Don't try this at home

"For it must be remembered that at the time I knew quite nothing, naturally, concerning Milo Payne, the mysterious Cockney-talking Englishman with the checkered long-beaked Sherlockholmsian cap; nor of the latter's "Barr-Bag" which was as like my own bag as one Milwaukee wienerwurst is like another; nor of Legga, the Human Spider, with her four legs and her six arms; nor of Ichabod Chang, ex-convict, and son of Dong Chang; nor of the elusive poetess, Abigail Sprigge; nor of the Great Simon, with his 2163 pearl buttons; nor of--in short, I then knew quite nothing about anything or anybody involved in the affair of which I had now become a part, unless perchance it were my Nemesis, Sophie Kratzenschneiderwümpel--or Suing Sophie!"

—Harry Stephen Keeler, THE RIDDLE OF THE TRAVELING SKULL (p. 3)

And I still think that there can be no neater way of putting in a nutshell the outcome of the super-sticky affair of Nobby Hopwood, Stilton Cheesewright, Florence Craye, my Uncle Percy, J. Chichester Clam, Edwin the Boy Scout and old Boko Fittlesworth—or, as my biographers will call it, the Steeple Bumpleigh Horror.

—P.G. Wodehouse, JOY IN THE MORNING (p. 2)

A new Keeler mystery

My review of P.G. Wodehouse: A Life in Letters is now up on the Bookforum site. Thank you to my editor, Michael Miller, for forcing me to write it!

One thing that got left on the cutting-room floor: For the birth of my second child, the only reading matter I brought to the hospital was...an issue of Bookforum! It was the one with Samuel Beckett wearing shorts on the cover.

*

I did a double-take when I saw (via Facebook) that I was in yet another issue of the Asian American Literary Review. Just yesterday I remembered that I had published a piece in the AALR called "Chinese Whispers: On Writing/Not Writing Asian American Literature." So what was this other article by me? It's "vintage Park"—my review of Harry Stephen Keeler's strange, wildly entertaining, ethnic-studies-ready Y. Cheung, Business Detective (1939). In the piece, I reflect on an odd resemblance it bears to a story by Nabokov. I'm happy to see it reprinted. (It originally appeared in 2000—remember 2000?—in issue 30 of the Keeler News.)

(This has got to be one of the worst Keeler jackets. But it's a terribly interesting book.)

1924

"A scaly neighborhood!" he murmured.

The young man's judgment was one at which few people with an eye for beauty would have cavilled. When the great revolution against London's ugliness really starts and yelling hordes of artists and architects, maddened beyond endurance, finally take the law into their own hands and rage through the city burning and destroying, Wallingford Street, West Kensington, will surely not escape the torch. For, though it possesses certain merits of a low practical kind, being inexpensive in the matter of rents and handy for the buses and the Underground, it is a peculiarly beastly little street. Situated in the middle of one of those districts where London breaks out into a sort of eczema of red brick, it consists of two parallel rows of semi-detached villas all exactly alike, each guarded by a ragged evergreen hedge, each with coloured glass of an extremely regrettable nature let into the panels of the front door; and sensitive young impressionists from the artists' colony up Holland Park way may sometimes be seen stumbling through it with hands over their eyes, muttering between clenched teeth 'How long? How long?'

--P.G. Wodehouse, Leave It to Psmith (1924)

*

There is one profession and one only, namely architecture, in which progress is not considered necessary, where laziness is enthroned, and in which the reference is always to yesterday.

Everywhere else, taking thought for the morrow is almost a fever and brings its inevitable solution: if a man does not move forward he becomes bankrupt.

But in architecture no one ever becomes bankrupt. A privileged profession, alas!

--Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture (1924)

Four for Wodehouse

I. "DID Bertie Wooster mean to harm Barbara Geltosky in September 2008? The evidence against him is damning. For instance, the hole that Bertie, Ms. Geltosky’s 5-year-old Norwegian elkhound, dug in the garden was 12 inches across and 12 inches deep — the perfect size for a human foot." —NYT

II. From David Lipsky's Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, we learn that David Foster Wallace had a dog named Jeeves and a dog named Drone.

III. "Mr. [Harry Stephen] Keeler is infinitely plausible at infinite speed. He is a serious Wooster of the thrills." —Daily Telegraph.

IV. Annals of Facial Hair

"I have come to a decision Mrs Twemlow."
"What about?"
"Ever since his lordship srted to grow it I have seen the writing on the wall plainer and plainer, and now I have made up my mind. The moment his lordship returns from London, I tender my resignation. Eighteen years have I served in his lordship's household, commencing as under-footman and rising to my present position, but now the end has come."
"You don't mean you're going just because his lordship has grown a beard?"
"It is the only way, Mrs Twemlow. That beard is weakening his lordship's position throughout the entire country-side. Are you aware that at the recent Sunday school treat I heard cries of 'Beaver!'?"
"No!"

