interest in him that makes him very uncomfortable; and third, to complicate his life further he begins to fall in love with the conference organizer.

With the addition of some other quirky characters including a stalker, the story is complex enough to provide the reader with entertainment and mirth.  While it is fairly lightweight, the spirited narrative has all the best characteristics of an off-beat romantic comedy and contains just enough whimsy to keep the reader focused through to the end.

Philosophical Exploits into the Absurd

The Thought Gang 

by Tibor Fischer

"The publishers eventually tracked me down and asked me about the book, how it was, where it could be found.  I countered by asking for more money, simply so I had something to say apart from, I can't find the typewriter and even if I could find it, it doesn't have a ribbon, and the a and the z don't work. . . 
The thing about signing a contract is that it can mislead people into thinking something has been agreed." (p 74)



If you love philosophy and have an appreciation for the absurd you will probably enjoy this book. Tibor Fischer has written a novel that I found dependable in producing humor evidenced by my smiles and more often than not outright laughter.

The story demonstrates the sublime absurdity of a middle-aged philosopher who is running from his academic publisher and others;  and while doing so finds himself in France about to join with a semi-successful thief (the thief has recently been released from prison) ultimately entering into a series of adventures. Coffin uses a first-person narration (numbered in sections, like a philosophical treatise) that is not terribly mellifluous, but becomes fun through the use of wisecracks about Epictetus and Zeno--as well as Coffin's unexplained fascination with words that begin with the letter Z. The style gets to you (at least it did for this reader). He juxtaposes intellectual metaphysics and juvenile gangster fantasy as evidenced by the line, ``The thing about a gun is, it's like being on the right side of a Socratic dialogue."

The result of the philosophical and adventurous mish-mash is a delightfully wacky book that has echoes of Tristram Shandy and other books of that sort. Read it at your own philosophical risk.

A Trip on the Thames

Three Men in a Boat: To Say Nothing of the Dog 
by Jerome K. Jerome


“Let your boat of life be light, packed with only what you need - a homely home and simple pleasures, one or two friends, worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog, and a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little more than enough to drink; for thirst is a dangerous thing. ”   ― Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat


Jerome K. Jerome wrote a leisurely chronicle of a summer's boating holiday on the Thames. It was published in 1889 when he was only thirty years old. It was a success as a popular humorous book and has remained in print to this day. While some of the book is pure farce his main approach to humor was understatement and outrageous exaggeration in a style that reminds one of some of Twain's comic writings. He described his technique thus:

"Some people are under the impression that all that is required to make a good fisherman is the ability to tell lies easily and without blushing: but this is a mistake. Mere bald fabrication is useless; the veriest tyro can manage that. It is in the circumstantial detail, the embellishing touches of probability, the general air of scrupulous---almost pedantic---veracity, that the experienced angler is seen."

His humor relies on the diabolic malice of inanimate objects when they escape from civilization: of the infrangibility of cans when the can opener has been left behind, the ingenuity of an untended rope, the cunning of kettles and leaking kerosene. His narrator is known simply as J. while his companions are Harris and George (though they are somewhat shadowy characters) and of course there is Montmorency, the dog.

"To look at Montmorency you would imagine that he was an angel sent upon the earth, for some reason withheld from mankind, in the shape of a small fox-terrier. There is a sort of Oh-what-a-wicked-world-this-is-and-how-I-wish-I-could-do-something-to-make-it-better-and -nobler expression about Montmorency that has been known to bring tears into the eyes of pious old ladies and gentlemen."

With a convivial narrator and two friends, to say nothing of the dog, this tale of a boat trip is simply one of the funniest and most delightful short books that I have ever read.


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Modern Fables

Fables for Our Time 
and Famous Poems Illustrated 
by James Thurber

"Moral: It is better to ask some of the questions than to know all the answers." 

from "The Scotty Who Knew Too Much"  - James Thurber

I was originally introduced to the writing of James Thurber when I found The Thurber Carnival collection in our library at home. This was when I was old enough to read but long enough ago that I do not remember the exact date. At a later point in my education I read some of the more famous fables in High School English class.


This collection brings together the fables and some of the poems for which Thurber provided illustrations. The fables include both the better-known ones like "The Unicorn in the Garden" and "The Little Girl and the Wolf", and some less well known tales that include "The Mouse Who Went to the Country", "The Lion Who Wanted to Zoom", and "The Moth and the Star". Each fable has a moral that is often some practical bit of wisdom.


The poems are such that you might want to memorize like Longfellow's "Excelsior" and "Oh When I was . . ." by A. E. Housman from his collection "A Shropshire Lad". This small gem of a book is a delight to read and reread from time to time to lighten your day.

