Hiatus 2010

Yes, it's true this time. Not like last year, when T'aint settled upon me and I had lots of idle time on my hands. This year, I truly am taking a blogging hiatus for Christmas. Mostly. But here, definitely. See y'all in January.

Borrr-ing

As a writer, I know not everything I write is going to shine. In fact, a lot of it is unadulterated crap. But I like to think that, someday, I'll be remembered by someone for the good stuff I wrote, rather than the mediocre.

Then there's Alva Johnson.

If Louis Untermeyer is to be believed, "Legend of A Sport" is one of Johnson's better bits of amusing writing.

I've got to be honest: This is the first bit in the Treasury of Laughter I couldn't finish reading. Especially when I hit this old joke:

As a wit, [Wilson] Mizner belonged to two distinct schools -- the scientific and O. Henry. His scientific method consisted of bringing a calm spirit of inquiry to bear on boiling emotion. When an excited man rushed up to him exclaiming, "Coolidge is dead," Mizner asked, "How do they tell?"

And it goes on like that. For twelve pages. In small type. I'll spare you any more snoring, and leave you to go to your respective uncles to hear the old, bad jokes.

Elf Practice

Try this on for size:

When I was one-and-twenty
I heard a wise man say,
“Give crowns and pounds and guineas
But not your heart away;
Give pearls away and rubies
But keep your fancy free.”
But, I was one and-twenty,
No use to talk to me.

When I was one-and-twenty
I heard him say again,
“The heart out of the bosom
Was never given in vain;
‘Tis paid with sighs a-plenty
And sold for endless rue.”
And I and two-and-twenty,
And on, ‘tis true, ‘tis true.

That’s the entirety of A. E. Houseman’s poem “When I was One-and-Twenty,” which I suppose is comic in a way, but neither this one nor the other that Louis Untermeyer presents – “Oh, See How Thick the Goldcup Flowers,” is really all that ha-ha hilarious. Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m just in a bad mood writing this. But I’ve read the poems several times and while they may elicit a smile, they certainly don’t hit the Elf Practice level of hilarity (you know, Elf Practice, learning how to chuckle and go ‘hee hee’ and ‘ho ho’ and wiggle your ears, important stuff like that).

Scotch Tape

Most of what I know about the Scotch comes from: Greyfriars Bobby, Scrooge McDuck, that character in Mike Meyers’ film “So I Married An Ax Murderer” who makes fun of the size of his grandson’s skull, Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott, and a few little jokes and quips on BBC 4’s “The News Quiz,” one of which goes like this:

After this government (Gordon Brown) and Northern Rock, you won’t find anyone saying Scots are tight with money.

But Louis Untermeyer, bless him, includes a passel of Scotch money-themed jokes in his Treasury of Laughter. Here’s a little sampling:

A Scotchman, an Irishman and a Jew had dinner together. When the waiter came in with the bill, the Scotchman promptly said he would take it. The next day the newspaper carried a headline: “Death of a Jewish Ventriloquist.”

Angus woke early and found that his wife had passed away during the night. “Maggie! Maggie!” he cried to the servant.

“Aye sir?” she called back.

“Maggie, ye need boil only one egg the morn!”

In Edinburgh they tell the story of the two burglars who smashed a jeweler’s window and were arrested when they came back for the brick.

But what’s interesting about the collection of jokes is that they remain the sole oral storytelling tradition we have, and I included stand-up comedians and such in the mix. This is an old storytelling method, of course, which used to be implemented much more often before the advent of inexpensive printing, whether it was done on paper pulp, papyrus, or stone. So these terrible japes have more common with Beowulf than a lot of the high fantasy we read these days. Interesting, interesting . . .

Oliver Wendell Holmes is Content You're Reading His Poetry

Are you content?

