A Blog of Bosh

In July 2000 Charles Lewsen gave a performance at the Redgrave Theatre in Bristol of the solo theatre piece, How Pleasant to Know Mr. Lear, first given in 1968 at Hampstead Theatre and the Edinburgh Festival, and subsequently at venues throughout Britain, and festivals in Tel Aviv and Charleston, South Carolina. One such performance also [...]

You may remember that a few months ago I posted on a projected TV series on Edward Lear’s journey through Albania in 1848. A promo of the documentary is now available on YouTube.

A.E. Stalling has a very interesting post on Edward Lear on her blog at Poetry Foundation. After a short general introduction, she states that
The Akond of Swat, [...] with its strict adherence to the form and “exotic” eastern locale, [... is] a ghazal, and consciously so.
The idea, as far as I know, was first advanced [...]

A few more interesting posts from the incredibly lively world of animation blogs:
Michael Sporn has four new nonsense-related articles:

Fantasia Program 1 & 2: a souvenir booklet sold with the initial roadshow presentation of Fantasia.
Alices: on the clash on Alice animations between Disney and Lou Bunin.
Belloc’s Bestiary.
Steig’s Bdsplr: on William Steig’s children books.

Mark Meyerson has [...]

Two new early essays on Edward Lear are available at the nonsenselit.org’s library:
Holbrook Jackson, “Masters of Nonsense.” All Manner of Folks: Interpretations and Studies. London: Grant Richards Ltd., 1912; pp. 30-44.
Hildegarde Hawthorne, “Edward Lear.” St. Nicholas: A Monthly Magazine for Boys and Girls, Volume XLIV, part I, November 1916 - April 1917; pp. [...]

Here is a poem, made of three limericks, by Louise Ayres Garnett and illustrated by Peter Newell. I’m taking it from an eBay auction, the description dates it to 1922 but does not say where it is taken from:

Four quadrupeds danced a quadrille
On the summit of Somebody’s hill,
And a lily-white queen
Looked on at the scene
And [...]

A controversy seems to have been raised by the Ofsted report on poetry in schools, which maintains that British pupils are not prepared to appreciate classic poetry because of a focus on a few poems, which are considered not “genuinely challenging.”
When it comes to citing these supposedly unstimulating poems, newspapers, in particular the Times that [...]

Animation is one of the liveliest subjects on the Internet at the moment; among the mass of interesting posts, Michael Sporn’s two new articles (1 & 2) on the representations of the blank map in Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark are not to be missed.

Of great interest to nonsense-lovers should also be the [...]

Part of Stanley’s first Long Vacation (1835) was spent in a visit to Dublin, where he joined his father at a meeting of the British Association. Though unable, as he confesses, ‘to enter into the scientific business from my ignorance of the subject,’ he was keenly interested in seeing the eminent men who were assembled [...]

A new article is available on the nonsenselit.org bookshelf: Carolyn Wells, “Limericks.” Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly, vol. 55, no. 5, March 1903, pp. 532-5.
It mostly consists of limericks by authors well-know at the turn of the twentieth century. Worth of a mention is the above carp, drawn by Oliver Herford for a limerick by [...]