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Fun with Verse

How to Be Well-Versed in Poetry 
by E.O. Parrott

"Wake from out my midnight ramble.

Life is just a massive gambol."

-  Bill Greenwell (after Dylan Thomas)

This wonderful book is both an anthology of poetry and an introduction to poetic forms. Apparently it is one of a series of similar literary compilations, all edited by Mr. Parrot. He spent many years as a teacher of English and General Studies, and reminds me of the character Hector in Alan Bennett's play, The History Boys, because of his eclectic taste as demonstrated in this book (and presumably his other collections).

Useful as a reference through the inclusion of all known poetic forms and not a few unknown (to me), it is a review for those, like myself, that are rusty on the details of the form of poetry if not the substance. While rhyming and meter and stanzas are encountered there are sections of poetic fancies, light verse, terse verse and more.  The forms are demonstrated in all manner of ways, one being the parody like that in the epigraph above that mocks the famous "Fern Hill" of Dylan Thomas.  
The chapters begin with a selection of poems whose subject is poetry itself, with verses like:

"Poetry the pleasure
Madness and treasure."
and:
"So remember: the poetic Muse
It is a sure-fire cure for the blues;
A verse a day
Keeps the hearse away."

This should provide brief evidence that poetry can be fun for all who love words or at least wonder about them. The delight is in learning about the form and being of poetry while experiencing rhymes from a gathering of contemporary poets who provide exceptionally entertaining evidence of the magic of verse.  Often with tongue-in-cheek he gathers poems and poetic bits of verse with both demonstration and entertainment in mind. The result is a book of poetry presented in its most entertaining form. For that and for the inspirational value to encourage me to expand my poetry horizons I am grateful.

If you like the classics or Proust you may find the following "Distichs" delightful:

"A tea-soaked madeleine consumed by Proust,
Mon Dieu! What recollections that unloosed."

"She launched a thousand ships, no less, from little craft to whalers;
You'd say that Helen must have got on very well with sailors."
- Stanley Sharpless


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The Craft and Art of Poetry

The Habit Of Art 
by Alan Bennett


"Auden   Do you always mean what you write?

Britten   In the sense that Shostakovich somestimes doesn't?  I think so.  Don't you?

Auden   I do now.  But I didn't always.  When I was young I used to leave meaning to chance.  If it sounded right I let the meaning take care of itself.  It's why I find some of my early stuff so embarrassing."

  -  Alan Bennett, The Habit of Art.



Reading a play is often more difficult than viewing a play. It is certainly different in many ways. Yesterday I had the opportunity to see the The Habit of Art By Alan Bennett as presented via a rebroadcast of National Theatre (of London) Live’s 2010 broadcast.  Alan Bennett’s acclaimed play The Habit of Art, with Richard Griffiths and Alex Jennings, was offered by the Music Box Theatre cinema as part of the National Theatre's 50th anniversary celebrations.

The story of the play is simple: Benjamin Britten, sailing uncomfortably close to the wind with his new opera, Death in Venice, seeks advice from his former collaborator and friend, W. H. Auden. During this imagined meeting, their first for twenty-five years, they are observed and interrupted by, amongst others, their future biographer and a young man from the local bus station. The actual play as written by Alan Bennett is a bit more complicated. It is staged as a play within a play, thus the audience sees the actors and the stage management perform a run-through of the play, late in its preparation for its formal presentation. This was somewhat more complicated in the reading than when viewing the play. One difference is the experience, when viewing the play, of the action of the play within the play seeming to evolve from the action of the characters who are making it happen.  This is difficult to describe, but it was quite wonderfully amazing when experienced.  
In addition to the main story of the Auden/Britten meeting the work of the actors is interrupted from time to time by discussions of changes to the script, questions of appropriate location of certain scenes and other issues that one might naturally encounter while preparing to stage a play. This aspect of the play was rather fascinating as the audience was provided a look inside the world of the theater. It reminded me a bit of the play "Noises Off!" by Michael Frayn in this aspect although it was not nearly as anarchic as that wonderful comedy. 

The poetry of Auden is present in the character and he explains what he does succinctly and simply in the phrase "I have the habit of art." That being said, he has many other very human habits and the play highlights this very human side of Auden, as it does for Britten. The staging is exceptional and the acting superb with Richard Griffiths as Auden, Alex Jennings as Britten, and Frances de la Tour as the Stage Manager.
Alan Bennett’s play is as much about the theatre as it is about poetry or music. It looks at the unsettling desires of two difficult men, and at the ethics of biography. It reflects on growing old, on creativity and inspiration, and on persisting when all passion’s spent: ultimately, on the habit of art

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Three by Waugh

Evelyn Waugh 

Today is the anniversary of the birth of Evelyn Waugh who was born in London on this day in 1903.  He is one of my favorite authors.  I have selected reviews of three of his novels including my favorite, Brideshead Revisited.  His humor is nothing less than delightful.