I’m not. Well, almost. Good enough for government work contentment, that’s what I’ve got. But like Mr. Burns, I’d give up all of my billions for just a little bit more.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., understands that contentment without being content about it is part of human nature. Witness this snatch from his poem of that title:

Man wants but little here below.
Little I ask; my wants are few;
I only wish a hut of stone,
(A very plain brown stone will do,)
That I may call my own; --
And close at hand is such a one,
In yonder street that fronts the sun.
Plain food is quite enough for me;
Three courses are as good as ten; --
If Nature can subsist on three,
Thank Heaven for three. Amen!
I always thought cold victuals nice; --
My choice would be vanilla-ice.
I care not much for gold or land; --
Give me a mortgage here and there, --
Some good bank-stock, some note of hand,
Or trifling railroad share, --
I only ask that Fortune send
A little more than I shall spend.

The full poem can be found here. Or, if you’re in the mood for magenta, here.

O. Henry. Inspiration from Disney to Serling. And Beyond.

So I’m not just imagining it.

After I read O. Henry’s story “The Ransom of Red Chief,” I immediately thought of the 1976 Disney film “No Deposit, No Return,” in which Darren McGavin and Don Knotts play two unsuccessful safecrackers who inadvertently “kidnap” two kids of generally absentee parents whose grandfather revels in their absence as he toys with the kidnappers in paying the ransom.

Of course, the story is also similar to that of 1982’s “Savannah Smiles,” starring Donovan Scott and Mark Miller, though in this case it’s the parents, not the “kidnapped” kid who are the real stinkers in the story.

But that’s O. Henry for you. Before Hollywood was there churning out the “surprise” plot trists, before Rod Serling was there, banally prattling on about the odd little twists of fate that lead people from a normal life into that twilightiest of all zones, there was O. Henry.

And there’s this version, an odd Russian version of the film, which makes it clear within the first few moments that the director saw the story as a jab against the capitalist stooges who set up their whole society so that one had to get capital in order to capitalize on the whole capitalist system. Capital capital capital. (Other than that, the telling here is pretty accurate to O. Henry’s story.)
 

(This was filmed in 1962, per IMDB.com. Unsure on international copyright for this.)

What first catches the ear is an odd simile:

“Hey, little boy!” says Bill, “would you like to have a bag of candy and a nice ride?”

The boy catches Bill neatly in the eye with a piece of brick.

“That will cost the old man an extra five hundred dollars,” says Bill, climbing over the wheel.

That boy put up a fight like a welter-eight cinnamon bear; but, at last, we got him down in the bottom of the buggy and drove away.

Like a welter-weight cinnamon bear. I like the sound of that.

I like the sound, too, of O. Henry’s first-person telling, at which he is amazingly consistent.

Of course, the brick in the eye isn’t the only first-person telling we get of this little brat’s impudence. There’s also this:

Just at daybreak, I was awakened by a series of awful screams from Bill. They weren’t yells, or howls, or shouts, or whoops, or yawps, such as you’d expect from a manly set of vocal organs – they were simply indecent, terrifying, humiliating screams, such as women emit when they see ghosts or caterpillars. It’s an awful thing to hear a strong, desperate, fat man scream incontinently in a cave at daybreak.

I jumped up to see what the matter was. Red Chief [the kid] was sitting on Bill’s chest, with one hand twined in Bill’s hair. In the other had had the sharp case-knife we used for slicing bacon; and he was industriously and realistically trying to take Bill’s scalp, according to the sentence that had been pronounced upon him the evening before.

Of course, in true Hollywood or Disney fashion, the kidnappers can’t get rid of the kid until they pay the imp’s father $250 for his return – and have to do so under cover of darkness besides, so the neighbors won’t know who to blame when the kid returns.

O. Henry is a wonderful practitioner of the short story, a lost art in America, and as well a chronicler of the unchronicled, choosing rather than the socialite, the war profiteer, the politician or the industry mogul, to write of the ordinary, from two-bit kidnappers in a tiny town in Alabama to their obnoxious prey. And while most folksa re more familiar with the Oprah-like shmaltz of O' Henry's pieces such as "The Gift," this piece shows that while hes tuck with the short story genre, he wasn't all shmaltz.

Full text of the story can be found here.

Boldly Taking on the Tar Baby

This drawing is in the public domain in the United States.

