neil693

Problèmes d’actualité ( 3 )     It’s un­can­ny how well some of the po­li­ti­cal car­toons from nine­teenth-cen­tury France trans­fer over to us to­day. La Ca­ri­ca­ture was pub­lish­ed as a week­ly, about eight pages per is­sue, in­clu­ding a cou­ple of il­lus­tra­ted plates. One sec­tion of the text gave ex­pla­na­tion and com­ment for the fea­tur­ed il­lus­tra­tions.

No. 91 (2 August 1832) had an­other mo­nar­chist-din­dons piece (done by Phi­li­pon and Ber­nard-Romain Julien) that is just as easi­ly about Trump­ist-din­dons.

Manière simple et facile de prendre et d’apprivoiser les dindons     Qui ne va re­con­naître ici quel­que zèlé, quel­que chaud, quel­qu’en­ragé mo­déré de sa con­nais­sance ? Pour moi, j’y vois une bon­ne par­tie des of­fi­ciers de ma com­pagnie, j’y vois quel­ques hon­nêtes sol­dats ci­toy­ens. Voici tel art­iste qui a lais­sé dans la din­don­nière son in­dé­pen­dance et son franc par­ler ; voici tel autre qui rôde au­tour du pot et qui ne veut pas se com­pro­met­tre par une ca­ri­ca­ture ; il ne tar­dera pas d’en­trer . . . . Abon­né, cherche là de­dans, tu y ver­ras ton voi­sin, ton chef de bu­reau, ton ami, peut-être ton par­ent, peut-être toi-même, qui sait ? . . . . (725)

Sim­ple and easy me­thod for catch­ing and tam­ing tur­keys     Who will not re­cog­nize here some zealot, some hot­head, some bor­der­line lu­na­tic that he knows? As for me, I see in it a good part of the of­fi­cers of my com­pany, I see in it some honest ci­ti­zen-sol­diers. Over here is an art­ist who, amidst the gob­ble­dy­gook, took leave of his in­de­pen­dence and his forth­right­ness; over here, an­other one who can’t give a straight answer and yet doesn’t want to be pigeon­holed—he’ll walk into the trap soon enough . . . . Look to it, read­er, you will see your neigh­bor, your boss, your friend, may­be a re­la­tive of yours, and—who knows?—may­be your­self . . .

Paris Musées des­cribes the piece nice­ly:

À l’in­té­rieur d’un piège sous forme de boîte, une croix de la lé­gion d’hon­neur at­tire des din­dons, les­quels por­tent cer­tains at­tri­buts de mi­li­taires et de ma­gis­trats. Au fond, on de­vine la foule des din­dons in­té­res­sés par cet­te dé­co­ra­tion. À gauche, un din­don pi­core dans une as­siette rem­plie de pièces d’or. Les din­dons sont les ci­to­yens fran­çais, de tous bords, que la mo­nar­chie ral­lie à son camp en leur fai­sant mi­roi­ter des dé­co­ra­tions et de l’ar­gent. Un din­don, au pre­mier plan, est abon­dam­ment dé­coré, mais en con­tre­partie, ses pat­tes sont en­chaînées et son bec est mu­se­lé. La planche met en garde tous les ci­to­yens fran­çais, dont le péché d’or­gueil pour­rait les as­si­mi­ler à ces din­dons. Nul n’est à l’abri de cé­der à la va­ni­té . . . La planche in­vite donc à la vi­gi­lance et à gar­der son sens cri­tique et ses opi­nions prop­res.

In­side a box trap, a cross of the Leg­ion of Honor is bait for a crowd of tur­keys in the rear, some of which are wear­ing mi­li­tary and ju­di­cial at­tire. On the left, a tur­key pecks at a plate fil­led with gold coins. The tur­keys are the French ci­ti­zens from every side whom the mo­nar­chy ral­lies to its camp with en­tice­ments of awards and mo­ney. One tur­key in the fore­ground has been abun­dant­ly de­co­ra­ted, but its feet are ac­cord­ing­ly chained and its beak muz­zled. The il­lus­tra­tion is a warn­ing to all French ci­ti­zens that the sin of pride could turn them into these tur­keys. No one is se­cure from suc­cumb­ing to va­ni­ty . . . there­fore it calls for vi­gi­lance and for safe­guard­ing one’s cri­ti­cal sense and one’s own opi­nions.