Brideshead Revisited


In his letter of 7 January 1945 Evelyn Waugh wrote to Nancy Mitford that (regarding Lady Marchmain) "no I am not on her side; but God is, who suffers fools gladly; and the book is about God." Nancy, in a subsequent letter (17 January 1945) commented that she was "immune from" the "subtle" Catholic propaganda supposedly in the novel. Well, I guess that I am in Nancy's camp, recognizing the excellence of this G.E.C. (Great English Classic) and in my own way fascinated by the role of God in it, I remain unmoved by any hidden proselytizing (perhaps too harsh a word). Brideshead Revisited is possibly Evelyn Waugh's greatest novel and certainly one of the best English novels of the twentieth century. The demonstration of the battle between the culture of a civilization dying in the aftermath of World War I and the modern "hollow" culture of the the twentieth century plays out in this drama of a family and their estate, Brideshead. The journey of Charles Ryder, who guides us through this story, from his first encounter with Sebastian Flyte and his first visit to Brideshead keeps the reader rapt until the final pages, when under the shadow of the Second World War Charles returns to Brideshead for a final visit. His growth through encounters with the Flyte children and their mother and father plays out against the background of the Brideshead and all that for which it stands. Waugh uses comic relief in a judicious manner to lighten the way for the reader in a way that keeps the serious themes of the novel from becoming overwhelming. This classic novel also provides a beautiful depiction of the experience of going up to Oxford during the 1920s.

Further thoughts: In his letters Waugh claims that the theme of the novel is death, but I am not sure we should trust the author to be completely accurate in that sweeping summary of what appears, upon reading, to be a complicated and thoroughly multi-layered meditation on, yes death, but also memory and loss and the source of spiritual nurturing for human beings. Charles finds his passion in art and is as successful in that endeavor as he is unsuccessful in love. The sadness that surrounds his relationships with the various members of the Marchmain clan mirrors the sadness of their decline. I am reminded of Mann's Buddenbrooks from the turn of the century which limned a not dissimilar family decline. In Brideshead a significant question is whether Charles can overcome his two lost loves--both of whom moved away from him more than he from them--with the love of life that he acquires through art. His journey involves a tumult of emotion and imagery told in such a compelling and magnificent way that it is easy to lose ones self in the prose. Rather than bias the reader I will not provide a conclusion or even hint where I come out with regard to Charles' life other than to suggest that, as T. S. Eliot once said with poetic grace, the end is there in the beginning.

If you like magnificent writing, biting wit, England (Oxford in particular) or Venice, or the serene beauty of traditional manners you will love this book.


 Decline and Fall 


Evelyn Waugh's first novel, Decline and Fall, is a delightful satiric comedy. It is based in part on Waugh's undergraduate years at Hertford College, Oxford, and his experience as a teacher in Wales. In it I encountered the author's not so subtle satire and characteristic black humor in lampooning various features of British society in the 1920s.
The novel's title is a contraction of Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. But it also alludes to the German philosopher Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West (1918–1922), which first appeared in an English translation in 1926 and which argued, among other things, that the rise of nations and cultures is inevitably followed by their eclipse. Waugh read both Gibbon and Spengler while writing his first novel.
I tremendously enjoyed the picaresque adventures of its hero, Paul Pennyfeather, as he encountered barely believable difficulties in "getting along". Waugh's characterization is superb while his satire is unambiguously hostile to much that was in vogue in the late 1920s, and themes of cultural change and confusion, moral disintegration and social decay all drive the novel forward and fuel its humor. This book was a joy to read even if you do not participate in all of Mr. Waugh's inside references. It is a worthy introduction to the novels of one of the finest authors of our century.


A Handful of Dust 


Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, on several end-of-century Top 100 lists,was published on September 3, 1934. Waugh took the title for his novel from a line in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land — “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.” In Brideshead Revisited, Waugh returned to the same poem, sending Anthony Blanche out on an Oxford balcony to stutter a few lines from it. Waugh’s biographers have noted a particular connection to Eliot. Early in life, Waugh liked to associate himself with Eliot’s avant-garde style; in his late twenties, Waugh became a Catholic, as Eliot in his late twenties became Anglican; and later in life, both authors grew more conservative and wrote in support of preserving and improving the crumbling class system in Great Britain.
In this novel we have a comedy that contains tragic events, but still manages to entertain the reader with Waugh's brilliant satire and wit. The protagonist, Tony Last, is an ossified country squire. As one of that system’s most doomed representatives when we first meet him, Last is living in blinkered bliss at Hetton Abbey, a rambling Victorian mansion renovated in tasteless neo-Gothic style. He is blithely unaware of his wife's peccadilloes. When the battle over divorce heats up Tony goes on an expedition to South America with a con man. Whether the trip is made because he is merely fooled by the con man or as a reaction to the divorce proceedings it does not work out quite as he expects. Eventually he falls under the spell of a madman named Todd who has a beloved set of Dickens novels; it is his passion to hear them read aloud, and it is Tony's personal hell to be the one required to do this.
This is Waugh at his satirical best and I can forgive his use of Dickens as torture (even though reading him may be felt thusly to some people anyway). While I had trouble understanding the foibles of most of the characters I understood enough of the story to become mesmerized by his brilliant satire and witty prose.