—Wodehouse, "Lord Emsworth Acts for the Best," Blandings Castle

What!

I.

'You patted his face.'
'I never. I was feeling his moustache.'
'It's the same thing.'
'It's not. Sidney, it's fastened on with glue!'
"What!'
—P.G. Wodehouse, Quick Service


II. Levi on Reality Hunger:

This seems like a perfect demonstration of what Shields doesn't seem to get about fiction: he’s right about what would happen if you were to take the plot out of Hamlet—but he doesn’t realize that the result would be terrible. A Hamlet who riffs forever? Could anyone really want that?

Annals of facial hair, VII

'There must be a certain code in these matters. Either a man is Grover Whalen or he is not Grover Whalen. If he is not, he has no right to wear a moustache like that.'
—P.G. Wodehouse, Quick Service

Who?

Mystery solved!



(image from here)

When worlds collide, part 646

Grognardia and P.G. Wodehouse.

If I tweeted...

"He resembled a minor prophet who has been hit behind the ear with a stuffed eel-skin."
—Wodehouse, "Ukridge's Dog College"

"He seemed to shrink into his mackintosh like a snail surprised while eating lettuce."
—Ibid.

Festivus?

"Plum" also paid endless attention to detail. On display is a letter to the novelist Arnold Bennett, thanking him for his praise. "I can never see why printers should do their job so slackly," he writes. In Jeeves and the Yuletide Spirit, the story Bennett had admired, Bertie Wooster tells Jeeves that he has been invited somewhere for "the festive s" – it was a habit of Bertie's to substitute the initial letter for the whole word. The first edition rendered this as "festives". The American edition changed it to "festivities". The later Omnibus edition stuck in "Christmas" instead. It was not until 1999 that the Penguin edition fulfilled the author's intention. —Telelgraph

(Via Jenny)

A few of my favorite things

Ukulele + Wodehouse in one article!

At one point during my visit he pulled down a baritone ukulele from the rack of stringed instruments behind him and strummed it with abandon as he sang a forceful little ditty about pitching woo....

He admired Edgar Rice Burroughs’s tales of John Carter of Mars and, he said, “I waited at the mailbox every month with my tongue hanging out for the latest issue of Weird Tales,” the pulp magazine that featured seminal fantasy writers like Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, C. L. Moore and Clark Ashton Smith. Vance attended the University of California, Berkeley, but his practical education as a writer came from reading the pulps and other entertainments: L. Frank Baum’s Oz books, the mannered yarns of Jeffery Farnol, the light comedy of P. G. Wodehouse, his literary hero.

—Carlo Rotella, "The Genre Artist," NYT Magazine

Ghost world

'Do you believe in ghosts?' asked Mr Mulliner abruptly.

I weighed the question thoughtfully. I was a little surprised, for nothing in our previous conversation had suggested the topic.

'Well,' I replied, 'I don't like them, if that's what you mean. I was once butted by one as a child.'

'Ghosts. Not goats.'

'Oh, ghosts? Do I believe in ghosts?'

'Exactly.'

—P.G. Wodehouse, 'Honeysuckle Cottage'

Table-Talk of Parkus Grammaticus for February 17, 2009

I. Last week I taught Wodehouse's Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit, and now I see Wodehousean touches everywhere I turn....first in Cintra Wilson's column, then in Michael Lewis's great piece in the NYT Magazine, on the new basketball statistics....(I don't even like basketball! But this piece is amazing...)

I see two jokes in this paragraph. We see Wodehouse trademark #1, the unexpected simile, and #2, the unexpected exaggeration, fitted in seamlessly to complete an otherwise normal sequence.

[Kobe] Bryant is one of the great jawboners in the history of the N.B.A. A major-league baseball player once showed me a slow-motion replay of the Yankees’ third baseman Alex Rodriguez in the batter’s box. Glancing back to see where the catcher has set up is not strictly against baseball’s rules, but it violates the code. A hitter who does it is likely to find the next pitch aimed in the general direction of his eyes. A-Rod, the best hitter in baseball, mastered the art of glancing back by moving not his head, but his eyes, at just the right time. It was like watching a billionaire find some trivial and dubious deduction to take on his tax returns. Why bother? I thought, and then realized: this is the instinct that separates A-Rod from mere stars. Kobe Bryant has the same instinct. Tonight Bryant complained that Battier was grabbing his jersey, Battier was pushing when no one was looking, Battier was committing crimes against humanity.

This isn't really Wodehousean, but I like it:

Last July, as we sat in the library of the Detroit Country Day School, watching, or trying to watch, his March 2008 performance against Kobe Bryant, Battier was much happier instead talking about Obama, both of whose books he had read. (“The first was better than the second,” he said.) He said he hated watching himself play, then proved it by refusing to watch himself play. My every attempt to draw his attention to the action on the video monitor was met by some distraction.

