A tale of Whoopshire

Last year we had a P.G. Wodehouse story for Halloween. This year it’s Robert Benchley’s turn. This is technically a Christmas story, but it’s equally inappropriate for October 31.

Uncle Edith’s Ghost Story

“Tell us a ghost story, Uncle Edith,” cried all the children late Christmas afternoon when everyone was cross and sweaty.

“Very well, then,” said Uncle Edith, “it isn’t much of a ghost story, but you will take it—and like it,” he added, cheerfully. “And if I hear any whispering while it is going on, I will seize the luckless offender and baste him one.

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Of dishwashers and cigarette lighters

The “letter to the editor” today at Dr. Boli’s magazine reminded me (and at least one other person) of Henry Kuttner’s tale from eighty years ago, “The Twonky.” I’ve occasionally wanted to post or link to the story, one of the more prophetic writings of the twentieth century, but until recently I hadn’t been able to find it online. You can read it here.1

Slow down

Ted Gioia echoes R.A. Lafferty:

IT’S OKAY TO READ SLOWLY

I tell myself that, because I am not a fast reader.

I can do speed reading, if it’s absolutely necessary—but I find it painful and exhausting. My natural reading pace is languid, almost lethargic.

My lifetime reading plan has been my proven path to Nirvana
Even more to the point, the books I read must be savored and slowly digested. Proust is one of my favorite authors, but I could only handle his ultra-dense writing in small doses. So I read through his 2,000-page novel at the pace of seven pages per day. I started when I was a teenager, and got to the final page shortly before my 30th birthday.

Of course, I read many other things during that period, but I always came back to his massive book—taking it slowly, thoughtfully, in the way it deserved.

For many years, I felt that my slow reading was holding me back. I would be wiser, I would be smarter, I told myself, if I could just read faster. I often keep going back over the same sentences again and again, trying to decipher their inner meaning. This slows me down to a tortoise’s pace—and it’s frustrating.

But now I believe slowness was a benefit. My learning was deeper and more mind-expanding because I didn’t rush it.

By the way, I did the same thing when I learned jazz piano. I spent months learning things that could have been mastered in days. But by the time, I was done, I had internalized my learning at a deep level.

Life is not a race. The journey is its own reward. If we could make the trip instantaneously—like they do with those teleporters in Star Trek—it wouldn’t be worth anything.

See Lafferty’s “The Primary Education of the Camiroi.”

Another poem

I recently posted a poem for the second day of February. Here’s one for the second week:

The Lordly Hudson

“Driver, what stream is it?” I asked, well knowing
it was our lordly Hudson hardly flowing.
“It is our lordly Hudson hardly flowing,”
he said, under the green-grown cliffs.”

Be still, heart! No one needs
your passionate suffrage to select this glory,
this is our lordly Hudson hardly flowing
under the green-grown cliffs.

“Driver, has this a peer in Europe or the East?”
“No, no!” he said. Home! Home!
Be quiet, heart! This is our lordly Hudson
and has no peer in Europe or the east.

This is our lordly Hudson hardly flowing
under the green-grown cliffs
and has no peer in Europe or the East.
Be quiet, heart! Home! Home!

– Paul Goodman

I was prompted to post this by a recent article by Ted Gioia. Goodman may have been a “nut of the first water,” but he had a moment of “chilling” prescience.

Sheep and Peacocks

On the second of February bloggers traditionally post a favorite poem, though apparently I’m the only one who still does that. Here’s one from Thomas Love Peacock’s 1829 novel The Misfortunes of Elphin.

The War-Song of Dinas Vawr

By Thomas Love Peacock

The mountain sheep are sweeter,
But the valley sheep are fatter;
We therefore deemed it meeter
To carry off the latter.
We made an expedition;
We met a host, and quelled it;
We forced a strong position,
And killed the men who held it.

On Dyfed’s richest valley,
Where herds of kine were browsing,
We made a mighty sally,
To furnish our carousing.
Fierce warriors rushed to meet us;
We met them, and o’erthrew them:
They struggled hard to beat us;
But we conquered them, and slew them.

As we drove our prize at leisure,
The king marched forth to catch us:
His rage surpassed all measure,
But his people could not match us.
He fled to his hall-pillars;
And, ere our force we led off,
Some sacked his house and cellars,
While others cut his head off.

We there, in strife bewild’ring,
Spilt blood enough to swim in:
We orphaned many children,
And widowed many women.
The eagles and the ravens
We glutted with our foemen;
The heroes and the cravens,
The spearmen and the bowmen.

We brought away from battle,
And much their land bemoaned them,
Two thousand head of cattle,
And the head of him who owned them:
Ednyfed, king of Dyfed,
His head was borne before us;
His wine and beasts supplied our feasts,
And his overthrow, our chorus.

As a matter of policy I no longer post or link to YouTube videos, but with a bit of searching you can find Dylan Thomas declaiming Peacock’s poem. I’d be curious to hear this war song set to music by a competent folk metal band.