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A Philosopher's Tale

The Mind-Body Problem 
by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein

“Eliot gives us a picture of the inside of a marriage but without divulging any sexual details. Her Victorian readers were meant to infer the hidden reality from such facts as Dorothea’s pathetic pallor and the desolate loneliness of that wedding trip. But I am no George Eliot (my misfortune) and you are probably not content to infer (your misfortune). And so I must take you back with me, from the piazza to the apartment, into Signora Trotti’s oversize antique bed. 
I had had thoughts, early on, of educating Noam in the bedroom, of teaching him the detours and the backways off the main straight road. But he was an unwilling student, when not altogether truant. It was not even possible to speak with him on the subject. He showed such distaste – not for the act itself, but for all reference to it.” - Rebecca Goldstein

This was my introduction to the writing of Rebecca Goldstein. A very funny novel whose clever dialogue was appealing both to my intellect and my emotions. She asks what is the mind, and how does it relate to the physical body? This question has fascinated humans for ages, both before and after 17th-century philosopher René Descartes articulated mind-body dualism. In our time, our growing scientific understanding of the brain and its functions has only compounded the question. Philosopher, novelist, and MacArthur fellow Rebecca Goldstein considers these questions through the protagonist of her novel The Mind-Body Problem. Her protagonist, Renee Feuer, is an acute young philosophy grad-student, raised an Orthodox Jew but very much fallen away. She meets famous Noam Himmel, who has come to the Institute for Advanced Studies to bestow it with his genius. A mathematician of world renown, Noam developed a new category of numbers when only age twelve; as an adult person, he's abstracted, enthusiastic, cuddly. And after they marry, Renee is thrilled to discover, at various European conferences, what she's already intuited: "I had married intellectual royalty." But it doesn't bring all that much satisfaction; after all, compared to Noam, Renee considers herself dull--and she waits for him inevitably to discover it too. Furthermore, as if in escape from the comparative puniness of her mind, she turns to her body: constantly thinking about sex (which Noam can take or leave), about children at times, finally falling into a series of indiscreet affairs with other Princeton thinkers.
It is an intellectual and comic entertainment for those interested in academia or philosophy or both. A delight from beginning to end.


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Dystopian Delight

The Wanting Seed 
by Anthony Burgess


"Life's only choosing when to die. Life's a big postponement because the choice is so difficult. It's a tremendous relief not to have to choose.”  ― Anthony Burgess, The Wanting Seed

Last month I reread Anthony Burgess's most famous novel, A Clockwork Orange. In it I found new insights into Burgess's creative thought, encouraging me to read more of his oeuvre. I followed up on that idea with The Wanting Seed, which he wrote immediately following Clockwork. This dystopian novel demonstrates one of his persistent themes, the conflict between 'Augustinian' authoritarianism and 'neo-Pelagian' liberalism. The novel is set in a future similar to A Clockwork Orange, where Burgess projects an England in which Christianity, fertility, and heterosexuality will have been outlawed. His heroine, Beatrice-Joanna, is a dissident earth-mother who runs away to Wales to give birth in the home of her brother-in-law. Her husband, Tristram, is a history teacher who, in an early scene in the novel, explains the history and meaning of pelphase (Pelagianism) and gusphase (Augustinianism), while his brother heads the Ministry of Infertility. The brothers' relationship leads Tristram to think, “If you expect the worst from a person you can never be disappointed.”  Using an almost over-the-top comic style Burgess comments on themes including: the tyranny of the state, homosexuality, perpetual war, spontaneous orgies, the persistence of religious feeling, and cannibalism. After his escape from prison Tristram hitches a ride from a sort of local militia-man who comments:  "There doesn't seem to be a government at the moment, but we're trying to improvise some kind of regional law and order. . . We can't have all this, indiscriminate cannibalism and the drains out of order.  We've got our wives and children to think of." (pp 171-2)  Although the setting of the novel demonstrates the worst aspects of pelagian liberalism and addresses many societal issues, the primary subject is overpopulation and its relation to culture.
The novel is inventive with a comic seriousness that is humorous with periodic moments of unease; the line between the comic and the serious is sometimes blurred. The author's signature fecundity of ideas, his love of quotations and literary allusions, and his brilliant use of language carries the reader through the rough spots. However, it is not hard to understand why it was "considered too daring" by potential backers of Carlo Ponti's proposed film version. My admiration for Burgess as a novelist of ideas grows with each of his novels. This comically heretical entry, combines with its predecessor to provide a veritable one-two punch of dystopian delight.


