A Blog of Bosh

No. 1
“It seems to me it orter work,”
Said Farmer Hiram Beggs,
“By feeding Hens on Easter dyes
To deckerate their eggs.”
No. 2
And sure enough for several days
The eggs were many-hued
With stranger markings on the shells
Than Beggs had ever viewed.
No. 3
He peddled them about the town
And found a brisk demand.
He sold a dozen lovely ones
To Mrs. Cyrus Bland.
No. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

I have added an article on Gustave Verbeek’s monotypes, to which he devoted his efforts after abandoning comics in the 1910s: Hawthorne, Hildegarde. “A New Achievement in an Old Medium: Gustave Verbeek’s Monotypes.” The Century Magazine 92.2, June 1916, 96-102.

There are a lot of UPA cartoons on YouTube; I had never seen Christopher Crumpet (1953), another story drawn in a pseudo-simple style reminiscent of Edward Lear with a largely nonsensical tale by T. Hee and Robert Cannon. The cartoon also reminds me of the earliest animation sequences, which very often started with a hand [...]

James Thurber’s drawings, once extremely popular, place him firmly in the tradition of Edward Lear’s apparently childish illustration, while his stories tend to be mildly satiric or parodistic.
One of the most famous of these, The Unicorn in the Garden, was adapted for one of UPA’s most acclaimed cartoons. After watching the short, don’t miss Michael [...]

Yesterday’s Speed Bump cartoon, by Dave Coverly, had Edward Lear’s Owl and Pussy-Cat as protagonists:

One of the questions which are often asked about Nonsense is, Why did it disappear almost completely from literature after the great season of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll? As M.B. Heyman writes in his thesis (Isles of Boshen: Edward Lear’s literary nonsense in context, University of Glasgow, Faculty of Arts, Department of English Literature, [...]

Helen Stilwell’s Laughable Looloos 1906 series is now available in full colour at Nonsense in the Early Comics.

The architect, John Prentiss Benson (1865-1947), had always dreamed of becoming an artist like his older brother Frank. In 1905 he lived in Flushing NY with his wife and four children and worked at his architecture firm of Benson and Brockway. He kept a studio in his home where he dabbled with paints, brushes, and [...]