Those who have read, or have been forced to read, the English romantic poets might enjoy Peacock’s caricatures of Shelley, Coleridge and Byron in Nightmare Abbey.

Update: At least one other blogger is still posting poetry.

2022: Fiction

In recent years I’ve largely lost my taste for new fiction, and I’ve probably spent more time perusing essays and polemics than I have reading stories. Nevertheless, I still occasionally read novels and story collections. Here are some that I read last year, with a few from 2021.

I downloaded a number of the titles in the periodic $.99 sales organized by Hans Schantz and read a few pages of each. Usually a few pages is enough. I did finish On Basilisk Station by David Weber, Storm Front by Jim Butcher, Monster Hunter International by Larry Correia and Draw One in the Dark by Sarah Hoyt, all first volumes of lengthy series. They held my attention, but after finishing them I had no interest in reading the next books. (Your taste may differ from mine; if they sound interesting, give them a try. All are competently written, and while they’re not my kinds of story, they might be yours.) I read all five volumes of Fenton Wood’s alternate history Yankee Republic; I would have loved it when I was ten years old, but I’m not that young any more. Frank Fleming’s various novels are amusing, though only the Superego series has any real heft to it. I also read Hoyt’s Deep Pink; the premise is clever, but it feels like a short story inflated to novel length.

The most interesting novel I read was an old one, written over a century ago: William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land. Everything you’ve heard about it is true: it’s stupendous, and it’s nearly unreadable. This tale of a heroic quest in a far distant future is written in a deliberately archaic style. It may have the highest ratio of semicolons to periods in all of literature. And in many passages every sentence begins with “And.” Getting through the first few chapters is work, and even when you’re accustomed to the rhythm of the prose it still takes an effort to read. But it’s worth it for its depiction of an Earth grown strange, hostile and dark.

I’ve been meaning for years to investigate Boris and Arkady Strugatsky. I finally got around to reading their Roadside Picnic, one of the few books that can stand comparison to The Night Land for sheer dread. Aliens briefly visited the Earth, leaving trash behind at a handful of sites around the globe. Some of the garbage is useful to humans. Some is lethal. “Stalkers” brave the hazards of the “Zones” where the aliens were to find items to sell on the black market. It’s dangerous: a step in the wrong direction means crippling injury or instant death, and there are consequences even for those who not venture into the Zones. The novel is narrated by one of stalkers during a few of his trips into the Zone over the course of several years. Roadside Picnic an intense, nightmarish book. I’ll need to read more of the Strugatskys.

Tim Powers is the contemporary writer most like the other Inkling, Charles Williams1. Like Williams, his books are spiritual thrillers. Powers is a Catholic, and it shows. His recent novel, Alternate Routes, introduces Sebastian Vickery, a former Secret Service agent who Saw Too Much and is now wanted dead or alive by the Feds, preferably dead, and Ingrid Castine, from a government department with a suspiciously innocuous name who saves his life. Together they save a haunted Los Angeles from the supernatural schemes of a rogue government agent. They reappear in Forced Perspectives, in which they save Los Angeles and the rest of the world again, this time from people with guilty consciences wielding an ancient Egyptian symbol/artifact. The daughter Vickery never had also figures in both books. The novels are fast-moving, easy to follow and entertaining, but they’re Powers-lite. For full-strength Powers, I recommend his earlier books. Try Declare if you like spy stories, or The Drawing of the Dark if you prefer 16th-century historical fantasy, or beer. English majors might consider The Anubis Gates, set in 19th-century London.

In The Annotated Alice, Martin Gardner names Frederic Brown’s Night of the Jabberwock as the outstanding work of fiction inspired by Lewis Carroll. Of course Brown’s book was long out of print when I first saw Gardner’s recommendation, and it wasn’t in the local library. I kept an eye out for it at used book stores but never spotted it. A few months ago I checked the devil’s website, as Robbo calls it, and there it was, and … it’s okay. Brown is deservedly famous among those who remember him as clever craftsman of short-short stories, and I hoping for an intricate Carrollian fantasy. However, Night of the Jabberwock turned out to be a murder mystery in which the narrator is a Carroll enthusiast. Solving the mystery involves ordinary reasoning, not Carrollian logic, and there are no white knights or Cheshire cats, just a small-town newspaper editor and his acquaintances. If you like tidy murder mysteries it’s worth checking out, but I was disappointed.

I also read Brown’s Martians, Go Home, in which the earth is suddenly invaded by obnoxious little green men. They won’t attack you physically, but they are mouthy little jerks, contemptuous of human beings, who pop up everywhere and insult everyone. They have x-ray vision, too, and blab what they read in personal letters and top secret documents. They are invulnerable, and there is no way to evade them or kick them out. Part of the book relates how a blocked writer copes with the alien provocations, and part recounts how the rest of the world deals with the little creeps. It’s never really explained how or why they came or what eventually happens to them. It’s an odd little book that doesn’t fit in any category, not quite science fiction, not quite humor, not quite satire. I can’t give it a strong recommendation, but it is unlike anything else I’ve read recently.