The Wanting Seed by Anthony Burgess.  W. W. Norton, 1996 (1962).

Bawdy Banned Book

Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais

"It becomes you to be wise to smell, feel, and have in estimation these fair books, de haulte gresse, light in the pursuit, and bold at the encounter. Then you must, by a curious reading and frequent meditation, break the bone and suck out the substantific marrow, — that is what I mean by these Pythagorean symbols, — with assured hope of becoming well-advised and valiant by the said reading; for in it you shall find another kind of taste, and a doctrine more profound, which will disclose unto you deep doctrines and dreadful mysteries, as well in what concerneth our religion as matters of the public state and life economical."  - Rabelais, Prologue to Garganua and Pantagruel

I have begun to reread Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy and, in doing so, I am reminded of Rabelais great comic novel that Sterne, among others, revered and referenced in his own bawdy work.  So, here is an updated version of my notes on Rabelais's novel:
In 1532 Francois Rabelais wrote a story about the giant Gargantua. For the following twenty years he would continue to write producing Gargantua and Pantagruel, the first great novel in French literature. This novel, in five parts chronicles the adventures of the giant Gargantua and his son Pantagruel. While many consider Rabelais a difficult writer, he is in many senses a modern novelist, rejecting the rules for the novel, if for no other reason than they had yet to be established. His translator, Burton Raffel, in preface to his 1994 edition, describes Rabelais as "something like a cross between James Joyce and Laurence Sterne (the latter, like Rabelais, an ordained clergyman)". Having read both Sterne and Joyce I would agree that Rabelais ' prose is like theirs, difficult but worth persevering. The bawdy humor helps make the reading a little easier, but I most enjoyed the many lists that Rabelais interjected including lists of fools, animals and food, among others.
While the first two books focus on the lives of the two giants, the rest of the series is mostly devoted to the adventures of Pantagruel's friends - such as Panurge, a roguish erudite maverick, and Brother Jean, a bold, voracious and boozing ex-monk - and others on a collective naval journey in search of the Divine Bottle.
Even though most chapters are humorous, wildly fantastic and sometimes absurd, a few relatively serious passages have become famous for descriptions of humanistic ideals of the time. In particular, the letter of Gargantua to Pantagruel and the chapters on Gargantua's boyhood present a rather detailed vision of education.
With its bawdy and bold examination of life--from satire on education to descriptions of bodily functions--Gargantua and Pantagruel is a comic masterpiece. His style is best described in Mimesis, where Erich Auerbach writes:
"The coarse jokes, the creatural concept of the human body, the lack of modesty and reserve in sexual matters, the mixture of such a realism with a satiric or didactic content, the immense fund of unwieldy and sometimes abstruse erudition, the employment of allegorical figures in the later books---all these and much else are to be found in the later Middle Ages. . . But Rabelais' entire effort is directed toward playing with things and with the mutiplicity of their possible aspects; upon tempting the reader out of his customary and definite way of regarding things, by showing him phenomena in utter confusion;"

Rabelais demonstrates a freedom of vision, feeling, and thought that has led to his book being banned by some ever since it was first published. Remember "Marian, the librarian" from The Music Man? She was chastised by the town in part because she included Rabelais on the town library shelves. Many other towns, states and countries over the years have banned this book. For both this reason and for the vigorous humaneness demonstrated by Rabelais this is worth reading. If you are a reader like me you may share some vicarious pleasure in a romp through the middle ages with Rabelais.

Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais, Burton Raffel (Trans).  W. W. Norton & Company, 1991  (first published 1532)

Last, Ryder, and Evelyn Waugh

A Handful of Dust 

by Evelyn Waugh

“It would be a dull world if we all thought alike.”

 ― Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust

Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, on several end-of-century Top 100 lists,was published on September 3, 1934. Waugh took the title for his novel from a line in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land — “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.” In Brideshead Revisited, Waugh returned to the same poem, sending Anthony Blanche out on an Oxford balcony to stutter a few lines from it. Waugh’s biographers have noted a particular connection to Eliot. Early in life, Waugh liked to associate himself with Eliot’s avant-garde style; in his late twenties, Waugh became a Catholic, as Eliot in his late twenties became Anglican; and later in life, both authors grew more conservative and wrote in support of preserving and improving the crumbling class system in Great Britain.
Waugh's protagonist, Tony Last, is an ossified country squire. One of that system’s most doomed representatives. When we first meet him, Last is living in blinkered bliss at Hetton Abbey, a rambling Victorian mansion renovated in tasteless neo-Gothic style. He is blithely unaware of his wife's peccadilloes. Overall, it is a quirky tale that finds Tony in Africa under the spell of a madman named Todd. Mr. Todd has a beloved set of Dickens novels; it is his passion to hear them read aloud, and his decree that Last will do so until he is told to stop.
This is Waugh at his satirical best and I can forgive his use of Dickens as torture (which reading him may be to some people anyway) for I so enjoy his brilliant satire and witty prose.

_______________________________________

Mad World: Evelyn Waugh

and the Secrets of Brideshead 

by Paula Byrne

"'I am not I': yet Charles Ryder manifestly is Evelyn Waugh.  Brideshead Revisited contains as large a dose of autobiography as Charles Dicken's David Copperfield or Marcel Proust's A la recherch du temps perdue.  So who, then, was the 'thou' who was and was not 'he or she'?  The 'they' who were and were not 'they'?  What was the 'household of the faith' that was not Brideshead?  What were the events that inspired the novel?" (p 3)

I love the early novels of Evelyn Waugh simply because they are so funny, filled with epigrammatic sentences and a humor that verges on the fantastic and surreal. "Decline and Fall" is as sparkling as Voltaire's "Candide," and in some ways funnier for the twentieth-century reader, while "Vile Bodies" is a masterly period piece, the definitive satirical portrait of the 1920s "bright young things." Waugh can shock, too: Near the climax of "Black Mischief" (1932), the hero actually finds himself at a cannibal feast where he ends up eating his girlfriend.
In Mad World, Paula Byrne spends much of the book showing just how deeply the novelist drew on real people, places and events to produce his best known and most controversial novel, "Brideshead Revisited". Despite being exceptionally funny in places, "Brideshead Revisited" focuses, slowly but inexorably, on a religious theme: the working out of God's grace in human lives. In its pages Charles Ryder gradually progresses up a kind of ladder of love. Byrne pursues the autobiographical connections between Waugh, Tony Last of A Handful of Dust and Brideshead Revisited’s Charles Ryder. One link, says Byrne, is Madresfield Court, much of its architecture used as model for both Hetton Abbey and Brideshead Castle, many of its inhabitants used as model for his characters — notably, the gay Lord Beauchamp, squire of Madresfield, inspired Tony Last, and Beauchamp’s gay son Hugh Lygon, one of those with whom Waugh had an affair while at Oxford, inspired Brideshead’s Sebastian Flyte. Byrne’s title plays off Madresfield’s informal name of Mad Court or “Madders”; her title is also inspired by the nervous breakdown of Waugh’s later years:
He went mad, began hearing voices in his head. One of them kept telling him that he was homosexual. He wasn’t — he loved women too much for that — but there is no question that the creator of Sebastian Flyte and admirer of Lord Beauchamp had one of the great bisexual imaginations of the English literary tradition.
Byrne's biography is somewhat narrow in focus, concentrating on just the first 40 years of the writer's life, and with this focus she is able to maintain a fast pace and mirror the fun of his novels. Only in her last section does the story slow, becoming somewhat academic in needlessly highlighting all the correspondences between the world of Madresfield and the world of Brideshead. But she makes her case.
As she says in her prologue, "Mad World" illuminates the obsessions that shaped Waugh's life: "the search for an ideal family and the quest for a secure faith." Her book also reminds us just how much our lives are enriched and sustained by friendships.

Mad World by Paula Byrne. HarperCollins, 2010 (2009)
A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh. Back Bay Books, 1977 (1934)

Polar Bear, Redux

Run for the Zoo

We ran for the zoo again this year

For the umpteenth time so I had no fear.

The course ran up and then ran down

first on Stockton and then on crackling ground.

We ran around for a bit till we turned in at the Zoo.

Soon it's the middle of the race and then I was there --

I turned to my right and saw a big white Polar Bear.

And just in front of that Polar Bear a bright white bird

Sat on top of a rock, his feathers glistening in the morning sun

We all were together, runners, bear, and bird,  having fun.

The bear did not notice the runners go by

As he slept in the shade in his crag on high.

But we kept going buoyed by the joy of the morning run,

Along with the sight of the Polar Bear and the bird in the sun.

