Very few camels about today. Precious few mice, come to that.

Photo credit: Mary Lee Agnew

Here is a poem by Kahlil Gibran:

A fox looked at his shadow at sunrise and said, "I will have a camel for lunch today." And all morning he went about looking for camels. But at noon he saw his shadow again - and he said, "A mouse will do."

A writer looked at his word count at sunrise...

Still, if you also had a mouse day today, take heart. Here's Ralph Waldo Emerson to cheer us up:

We do not know whether we are busy or idle. In times when we thought ourselves indolent, we have afterwards discovered, that much was accomplished, and much was begun in us. All our days are so unprofitable while they pass, that 'tis wonderful where or when we ever got anything of this which we call wisdom, poetry, virtue. We never got it on any dated calendar day. Some heavenly days must have been intercalated somewhere.

Thanks, Ralph! And nice use of 'intercalated'.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I'm on tour from September to November! Venues and ticket links here.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

This is the start of the dust-jacket blurb for a 1956 novel called Thin Ice, by Compton Mackenzie (of Whisky Galore fame) 


'Perhaps it was strange that George Gaymer should have become a friend of Henry Fortescue at Oxford in the last years of the nineteenth century. Politically they were poles apart. Henry, already president of the Union, had a brilliant future ahead of him; George was good-hearted but mediocre. Above all, Henry was a homosexual, George was not. Yet George's loyal friendship stood many test across more than forty years, and was reliable when that of Henry's own kind proved transitory or even treacherous.'


Wow. Bear in mind this is meant to be a bold and progressive novel, in which homosexuals are treated with daring sympathy. Despite their inherently treacherous nature.


I also enjoy the ways in which early twentieth century authors let you know a character is gay without actually using the word. Any word. 


This is from James Thurber: 'Winney was, by a familiar caprice of nature, incapable of emotional interest in females'. 


And this is from Ngaio Marsh: 'Bertie was a bachelor, and most understandably so.' 

Ol' Lols

I had a conversation this week about which writers could still make you laugh out loud from a distance of over a hundred years. A huge number of funny authors pre-1910, of course, but how many can actually make you physically laugh -even just a chuckle- as you read? (For fairness, I think it has to be from the page, not when read out or in performance.) We immediately came up with very early Wodehouse; Jerome K Jerome; Mark Twain and the Grossmith brothers (the authors of The Diary of a Nobody, which I've always thought would make an excellent musical). Since then, I've remembered Saki and Stephen Leacock. One of us nominated Dickens, which may be true for him, but, though I like Dickens and find him funny, I'm not sure I've ever actually laughed out loud whilst reading him. Nor at Shakespeare, nor Swift. At Wilde, outside performance? Not sure, but I think maybe not. Thurber, Parker, Waugh and Lardner are all too young. Who else? There must be more. Who've I forgotten?

P.S. Since I started writing this post, I accidentally came across another one - a writer whom, had someone else proposed them, I'm afraid I'd have put in the huge 'funny-but-not-laugh-out-loud-funny' bracket: Lewis Carroll.  I was reading a book of his letters, and this, written to a child in 1871, definitely made me (appropriately) chortle.

'You know I have three dinner-bells - the first (which is the largest) is rung when dinner is nearly ready; the second (which is rather larger) is rung when it is quite ready; and the third (which is as large as the other two put together) is rung all the time I am at dinner.'

Hold the snide.

I feel this blog has got a little sneery lately, so here's something I saw in Edinburgh that I really liked. It made me both smile and admire everyone involved - the person who wrote it, and the people who did what they did when they read it. Click for a bigger version, if it's too small to read. 

The cartoon critic.

One of the many terrific books by James Thurber is 'The Years With Ross', an account of his experiences of the early days of the New Yorker magazine, and in particular its eccentric, energetic, unpredictable founder and editor, Harold Ross.

Ross was deeply involved in every aspect of the magazine (except perhaps the financial), including scrutinising the submitted cartoons every Tuesday, pin-pointing weaknesses with a white knitting needle. Thurber says:

'I was on hand when he pointed his needle at a butler in a Thanksgiving cover depicting a Park Avenue family at table, and snarled 'That isn't a butler, it's a banker.' Suddenly, the figure was, to all of us, a banker in disguise, and Ross dictated a note asking the artist 'to make a real butler out of this fellow.'

On another occasion he stared at a picture of Model T driving down a dusty road for two minutes, before saying 'Take this down, Miss Terry. Better dust.'

It was Ross who decided, though not without misgivings, to publish not just Thurber's brilliant articles and short stories, but also his equally brilliant but untrained and elliptical cartoons, such as this one:

Of course, this sort of naif style looks perfectly normal to us, but in those days of the elegant draftsmanship of Peter Arno or Charles Addams it was rather shocking. According to Thurber, one angry artist:

'...yelled at Ross one day during the thirties, 'Why do you reject drawings of mine and print stuff by that fifth-rate artist Thurber?'

'Third-rate,' said Ross, coming promptly and bravely to the defence of my stature as an artist and his own reputation as an editor.

Elsewhere, Thurber quotes E.B.White, on finding Thurber trying his hand at the more usual elaborate cross-hatching style of cartooning: 'Don't do that. If you ever got good you'd be mediocre.'

Perfect character sketch in three words.

All is forgiven, Radio Four. You may market atrocious spoons (actually, it's probably not even you that do that; it's probably the sinister 'BBC Worldwide', the identity of which I've never quite understood), but you also provided the following terrific quote today. Broadcaster Charles Wheeler remembering spy George Blake, with whom he worked during the war:

'He was a curious person. He was very charming. People liked him. Smiled a lot... smiled rather too much. Smiled at breakfast.'

Selected picture captions from a 1953 children's storybook I found today.

•         'I say, Meg! You have let me down!' he said, under cover of Father's carving.
  
•          He looked and looked and looked, for Sarah was such a funny shape!
•          Wherever he went, everyone ran away.
  
•          The proud snowman said 'No, I won't lend you my warm scarf.'
  
•          But one day, when dinner had been a little less filling than usual, Christopher's Mamma addressed him in a new and serious way.
  
•          Mimsy Poops tilted her white bud of a chin before going out.
  
•          More photographs were taken, this time with Sarah sharing the cowologist's enormous umbrella.
  

I didn't have time to read any of these stories, unfortunately. Some I can make an educated guess at - I don't suppose any of us are in much doubt about how the proud snowman's scarf-sharing policy worked out for him. But which of us is bold enough to claim we can predict the proposal Christopher's Mamma is about to make; or explain just how Sarah (who was such a funny shape) even came to meet a 'cowologist', let alone share his enormous umbrella?