A Blog of Bosh

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Start with rhymes
By DAphne LeeAside from being easy on the ear, rhyming stories are also easy on the tongue although anyone who has grappled with Dr Seuss or Edward Lear’s deliciously madcap nonsense may beg to differ. My husband and I are forever arguing about the correct pronunciation of Lear’s Quangle Wangle Quee, but, as [...]

Charles Causley
Charles Causley, who died on Tuesday aged 86, was among the most important British poets of his generation.Causley came to Westminster Abbey - once - for a ceremony, with appropriate music and readings, to unveil a stone to Edward Lear. ‘That was very nice,’ he remarked. ‘If church were always like that, I might [...]

The Medieval Bestiary
Here begins the book of the nature of beasts.Of lions and panthers and tigers,wolves and foxes, dogs and apes.~ Aberdeen Bestiary
I seldom recommend whole sites in this page, but this one deserves a careful exploration. You will find detailed descriptions of several manuscripts, a list of the beasts (many fantastic but all with [...]

Inbal Pinto
Inbal Pinto’s latest show, Boobies, creates a world in which characters from Edward Lear and Mervyn Peake might happily meet. On a beach sown with blue seagrass, a dropsy-bellied patriarch wages war against a sinister emerald-bearded merman. A giant warrior queen drops fledgling soldier chicks from beneath her crinoline skirt. A chorus of blue-feathered [...]

Rose-Red City Carved From the Rock
In 1812 a Swiss-born, Cambridge-educated linguist named Johann Ludwig Burckhardt passed through the city en route from Syria to Egypt. He spent an uneasy three days there, unwelcomed as an outsider by the inhabitants, and published an account of it in his book, ‘Travels in Syria and the Holy Land.’The [...]

Spike’s sad sharp edgeThose who grew up on The Goon Show will see him as later generations saw Monty Python - as the one who made sense by failing to do so, the great anarch who gave form to a sense of all-encompassing absurdity. In fact, it makes more sense to see him as a [...]

Nailing Spike [Milligan]
The combination of Spike, Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe and Michael Bentine, with help from deep-dish subversives emerging from their cocoons in the BBC, created an explosion of verbal anarchy that nevertheless flowed from a tradition, combining music hall with Lewis Carroll and the nonsense prose and poetry of Edward Lear. Carpenter does not [...]