James Henderson, 2012

Serio-comic Reflection

                    

 English, August: 

An Indian Story 

by Upamanyu Chatterjee

"Agastya? What kind of a name is Agastya?"
"He's a saint of the forest in the Ramayana, very ascetic.  He gives Ram a bow and arrow.  He's there in the Mahabharata, too.  He crosses the Vindyhas and stops them from growing."(p 9)


English, August is fundamentally a comedy, but I would rather call it a serio-comic reflection on a young Indian man of intelligence who exhibits, among other things, an ennui that permeates his actions and choices throughout the novel. It is the story of Agastya Sen, known to his friends by the English name, August, who is a member of the Indian elite, educated at Yale, and recently ensconced in a prize government job. It is a job which takes him to Madna, "the hottest town in India," deep in the rural countryside. Surrounded by an amalgam of neer-do-wells, bureaucrats and characters of various kinds that share only the common characteristic of being both annoying and of no interest to August he wonders what to do? While settling into a self-indulgent life that includes both pot and pleasing himself  incongruously he begins reading a combination of Marcus Aurelius and the Bhagavad Gita.
"In those months he grew to like immensely this wise sad Roman. Marcus immediately made him feel better, because Marcus seemed to have more problems than anyone else--not the soul-squashing problems of being poor, but the exhilarating abstract problems of one immersed wholly in his self."(p 80)
On the recommendation of one of his new acquaintances, who runs his father's hotel, he also begins to read the Gita.
"Thus, through happenstance, Agastaya could place the Bhagavad-Gita beside Marcus Aurelius on his shelf. . . Most passages were abstruse, but Agastaya was surprised by some:"(p 96)


Omnipresent throughout the novel was the ennui of this young man who had no direction in his life and no interest the profession that had been chosen for him by his father, prestige notwithstanding. August, on the contrary, after almost two hundred pages thinks:
"No emotion was sacredly his own, and he half-hoped that his restlessness would thus succumb to attrition. Perhaps his mind would finally realize that its disquietude was merely an index of its immaturity, as inevitable a sign of growing-up as the first emission of semen, as universal as excrement, and about as noteworthy."(p 195)
"At night he would lie awake and hear the clack of his uncle's typewriter and watch the dark shape of the bougainvillea outside the window, and see in its twists and turns a million things, but never his future."(p 197)


Yet this is a comic novel. One that is filled with humorous characters, recognizable to anyone familiar with bureaucracies. The omnipresent heat and fecundity of life demonstrated, to the consternation of August, in mosquitoes and animal feces, presents an unquestionable level of discomfort that is put to use for comic purposes. But the central irony is Agastya himself and that is no better illustrated than by the derivation of his name. His doctor's father shares this near the end of the story:
"Agam is mountain. Agastya could be agam plus asyat, one who pushes a mountain. Or agam plus styayati, one who stops a mountain. We often have this ambiguity, and uncertainty about our names, their origins."
There may also be a suggestion of Sisyphus in all this mountain-pushing business, but perhaps not. What is present is great irony when considering the life of this young dreamer of uncertain origins who is adrift in the heart of India near the start of a life that may merely drift off into the future.


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Chicago News History

The Front Page

by Ben Hecht and 
Charles MacArthur

Yesterday I attended the latest production of TimeLine Theatre Company, The Front Page by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur.  This is not the sanitized film version of Hecht and MacArthur's famous comedy but the original stage version originally produced in 1928.  Even so,  with the current changes underway in the newspaper business and Chicago politics this play seemed just as timely as it was in the twenties.  It was directed by Nick Bowling with the same energy and imagination that he brought to The Farnsworth Invention last year and Frost/Nixon earlier this season.  The story was based in real events and the connection with the Chicago of the late 1920s is palpable.  The comedy was  non-stop  and action-packed with an ensemble that filled the stage with the excitement of a newspaper reporters' room.  The ensemble of actors was excellent with P. J. Powers and Terry Hamilton outstanding in the central roles of Hildy Johnson and Walter Burns.  I enjoyed the performance from the moment I sat down in the theater in the round setting till the last phone stopped ringing on stage.  This has been a great season at TimeLine, but I think they left the best for last.  The season is ending with a classic newspaper comedy that is simply a blast!

Literary Blog Hop

The Literary Blog Hop is hosted by The Blue Bookcase!  This week Gilion from Rose City Reader asks:


Can literature be funny? What is your favorite humorous literary book?


The first question that this topic raised in my mind is what is literature?  What makes a book a literary book?  But that is not the question, rather can this book, assuming it is literary in nature, be funny?  While I have read many funny books over the years and most of them would qualify as literary in the general sense of the word, the best answer is provided by "classic" literature, that is the greatest works of the greatest minds.  I would agree with Lucia in that regard that classic literature definitively answers the question in the affirmative.


