A Blog of Bosh » Marco

Carroll’s Headaches

Marco — Sun, 23 May 2004 03:10:08 +0000

Migraine aura symptoms gave rise to “Adventures in Wonderland”
Migraine aura may have been the inspiration for Lewis Carroll’s descriptions of ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,’ physicians suggest in a letter published in the April 17th issue of The Lancet.
Coining the term ‘Alice in Wonderland syndrome’ to refer to certain hallucinations specific to migraine, Lippman first suggested in the 1950s that Carroll may have used his own migraine experiences in writing ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ (1865) and the sequel ‘Through the Looking Glass’ (1871).
In recent years, however, this theory has been refuted because no mention of migraine could be found in the writer’s journals before he wrote the Alice stories. Now, Drs. Klaus Podoll of the University of Technology in Aachen, Germany, and Derek Robinson of Berkshire, UK, report previously overlooked clues to support the relationship.
Migraine News, April 1999

nonsenselit.org is online!

Marco — Thu, 13 May 2004 06:30:02 +0000

On 12 May 2004, Edward Lear’s birthday, I am at last releasing the new portal for Nonsense literature. The Lear pages do not contain anything new, updating and renewing them is my next project, but you should find lots of interesting material:

A new Peter Newell site containing, among many other things, the first republication of a long run of his comic strip: The Naps of Polly Sleepyhead;
A web edition of the tallest book ever:The Flight of the Old Woman who was Tossed up in a Basket, London, 1844;
A comic book in which Santa Claus meets Alice;

An all new Pictures section containing full scans of two different colour editions of the Book of Nonsense;
A Sounds section, which at the moment only contains a BBC Radio 4 programme about The Owl and the Pussy-cat;
A Reading Shelf with Nonsense short stories and essays;

Well, much more…

I’ve been working on this for a very long time, so be kind: visit and share your thoughts and suggestions!

Sukumar Ray

Marco — Mon, 03 May 2004 03:21:17 +0000

Literary nonsense of Sukumar Ray once again!
Dungaroo, Flipfloposaurus, Billy-Hawk Calf among other animals paid a peppy visit to a book store here and regaled book lovers!
They are, after all, characters from the nonsensical world created by legendary Bengali writer Sukumar Ray.
The occasion was the launch of ‘Abol Tabol: The Nonsense World of Sukumar Ray’ by Sampurna Chattarji, an English translation of the Bengali original, at the Oxford Bookstore here in association with Penguin Books India.
This was followed by a dramatic rendition from the book by Ravi Khote, a multiple-medium performance artiste.
This selection offers the best of Ray’s world — pun-riddled, fun-fiddled poetry from ‘Abol Tabol’ and ‘Khai-Khai’, stories of schoolboy pranks from ‘Pagla Dashu’ and madcap explorers ‘Heshoram Hushiyarer Diary’, and the unforgettable harum-scarum classic of ‘Haw-Jaw-Baw-Raw-Law’.
All the stories and poems are accompanied by Ray’s inimitable illustrations.
India News Channel | 29 April 2004

The Canon According to Harold Bloom

Marco — Sun, 04 Apr 2004 10:51:32 +0000

O Poetry! Let us celebrate month with anthologies of the bad, good
Bloom has assembled an anthology of representative poems by English and American writers. Seen in such a light, this is a fine compendium, particularly valuable for Bloom’s important and insightful introductions to the poets and comments on individual poems.
But many of those poems are far from “best.” Bloom’s tastes are catholic and so magnanimous that he includes work by such agreeable but minor poets (among the Americans) as Jones Very and Trumbull Stickney, Elinor Wylie and John Brooks Wheelwright. It’s a gathering, in part, of Bloom’s favorite forgotten poets, and his mantras in the book are “Now little regarded . . .” and “Now neglected . . .” He seems unable or unwilling to distinguish between “best” and “charming,” a category that would require a different book.
“Poe,” Bloom writes, “is a bad poet,” but since Poe “is also inescapable,” the anthologist “glumly” includes two poems, “Israfel” and “The City in the Sea.”
Bloom is fond of English odd balls like Thomas Love Beddoes and William Savage Landor - what, no George Crabbe?; of the sentimentalists of the flaming 1890s, a terrible decade for poetry, like Lionel Johnson and Ernest Dowson (”I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind”); and of the great purveyors of pungent nonsense Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, who, one admits, deserve a place in some pantheon.
commercialappeal.com | 4 April 2004

Martha Graham’s The Owl and the Pussy-cat

Marco — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0000

The Best of Modern Dance
Because [Martha] Graham saw dance as expressive rather than merely decorative, it freed generations of young dancers to explore a range of emotional and psychological themes that weren’t available in traditional ballet.
From April 14 to April 25 at City Center in Manhattan, the company will present twelve performances that include a spectacular assortment of classics and revivals with a live orchestra.
The company is scheduled to perform some of Graham’s most notable pieces such as the powerful all-female Sketches from Chronicle, the classic Errand Into the Maze and the jazz-inspired Maple Leaf Rag. The season includes revivals of Cave of the Heart and the erotic Circe, along with the Owl and the Pussycat, with the Edward Lear text narrated by Andr頌eon Talley, Vogue’s editor-at-large.
The Hudson Reporter | 4 April 2004