Again—sounds fa­mi­liar, huh? 🙂

(layout works best in the Word­press theme I chose  •  images and text will re­flow/re­size, to some ex­tent, as you ad­just the width of the brow­ser win­dow  •  the Word­press Read­er is too sim­ple­mind­ed for that to work)

Goreyana     I was thinking a lot about another favorite illustrator when the news of Sempé’s passing arrived. Me dear weaders know that I’m a big fan of Edward Gorey, and a few of them belong to that club themselves. In case anyone needs an introduction, here’s a brief bio (from Steven Heller’s anthology Man Bites Man) and another one from Le Monde (in a review of recent French translations of The Hapless Child and The Raging Tide).

Gorey has become quite a franchise, and there are a number of books and websites about him by now. His work contains a lot of subtle details and recurring motifs, and commentators still don’t always fully pick up on them, even with such well-known things as the way he plays with rearrangements of his name. In The Evil Garden, for example, Mrs. Regera Dowdy (a straight­forward anagram) is one of Gorey’s more famous alter egos; among other things, she’s the translator of a late nineteenth/early twentieth century German writer called Eduard Blutig, who collaborated with an artist named O. Müde. They of course are also alter egos of Gorey’s, but their names are more sly: “blutig” is German for “bloody”, thus “Eduard Blutig” = “Eduard gory”/Edward Gorey; and “müde” means “tired”, so “O. Müde” = “O. weary”, which in turn is a reference to another direct anagram that Gorey uses elsewhere, “Ogdred Weary”. Those two are cryptograms for Gorey, once- and twice-removed, respectively. 🙂

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In the 1970s Gorey was a contributor to National Lampoon magazine. His holiday cover for the December 1971 issue is a good example of the macabre black humor for which he’s known. 😉

A HEART-WARMING CHRISTMAS     1. drunken father 2. empty gin bottle 3. rabid rat 4. beaten mother 5. unpawnable object 6. remains of her wedding dress 7. frozen robin 8. motto worked in human hair 9. dying child 10. caseless pillow 11. World Without End quilt 12. Christmas tree 13. string, bones, and ticket stubs from the gutter 14. Sir Giles Crockby, the Pilchard King 15. Russian sable pelisse 16. bespoke spats 17. his Thibetan chauffeur 18. basket of glazed tropical fruits 19. the Works of Goethe bound in blue Levant morocco 20. terrine of pâté de foie gras with truffles 21. antique automaton that sings ‘Dal dolor cotanto oppresso’ from La Clemenza di Scipione 22. box of absinthe-filled chocolates

It’s been remarked how that side of Gorey’s oeuvre—including (most famously) The Gashlycrumb Tinies, The Hapless Child, and other contes cruels that remind you, in their pitilessness, of Guy de Maupassant or maybe of Roald Dahl—was a formative influence on the likes of Tim Burton and Lemony Snicket.

This tableau and its key certainly makes a one-picture story of that kind all by itself, but for the attentive Goreyphile there’s a bit more . . . the sardine-selling industrialist here appears to be none other than the Magnate from what might be Gorey’s darkest abecedarium, The Fatal Lozenge.

A Zola-esque sce­na­rio (tinged with absurdity) suggests itself: now we know where the enor­mous limousine is headed—to pay a visit to the Drudge and her husband (the Invalid?), two of the residents of his factory town.

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Maybe the most in­­ter­­est­­ing National Lampoon piece is the one cal­led “The Happy Ending” (March 1973). The title alone is a bit of a de­part­ure from Gorey’s usual mode. 🙂 And indeed, it consists of ten spot illustrations, each accompanied by a bit of text, each supposedly the final scene of an uplifting tale: the happy ending to an untold story that we’re invited to ponder.