Given that is the case, my favorite humorous literary book, one for which humour in many of its classic forms is the defining theme, is Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais.  This book, considered by many the first novel, chronicles the comic adventures of the giant Gargantua and those of his son Pantagruel.  It is  written broadly with bawdy comedy and a lack of reserve that has often relegated it to the corner reserved for "banned" books.  It is humor based in confusion and breaking the boundaries of normal human behavior.  The examples of Rabelais' humor are too numerous to list; his penchant for making lists being one of the major sources of that humor, along with events like the war between the bakers, the story of Gargantua's tutor "Powerbrain", and his rants against lawyers, the priesthood and all whose hubris leads them into folly - the portrait is painful only if you consider excessive humor a source of pain.  The book is a revolutionary reaction to a time, the first half of the Sixteenth century when society was filled with pain, deformity, starvation and death.  It was the life described the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, as "nasty, brutish and short".  Rabelais' reaction was a humor so outsize and full of zest for life and freedom of being that its revolutionary outlook is still funny in our day.  In fact this novel from the last days of the middle ages is so revolutionary that it still seems modern in the Twenty-first century.  Rabelais said it best in his prefatory poem, 


"To My Readers"
"I'd rather write about laughing than crying, For laughter makes men human, and courageous."
BE HAPPY!


Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais. Trans. by Burton Raffel. W. W. Norton & Co.,  1990.

William Tell

Legend says that the Swiss hero William Tell shot the apple from his son’s head on this day in 1307. Tell is a hero in Switzerland, and the tale is oft-told (some variant tellings pre-dating the Tell legend), but not as P. G. Wodehouse tells it in William Tell Told Again:
Once upon a time, more years ago than anybody can remember, before the first hotel had been built or the first Englishman had taken a photograph of Mont Blanc and brought it home to be pasted in an album and shown after tea to his envious friends, Switzerland belonged to the Emperor of Austria, to do what he liked with….
William Tell Told Again (1904) is a collaboration, the prose telling by Wodehouse accompanied by a second telling in verse by John W. Houghton, and a third in color illustrations by Philip Dadd. Below, Houghton’s lines describing the key moment when Tell explains to the tyrannous Austrian Governor, Hermann Gessler (the “G.” of line 2) why he had pulled not one but two arrows from his quiver:

But, as the arrow cleft the core,
Cried G. with indignation,
"What was the second arrow for?
Come, no e-quiver-cation!
You had a second in your fist."
Said Tell, the missile grippin',
"This shaft (had I that apple missed)
Was meant for you, my pippin!"

Source: Today in Literature

Camera

by Jean-Philippe Toussaint

It was about at the same time in my life, a calm life in which ordinarily nothing happened, that in my immediate horizon two events came about, events that, taken separately, were of hardly any interest, and that, considered together, were unfortunately not connected in any way. As it happens I had just decided to learn how to drive, and I had barely begun to get used to this idea when some news reached me by mail: a long-lost friend, in a letter composed with a type-writer, a rather old type writer, had informed me he was getting married. Now, personally, if there's one thing that terrifies me, it's long-lost friends.

The Belgian novelist Jean-Philippe Toussaint is quickly becoming one of my favorites. The opening sequences of “Camera,” one remind me of the enjoyment I experienced recently reading another work, Television, by the same author.
Toussaint’s writing is comic and in this case that entails a sort of comedy with a tendency toward the mechanical. People, gestures and events become like automata — compressed, sprung, interlocked and endlessly repeating. The action, limited as it may be in this book that exhibits the author's control over inaction, in “Camera” take place among automobiles: machines whose very name encodes self-generated motion without end. To the extent there is any plot it involves the hero’s repeated trysts with the driving-school secretary. But this exists within and overlays a background of mechanical wordplay.

It seems that not much happens in “Camera.” But the hero is in a continual battle with a reality of driving lessons, journeying and falling in love. The hero muses that “in my struggle with reality, I could exhaust any opponent with whom I was grappling, like one can wear out an olive, for example, before successfully stabbing it with a fork.” That olive appears a few pages later, in a restaurant scene whose dialogue is passed over entirely, the better to let us appreciate the olive’s lined surface, its “resistance diminishing” beneath the pressure of the tines. Who will win this battle is not always clear. In an interview reproduced at the novel’s end, Toussaint cites Kafka: “In the fight between you and the world, back the world.” Continuity or focus is provided by the titular camera. The novel progresses and this reader had fun with the real moments while not necessarily sharing the level of despair brought forth by the author. The battle can be fun, if you let it.

Camera by Jean-Philippe Toussaint. Dalkey Archive Press. 2008 (2005)


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