Pater Familias » Literature

A KIPLING LIMERICK.

Philip — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 21:14:47 +0000

A KIPLING LIMERICK. I have posted on limericks and how I think that light verse is an important branch of poetry. Today is the middle of January, and there is playoff game scheduled on the Frozen Tundra in Green Bay. On this winter day in Connecticut (temperature 9 degrees this morning), here is a limerick by Rudyard Kipling from a blog devoted to limericks:

There was a small boy of Quebec
Who was buried in snow to his neck
When they said, “Are you friz?”
He replied, ” Yes, I is —
But we don’t call this cold in Quebec”

VICTORIAN HARPOONS IN TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY WHALES.

Philip — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 22:14:29 +0000

VICTORIAN HARPOONS IN TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY WHALES. Nick and his friend Jane went to the whaling museum in New Bedford recently and were struck by the fact that whales are being found today that are carrying harpoons that were fired in the 1800′s. These articles (here and here) point out that the harpoons provide a new way to estimate the age of the whales. Indeed, they support the conclusion that bowhead whales are the longest living mammals. The bowhead that is the subject of the articles is estimated to have lived 130 years, based on the date of manufacture of the harpoon. Previously, scientist used levels of an amino acid in a whale’s eyes to estimate its age. Presumably, the harpoon information would be helpful in confirming the amino acid method.

The real interest for me is the romance of the find—the reminder that we are not so far in time from the world of Moby-Dick.

THE WONDER OF THE FUTURE (COMMENT).

Philip — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 19:31:18 +0000

THE WONDER OF THE FUTURE (COMMENT). Nick Carraway, before his last reflections on Gatsby’s dream , thinks of the Dutch sailors who first saw Long Island, and of their first glimpse of the American continent. Carraway says: “For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”

Fitzgerald loved Keats, and I have to think that he had these lines in mind:

“Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.”

Happy New Year!

REFLECTING ON THE PAST (COMMENT).

Philip — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 19:29:34 +0000

REFLECTING ON THE PAST (COMMENT). Lee Bryant commented on my post about GATSBY’s wonderful last sentence, calling attention to the beauty of some of the sentences that go before, and how they give force to that last sentence. I realize that this is a good way to end the year and begin the next. At the end of the novel, Nick Carraway is sitting on the shore of Long Island Sound, “brooding on the old, unknown world” and thinking of Gatsby’s dream. He says: “He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.”

TO BE REMEMBERED FOREVER—WRONGLY—FOR BEING MEAN.

Philip — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 23:00:54 +0000

TO BE REMEMBERED FOREVER—WRONGLY—FOR BEING MEAN. Dickens is quoted as saying in his diary about Ebenezer Scroggie: “to be remembered through eternity only for being mean seemed the greatest testament to a life wasted.” And that is a message of A CHRISTMAS CAROL. It is, of course, a great irony that Scroggie was not a mean man. Indeed, Timothy Taylor cites this post on the History of Leith, Edinburgh:

“In life, Scroggie was apparently a rambunctious, generous and licentious man who gave wild parties, impregnated the odd serving wench and once wonderfully interrupted the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland by grabbing the buttocks of a hapless countess.”

EBENEZER SCROGGIE—ADAM SMITH’S GREAT NEPHEW.

Philip — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 22:59:46 +0000

EBENEZER SCROGGIE—ADAM SMITH’S GREAT NEPHEW. After I had posted before Christmas on Scroogenomics, I was pleased to find that Charles Dickens based his character Ebenezer Scrooge on a great nephew of Adam Smith. The story is told here by Timothy Taylor (the Conversable Economist) (link via the Marginal Revolution blog). Dickens visited the Canongate graveyard in Edinburgh (a small churchyard where I visited the grave of Adam Smith). Dickens saw a gravestone there which he misread as: “Ebenezer Lennox Scroggie–mean man.” Dickens wrote in his diary: “How bleak to have one’s shrivelled soul advertised forever.” Dickens thereby committed a great injustice to Scroggie. He misread the inscription. It actually said: “Ebenezer Lennox Scroggie—meal man” A meal man was a corn merchant.

GATSBY’S LAST SENTENCE.