It might be an uncharacteristically sweet and silly piece, but that’s not entirely foreign to Edward Gorey (there’s The Bug Book, for example) and, like a lot of Goreyana, its conceit is more sophisticated than it might look at first—surreal, even. (I think that’s what the un­us­u­al ti­tle il­lus­tra­tion sig­ni­fies: char­ac­ters and an end­ing, with­ no story.)

What is remarkable, given that Gorey is usually so otherworldly, is that two of the happy endings are overtly gay. As Mark Dery writes in Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey,

Al­though TV would la­ter in­i­ti­ate him into the de­lights of dis­po­sa­ble cul­ture, Gorey was re­so­lute­ly a crea­ture of high cul­ture in his New York years, steep­ed in Ba­lan­chine’s bal­lets, si­lent mo­vies, nine­teenth-cen­tury novels, and his own Vic­tor­ian–Ed­ward­ian, go­thic–sur­real­ist fan­ta­sies. He mov­ed, wraith­like, through the ’70s as he had the ’60s, seem­ing­ly un­touch­ed by the so­cial tur­bu­lence and cul­tur­al fris­son of the times.

Not to mention, this one comes well before there was any serious talk about same-sex civil unions and marriages:

Dery misses the mark when he explains the punch line of the other one, though:

a ‘bas­ket,’ in the gay slang of the day, was a man’s ge­ni­ta­lia, clear­ly out­lin­ed in tight-fit­ting pants. The well-en­dow­ed young hust­ler may have been the pride of North Da­ko­ta, Gorey sug­gests, but he’s got plen­ty of com­pe­ti­tion in the Big Ap­ple. Errr . . . not exactly. The point isn’t that our boy doesn’t (ne­ces­sa­ri­ly) have la plus grosse bite in New York City—it’s that he’s no long­er stuck in the arid, un­con­ge­ni­al hin­ter­lands of North Da­kota.

Af­ter two days on the road, it’s fi­nal­ly bright lights, big city: this might be the hap­py end­ing to a story call­ed “The Hap­py Hust­ler”. 🙂

Then there are these two:

I like to think of the first one as the con­clu­sion to an­other mini-story in The Fatal Lozenge, that of the Wan­ton. Is “Dud­ley” the stran­ger she en­tices, who turns out to be a be­ne­fac­tor and guard­ian an­gel?

The re­sem­blance be­tween the wo­men is not as clear as that be­tween the Mag­nate and Sir Giles Crock­by, the Pil­chard King, but it’s close enough to be plau­si­ble. That would make two sto­ries in the bunch with a “street­walk­er suc­ceeds” theme.

The other one could be the end of a fractured version of “The Monkey’s Paw”, or of an M.R. James–style an­tiq­uar­ian ghost story leavened with a dose of fri­vo­li­ty. “Bwadible Ong”, really! 🙂

All in all, though, the happy ending that I like best is this self-contained little gem:

the Robinia of square René Viviani and its supporting crutch

avenue of pollarded Platanus trees, with the characteristic smooth mottled bark

Dépêches de France ( 1 )     The New York Times recent­ly ran a piece on one of the less ob­vious at­trac­tions of Paris: the grand old trees. With the dis­turb­ing weather con­di­tions every­where (and of which Michel just wrote) of­fer­ing grow­ing cause for alarm, it’s well worth bear­ing these treas­ures in mind as a source of hope and in­spi­ra­tion.

Admiring the trees of Paris
(NYT, 9 Aug 2022)

We Ameri­cans have no­thing in our built en­vi­ron­ment—in­clu­ding the land­scap­ed grounds—that’s even a hand­ful of cen­tu­ries old, so cul­ti­vat­ed trees of such ve­ne­ra­ble sta­ture ought to be an es­pe­cial­ly va­lu­able re­mind­er, for us, of what is at stake.