 A commonly-accepted definition of the term “tar baby” today is a “sticky situation that is only aggravated by additional contact.” Ironically, race relations in the United States is such a tar baby. Dare to make any kind of comment on the subject and you’ll find a thousand willing to parse what you said, for both good and ill.

Thus the Treasury of Laughter enters the world of Joel Chandler Harris. And this is the last and only equivocation you’ll hear from us on the subject.

And for good reason. For good or ill, Joel Chandler Harris’ recordings of the “Uncle Remus” story introduced traditional American folklore to an appreciative world, and not just an appreciative world both north and south of the Mason-Dixon line. Per Wikipedia:

The tales, 185 in sum, became immensely popular among both black and white readers in the North and South. Few outside of the South had ever heard accents like those spoken in the tales, and no one had ever seen the dialect legitimately and faithfully recorded in print. To the North and those abroad, the stories were a "revelation of the unknown." Mark Twain noted in 1883, "in the matter of writing [the African-American dialect], he is the only master the country has produced."

The stories introduced international readers to the American South. Rudyard Kipling wrote in a letter to Harris that the tales "ran like wild fire through an English Public school.... [We] found ourselves quoting whole pages of Uncle Remus that had got mixed in with the fabric of the old school life.” The Uncle Remus tales have since been translated into more than forty languages.

James Weldon Johnson called the collection "the greatest body of folklore America has produced.”

So let’s have some fun.

First, we see the wily Brer Rabbit using his own fleabaggishness to keep Brer Fox at bay:

“Hol’ on dar, Brer Rabbit,” sez Brer Fox, sezee.

“I ain’t got time, Brer Fox,” sez Brer Rabbit, sezee, sorter mendin’ his licks.

“I wanter have some confab wid you, Brer Rabbit,” sez Brer Fox, sezee.

“All right, Brer Fox, but you better holler fum whar you stan’. I’m monstus full ur fleas dis mawnin,” sez Brer Rabbit, sezee.

Here we hear Harris’ wonderful ear for the dialect of the south, precursor, perhaps, to today’s Ebonics. Coming from a linguistically bland corner of the nation, I’ve got to say that reading Harris’ transcription is a challenging delight.

Harris’ story, of course, is familiar. Less familiar is that on an annual basis starting in 1888, Harris wrote seven Uncle Remus collection, cataloging for the world the vast imagination of the African-American south.
And maybe I’m full of hot air. But I’ll always enjoy Brer Rabbit’s reverse psychology, his quick with that outwits even after he’s been outwitted:

“I don’t keer w’at you do wid me, Brer Fox,” sezee, “so you don’t fling me in dat brier-patch. Roas’ me, Brer Fox,” sezee, “but don’t fling me in dat brier patch,” sezee.

“Hit’s so much trouble fer ter kindle a fier,” sez Brer Fox, sezee, “dat I speck I’ll hatter hang you,” sezee.

“Hand me des ez high as you plase, Brer Fox,” sez Brer Rabbit, sezee, “but to fer de Lord’s sake don’t fling me in dat brier patch,” sezee.

“I ain’t got no string,” sez Brer Fox, sezee, “en now I speck I’ll ahtter drown you,” sezee.

“Drown me des ez deep ez you please, Brer Fox,” sez Brer Rabbit, sezee, “but do don’t fling me in dat brier-patch,” sezee.

“Der ain’t no water nigh,” sez Brer Fox, sezee, “en ow I speck I’ll hatter skin you,” sezee.

“Skin me,” Brer Fox, sezee, “snatch out my eye-balls, t’ar out my years by de roots, en cut off my legs,” Sezee, “but do please, Brer Fox, don’t fling me in dat brier-patch,” sezee.

Okay. So maybe Harris carries the dialect thing a bit too far.

Of course we know what happens. Brer Fox throws him in the brier patch, a patch similar to the one Brer Rabbit was born in. Brer Rabbit escapes to live to outfox Fox another day, much like another literary rabbit would do once he escaped from Mr. MacGregor’s garden. And my world is richer for having read Brer Rabbit do the outfoxing, political correctness be hanged. Or drowned. Or whatever.