Philip — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 21:09:15 +0000

GATSBY’S LAST SENTENCE. The great last sentence of THE GREAT GATSBY is:

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Vidyan Ravinthiran had a review in the Times Literary Supplement (December 9) of Stanley Fish’s HOW TO WRITE A SENTENCE (which I posted on here). Ravinithiran notes that Fish only remarks that the series of b’s in the sentence slows the reader down. Ravnithiran adds the connection of “beat” and “boats” and the clotted accents in the sentence. He also says that the “e” sound in “beat” picks up the “e”sound in the green light which is an important symbol. I’m not so sure about that. I do think that the alliterative effect of the short words beginning with b and the word “ceaselessly” have a powerful effect. The beautiful sentence also serves as the keystone for the novel.

MAKING CHRISTMAS MEMORIES.

Philip — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 23:53:39 +0000

MAKING CHRISTMAS MEMORIES. Dickens is wise when he has Scrooge’s conversion accomplished by memories—Scrooge’s past memories, his memories that are being created in the present, and his memories that will be created in the future. We remember our Christmases and we know that we will remember what happens this year on Christmas. When a new family is formed there can be a clash of customs. Mary Jane’s family opened presents on Christmas Eve; ours opened them Christmas morning. Resolution was easy: we opened presents on both days. As the years went by, and distances grew, we celebrated with our original families on days after Christmas. Now the gift giving process is spread over several days as schedules permit. Santa Claus, with the assistance of Annalisa and Nick, fills stockings for the parents as well as the children with candy and small gifts.

Merry Christmas to all of you!

EGGCORNS AS “TINY LITTLE POEMS”.

Philip — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 19:14:31 +0000

EGGCORNS AS “TINY LITTLE POEMS”. Eggcorns as well as mondegreens show up frequently in the student writing mistakes that are discussed in RAB’s blog “You Know What I Meant”. RAB analyzes them in much the same way that a good literary critic would analyze a lyric poem. Here is one recent eggcorn: “The way to win a man’s heart is through his pallet.” RAB points out that the student was probably thinking of “palate” as a substitute for “stomach.” But the word brings with it notions of a discriminating male (palate) and of “a straw mattress or other temporary bed” (pallet). A little poem. A second recent eggcorn: “Satan wanted to repuke God.” As RAB points out, “repuke” has notions of a “rebuke”; Satan (the rebuker) is treating God as an inferior. And there is the notion of “puking’, of physical disgust with God.

MIDDLEMARCH.

Philip — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 17:46:05 +0000

MIDDLEMARCH. The last words of George Eliot’s MIDDLEMARCH: “…the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to … Continue reading →

SIMENON THE TECHNICIAN.

Philip — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 16:41:29 +0000

SIMENON THE TECHNICIAN. Joan Acocella cites Julian Symons as saying that the Maigret stories were not detective stories because Simenon was not interested in detection. I concede that Simenon is not interested in forensic clues of the Sherlock Holmes kind, but Simenon creates great variety within the detective story form. He has, for example, the clue (which I mentioned here) that is in plain sight from the beginning of the book, the classical case with 5 suspects (in Simenon’s case, the victim has a lover for different days of the week), and a Nero-Wolfe type denouement with all the suspects assembled to hear the solution, but with the twist that one of the suspects conducts the unraveling while Maigret watches.)

A NOBEL PRIZE FOR DETECTIVE STORIES?

Philip — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 09:40:44 +0000

A NOBEL PRIZE FOR DETECTIVE STORIES? I posted here that I thought that Simenon was worthy of a Nobel Prize. Some think that Simenon did not win the Prize because he was so prolific. He usually spent an intense 10 days to write a novel. Joan Acocella gives the totals of 76 Maigret novels for Simenon, with an additional 134 straight novels (most of them what Simenon called his roman durs). Simenon thought his roman durs (hard novels)—the ones without Maigret— were his best books and the critics all seem to agree. I have only read the Maigret books, probably more of them than the books of any other writer. Which means that I found myself saying that a writer of detective stories was worthy of a Nobel Prize. I am comfortable with this.Simenon created two characters with a happy bourgeois marriage who grew in stature over the 76 books (“great emotion, greatly muted”, says Acocella) . He also created hundreds of characters from all levels of French society. Ross McDonald said that Lew Archer, his detective, was really a story-telling device. Maigret explores many stories.