I can’t re­mem­ber what tip­ped me off to them, but those in the know seek out the al­lées of plane trees in France, and I would love to see them one day (a nice de­scrip­tion here, in­clud­ing what seem to be some pol­lard­ed spe­ci­mens). Plane trees are a hybrid/relative of our Amer­i­can sy­ca­more, which un­like Euro­pean sy­ca­mores isn’t a maple, but a Pla­ta­nus spp.

The ar­ti­cle also men­tions an an­cient old black lo­cust de­scen­ded from some one among those in these here parts. It and an off­spring—in the square René Vi­vi­ani and the Jar­din des plantes, re­spec­tive­ly—were plant­ed by one of the roy­al gar­den­ers and his son, and are sup­posed­ly the old­est and se­cond-old­est trees in the City of Light: cf. F.J. Peabody, “A 350-year-old Amer­i­can leg­ume in Paris”, Castanea 47, no. 1 (Mar 1982), pp. 99–104; less pe­dan­ti­cal­ly, it makes you think of J.R.R. Tol­kien’s Lord of the Rings and the White Tree of Gon­dor, in Mi­nas Ti­rith. 🙂 This spe­cies is vi­go­rous to the point of being in­va­sive, but the blos­soms are ap­pa­rent­ly good eat­ing—sort of like the fuki/but­ter­bur, but safer to con­sume and bet­ter for the ground, I sup­pose.

Sy­ca­mores and lo­custs are all over the place here and I’ve been no­ti­cing them a lot as I’ve watch­ed trees get worse and worse, and even­tual­ly come down, through the dry years that we’ve been hav­ing. The in­sti­tu­tions and pro­per­ty owners can’t, or won’t, ir­ri­gate and tend them, for one rea­son or an­other. 😦

Dépêches de France ( 2 )     It has been in the news the last few days, in the New York Times and else­where: the il­lus­tra­tor Jean-Jacques Sempé has died. Per­haps it’s fit­ting to point to Le Monde’s notice:

Cartoonist Jean-Jacques Sempé, who could make the world giggle, has died
(Le Monde, 12 Aug 2022)

I guess he was best known in France and else­where as the il­lus­tra­tor of the “Pe­tit Ni­co­las” series of child­rens’ books, but he won the ac­claim and the hearts of fol­low­ers all over for gen­tle, whim­si­cal draw­ings that ap­pear­ed in many places; for us here in the States, his style is fa­mous­ly fa­mi­liar as be­ing fit to grace the cov­ers of The New York­er . . . I would put him in the same ca­te­gory as folks like R.O. Blech­man and Ar­nold Roth, and maybe Tul­lio Per­i­co­li or Ralph Stead­man too (but he’s never sar­do­nic, as I think Per­i­co­li can some­times be, or edgy, like Stead­man): all “car­toon­ists” whose work rises to the le­vel of art, in no small part be­cause they’re also story­tel­lers at heart.

I trea­sure my copies of Sempé’s Mon­sieur Lam­bert (Phaidon), a “graph­ic novel” (as we now say) fea­tur­ing the de­ni­zens of a busy Paris­ian bis­tro, “Chez Picard”, and of Pa­trick Süs­kind’s Mr. Sum­mer’s Story (Knopf), a bit­ter­sweet nar­rative of child­hood days that also bears witness to a doom­ed man’s plight, for which Sempé pro­vi­ded the art­work. The art­work for the jack­et and front mat­ter of Lam­bert is like a ci­ne­ma­tic story­board for the open­ing of the en­su­ing tale—and the (very good) Dutch ani­ma­tor Jorn Leeu­we­rink has en­li­ven­ed one of the il­lus­tra­tions for the Süs­kind.

Many apologies to me dear weaders for bein’ out of the loop. Unfortunately life has been a friggin’ disastrous mess for quite a long time, which tends to get in the way. Hopefully things will improve—they have to—BUT I’ve been saying that for a while, and it is still very difficult to see it happening.