Maybe things are less funny when I highlight them. (But then they become slightly funny again when I point this out.)

II. Gary Indiana—blogger!
(From Dzyd JMcB)

III. These poems are great.
(From Triple Canopy #2.)

IV.

Blackwater Worldwide is abandoning its tarnished brand name as it tries to shake a reputation battered by oft-criticised work in Iraq, renaming its family of two dozen businesses under the name Xe. The parent company's new name is pronounced like the letter z. —Guardian

(From Dzyd Kaela)

V. Happy birthday to my dad!

Crazy for you

There are some days when everyone I see is a lunatic.
—Renata Adler, Speedboat

It was amazing how often kind-looking people turned out to be crazy.
—Don DeLillo, Ratner's Star

I did a bit more wilting. It seemed to me that I was alone in a deserted smoking-room with a homicidal loony. It is a type of loony I particularly bar, and the homicidal loony I like least is one with a forty-four chest and biceps in proportion. —P.G. Wodehouse, Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit

Atmospheric disturbances

Levi listens to Wodehouse:

COOKE: Are you ever inclined to make a big jump into completely contemporary material?

WODEHOUSE: Well I'm not sure that I can manage it. This one's coming out next year, there's nothing to date it at all, it could all have happened yesterday.

COOKE: But, I mean, you're not moved by things like astronauts or urban renewal?

WODEHOUSE: [Laughing] Oh, no. No. No, I feel much happier with the sort of atmosphere I'm accustomed to.

Chin chin

Wodehouse: "Compared with Sir Roderick Glossop, Tuppy Glossop, old Pop Stoker, Mr Blumenfeld, and even Jeeves, Bertie is undoubtedly opisthognathous."

(TLS)

Atmospheric disturbances, ca. RIGHT NOW

Dizzies Newsfeeds for February 13

I. Molls reflects on A Hard Day's Night over at Hey Dullblog.

II. Time for self-reflection: I tend to use "over at" a lot, when I'm linking.

III. Heart-wrenching Pinakothek; Waughdehousiana from Levi.

IV. I'm a big Light Reader, but now I'm also reading Jenny's other blog—Triaspirational! It has stuff like this, which I don't understand:

2 x 50 free on 1:05

3 x 50 choice on 1:20

2 x 50 free on 1:00

3 x 50 choice on 1:20

2 x 50 choice on :55

50 easy swim

But also a delightful use of "Hmmm...":

One reason I know I'm fretting about half-marathon pace and times is that I am (pointlessly; procrastinatorily!) thinking ahead to my first marathon in November.

Like many runners, I obsess about arbitrary times that end with zeroes!

(Hmmm, should convert everything into someone's wayward eighteenth-century or science-fictional decimal time system and shake up those expectations...)

V. Also, there's a new New-York Ghost.

Wodwo Wodehouse do?

In 1967, Ted Hughes's third book, "Wodwo"—raw, spooky, elemental - sent me scurrying to find out the meaning of this strange Middle English word. The figure of "wodwo," which Hughes elsewhere characterized as a sort of "half-man, half-animal spirit of the forests," seemed to have loomed up out of the unconscious of English poetry. The book's epigraph came from a ferocious passage in "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," and soon I was parsing the somewhat resistant Middle English text and bounding through J. R. R. Tolkien's faithful translation. I was transfixed. I had stumbled upon the underground alliterative tradition of English poetry.
—Edward Hirsch on a new "Gawain" translation, International Herald Tribune

[T]he name Wodehouse...has a secondary, comic derivation, 'out of one's mind, insane, lunatic'. This sense appears punningly in A Midsummer Night's Dream and is echoed in the Old English term woodwose (or wude-wusa), for which the Oxford English Dictionary gives 'a wild man of the woods, a satyr, a faun'.
—Robert McCrum, Wodehouse

Weekend rubble

I. From the Parkives, a review of Adam Rapp's The Year of Endless Sorrows, from Bookforum:

The unnamed young protagonist—a fledgling fictioneer with an entry-level job at a Viking-like publisher—fits White’s description of “a boy arriving from the Corn Belt with a manuscript in his suitcase and a pain in his heart,” except that he keeps his slowly growing manuscript in the empty freezer of his East Village walkup, and his main wound is the gnarly result of a hoops injury. Limping becomes “a kind of personal theatre,” and he tells anyone who asks that his book-in-progress is about “acute knee pain and the end of the world.” It’s a heartbreaking work of staggering.

II. The return of Ten Words?

III. Fred Astaire as Keith Moon in the Wodehouse adaptation Damsel in Distress (via Mr. Cairns)

Winding down...

A few more from us—


Best novel ever?



A horror story:



...and one more from Idalia...