A Book on Children’s Literature

Marco — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0000

The kid in me is still alive
“Youth is such a wonderful thing; it’s a shame to waste it on the young!” This aphorism by George Bernard Shaw brilliantly exposes the ludicrous side of the romantic idealization of children, so characteristic of the 19th century.
For generations, religious leaders, educators and parents in the Western world had viewed childhood as an inferior, defective, irrational and sin-filled stage of human development. Then, this period of life underwent a cultural rehabilitation. From the late 18th century on, and especially in the 19th century, childhood was raised to the level of an ideal, representing moral purity, innocence, honesty and creativity. Childhood became the symbol of everything good in humanity, or for what humans could become if they were not spoiled by corrupt and hypocritical adult society.
…
Edward Lear, the eminent nonsense poet, was diagnosed by psychologists as someone who had ‘never emotionally recovered’ from his family’s adventures. ‘Perhaps because his childhood was cut short so suddenly and cruelly, he refused to grow up and remained, inside, an eternal child.’ Is the ‘eternal child’ inside the real, pure self the pinnacle of the realization of the artist’s unique personality, or is it no more than a construct, a projection, a regressive fantasy that charges the act of artistic fiction?
[A review by Galia Benziman of "Big Children: Beloved Children's Authors - Their Lives and Work." Three volumes: "The English" (228 pages); "The Americans" (262 pages) and "Especially the Europeans" (272 pages) by Yehuda Atlas, Yedioth Ahronoth Publishing, Sifrei Hemed, 2003.]
Haaretz - Israel News | 26 March 2004

The Descent of Dr. Seuss

Marco — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0000

No Place for Absurdity
By Eric Gibson
J.K. Rowling famously negotiated ironclad agreements with Warner Bros. to make sure that her Harry Potter books made it to the screen in the right way. (What you saw was what you read.) The stewards of Beatrix Potter have kept a watchful eye, too, permitting animated versions of her stories that hew to the letter and spirit of her work.
The legacies of A.A. Milne and Rudyard Kipling have not been so lucky, however. Their literary greatness is unrecognizable in Disney’s adaptations of “Winnie the Pooh” and “The Jungle Book.” More grotesquely, Dr. Seuss, in movie form, has suffered the same fate. Hollywood cashed in as Carrey and Myers mugged and romped, earning each film about $250 million. (With its recent video release, “Cat” is set to earn more.) But such success has nearly wrecked the brand.
As a writer, Geisel was the heir of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear. To be sure, embedded in his stories are messages and morals ranging right across the political spectrum. But at root he was an absurdist, a writer who, like his illustrious predecessors, took a childlike delight in upending the ordered universe with puns and playful fantasy and the incongruous juxtapositions of ideas — the “humming fish” of “The Lorax,” for example, or the antlered creature, the Gack, of “One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish” (”At our house/We play out back./We play a game/Called Ring the Gack.”).
Mercury News | 21 March 2004

Dr. Seuss and the British

Marco — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0000

The lord of misrule
By Nicola Shulman
The British response to Dr Seuss has not, so far, been suitable reading for Ms Dimond-Cates. It may be that we have an embarrassment of excellent children’s writers of our own, whom we may take seriously instead, if we are so inclined; or it may be another aspect of our defensive hostility to a younger, ascendant culture. At any rate, the reviewer for Junior Bookshelf in 1963 thought Dr Seuss ‘often tiresome and sometimes vulgar… Compared with Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll he seems madly common, slick, unmemorable.’
[...]
Critics prospecting for artistic antecedents have, naturally, cited the impossible perspectives of Escher and the melting hardware of the surrealist movement. It is certainly true that the nearest things in creation to Dr Seuss’s krazy-golf Whoville are the concrete sculptures put up in the Mexican jungle by the Englishman Edward James, much under the influence of surrealism himself. But if I had to ascribe Seuss’s work to a school - pseud’s corner notwithstanding - I should choose one from literature, not painting: nonsense. Seuss may be the first nonsense painter.
Telegraph | 18 March 2004

The Limerick’s Origins

Marco — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0000

There once was a wee humble ditty
By Shannon Roe
Today being St. Patrick’s Day, the least we can do is doff our derbies to that bit of Irish doggerel called the limerick.
From its name, you might think this five-line verse form originated in the town of Limerick, Ireland. But not necessarily. No one knows for sure where it came from - or exactly when, for that matter. But given the wee verse’s naughty reputation, it seems only fitting that its ancestry be mysterious.
Christian Science Monitor | 17 March 2004

Seussmania still Raging!

Marco — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0000

Hundreds attend ‘Seussentenial’ parties
The man who made the Grinch, Sam-I-Am and Bar-ba-loots household names was the inspiration for several local parties last week.
To celebrate the birthday of Theodor Seuss Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, hundreds of Rolling Meadows residents attended separate parties March 2 and Saturday. A similar party in Palatine drew more than 100 people, and several District 15 schools in Palatine and Rolling Meadows also held their own parties last week.
[Just one of the many similar articles]
Palatine News | 11 March 2004