I read a few of Giovanni Guareschi’s Don Camillo books a thousand years ago. They have been missing from my library for decades, but recently they have been made available again in English, this time with all the stories included in each collection.2 The books are mainly about Don Camillo, a priest in an Italian village in the years after World War II, and his battles with Peppone, the Communist mayor. The tales are mostly humorous satire. Camillo usually gets the better of Peppone, but he can be a jerk, and Peppone, wrong-headed though he is, is not a monster.

The novel Don Camillo and Don Chichi3 is the last Don Camillo story. It takes place in the mid-1960’s, after the second Vatican Council. The bishop of Camillo’s diocese assigns him “Don Chichi,” a young curate full of the spirit of Vatican II who spouts socialism and wants to “demystify” the Church. He is almost as much a trial to Don Camillo as Camillo’s niece, the willful biker chick Cat. Cat is Camillo’s match for guile and feistiness, but over the course of the novel she gradually becomes more responsible. Don Chichi, on the other hand, remains a fool whose meddling does more harm than good. Don Camillo and Don Chichi is primarily humorous, but there is bitterness. Guareschi was furious with the changes to the Church done with the excuse of Vatican II and his anger shows, particularly in the second chapter, a sarcastic “Open Letter to Don Camillo.”

Sort of a Christmas story

Some years back I posted one of Robert Benchley’s Christmas pieces. Here’s another.

Editha’s Christmas Burglar

By Robert Benchley
It was the night before Christmas, and Editha was all agog. It was all so exciting, so exciting! From her little bed up in the nursery she could hear Mumsey and Daddy down-stairs putting the things on the tree and jamming her stocking full of broken candy and oranges.

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Poetry corner: in memoriam

Joyce Kilmer, updated by John Leo:

Versified and rhythmic non-prose verbal arrangements are fashioned by people of alternative intelligence such as myself, but only the divine entity, should he or she actually exist, can create a solar-shielding park structure from low-rise indigenous vegetative material.

John Leo, a very funny, very serious writer whose columns were among the few things worth reading in the newspaper1 before the turn of the century, died earlier this month. His collection Two Steps Ahead of the Thought Police2 is fun to browse through.

(Via Kim Du Toit.)

Just wondering

Does this distress you?

From the Daily Mail:

A University has slapped a trigger warning on some of Britain’s greatest Romantic poets because their work contains ‘representations of sexism and misogyny’.

Bath Spa University has told students that poems by William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats and Alexander Pope have the potential to ‘disturb’ or ‘distress’.

Is there any writer worth reading, anyone at all, who will not “trigger” some ideologue?

(Via Kim Du Toit.)

Why is the sea boiling hot?

I had planned to post a selection of epigrams for this year’s post-a-favorite-poem entry today, but Maureen Mullarkey’s commentary yesterday on Chicago finger food as served by Cardinal Cupich calls for more Lewis Carroll. So, here’s “The Walrus and the Carpenter.”

The sun was shining on the sea,
Shining with all his might:
He did his very best to make
The billows smooth and bright —
And this was odd, because it was
The middle of the night.

The moon was shining sulkily,
Because she thought the sun
Had got no business to be there
After the day was done —
‘It’s very rude of him,’ she said,
‘To come and spoil the fun.’

The sea was wet as wet could be,
The sands were dry as dry.
You could not see a cloud, because
No cloud was in the sky:
No birds were flying overhead —
There were no birds to fly.

Continue reading “Why is the sea boiling hot?”

Catalogued

I recently received the White Flower Farm Spring 2022 Garden Book. As gardening catalogs go, it’s relatively dignified, with a University Roman flag, text that emphasizes accuracy over hyperbole, and no exclamation points. WFF prices are at the high end of the range, but in the past the plants they shipped were of consistently good quality. I might order a few items from them.

Nevertheless, the catalog was disappointing. Years ago the “garden book” was valued as much for the text as for the selections. Written by one Amos Pettingill, it had a degree of personality missing from other catalogs. Although the bulk of the text was devoted to describing the merchandise, he often digressed, as in his discussion of Exbury azaleas.

Lord Lionel Rothschild, a member of the famous banking clan and extremely rich in the days before the Great Depression and World War II, was not only a great banker but a great gardener. He was no dilletante; Lord Rothschild not only worked over every detail in the development of his lovely estate in Exbury, but he also worked diligently on breeding Rhododendron — and Azalea, a very close branch of the Rhododendron family. He spared no money in this huge breeding program, for he had started it late in life and knew it could be successful quickly only through massive expenditures. He once employed 225 men, 75 of them professional gardeners, to care for this estate of 250 acres. By working with tens of thousands of crosses, instead of thousands, Lord Rothschild used his wealth to telescope time…. Money, people are inclined to forget, is a very useful thing — whether we go to the moon or piggy-back a fine strain of plants with it.

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