Now, if only the external world were not a disaster, too. But it is. I of course mean, among other things, recent events here in the U.S. I’m not quite sure why I’m so fatalistic about the election. After all, in other places that have parliamentary-style governments, laughingstocks can and do rise to power if the polls break the right way (or, as the case may be, the wrong way)—and Italy, or wherever, is still around in spite of Berlusconi, or whoever. I guess we’re just not used to that here. Oddly enough! We Yanks are supposed to be the unsophisticated ones, but in a lot of ways we hold our own against the Old World.

I wonder a lot about our other Xanga (turned WordPress) friends these days and our collectively cosmopolitan environs. Lately I’ve been thinking that, if life ever breaks the right way, chances have increased that I might eventually expatriate. But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I …

It’s sooo long ago now that I started to look at this fellow’s scholarship. Since then interest in him has increased. Here’s an interesting recent article about him and his milieu. It fits into an apparent trend in writing the history of science these days, of trying to capture the atmosphere and spirit of the times, which (depending on how it’s done) could be more or less of a pseudo-scholarly gimmick, but does make for lively reading. This article is in turn based on an autobiographical piece that the guy wrote, which is among the material I’m examining. It’s naughty of me to do this, but here’s a draft of my notes. It’ll go *poof!* in a while, but before then maybe me dear francophone weaders can check me Fwench. 🙂

I’ve also finally gotten around to assembling a combined version of three of my fave language-instruction texts, namely the “Made Simple” books on French, Spanish, and Italian originally published by Doubleday. It really does pay to learn several related languages at once, but the problem with that strategy is that in order to be effective, it takes special resources—like parallel texts for study—that are either hard to find or nonexistent. But these fit the bill, because they were developed by the same person and designed around the same story (“businessman goes abroad”). Here’s (naughty naughty!) what it looks like so far.

*Sighs.* Our old friend Banyuls/Gilbert would have been proud. And would have had much to opine upon, in these turbulent times. Alas, that’s a cherished memory now. On the other hand, our compatriots in the UK, and Ostend, and Lausanne, and Amiens, and the Bay area, and Medellín, are surely still around, and we wonder about their circumstances. Now more than ever, I suppose, is the time to draw sustenance from one another. I will be looking out for their news!

Poem		[03 February 2013] An unpublished poem by Carl Sandburg, recently discovered in the Sandburg archive at the University of Illinois. Talk about currency.

Da pope

[18 February 2013] My my … the first papal resignation in six centuries. Definitely an occasion to raid the cartoon files! This was my reaction, too: As usual, only more so, it’s fun to wonder who’s going to be “it” … Vatican-watching is kind of like Supreme Court–watching—always a wonky, amusing, and topical pastime. I guess I’d place my bets on one of the Italians already there, or maybe that Ouellet guy if they really want to try to be “bold.” Somehow I doubt they’ll go much farther south or west than that. In any case, it’s not likely the universal church catches up with the times, at least on some things, anyway … (I love that young priest. Danziger’s cartoons have an edge to them, but little touches like that show he’s not really all that mean—not the way you might think at first, anyway.) But hey, nil nisi bene dicendum, we don’t have to wait for the guy to be dead first. Granted, the Catholic Church preaches and does a lot of things that aren’t very good for the world, but Benedict wasn’t worse than everyone around him, and unlike JP II and his allies in the curia (e.g.,  Sodano) he did pay serious attention to the child-abuse issue when he was in charge of that department and was overruled by them. His specific problem was that he was an awful top administrator—but professor types usually are, plus the Vatican sounds like your absolute worst nightmare of politics and infighting and scheming. And of course there’s his tin ear, which is not a good thing for a public-facing figure in any outfit. But I have to say I was kind of fond of this nerdy, intellectual pope, in a way that I wasn’t of JP II. Not that JP II wasn’t a reputable scholar, too—actually, he had a really good academic pedigree, a doctorate in philosophy under one of the founders of one of the main branches of phenomenology, I think—but he was a showboat, which is distinctly anti-nerdy. Benedict was more cerebral. I remember before his election someone described him as the only person he knew who would, in any one of a handful of languages, think for a minute when asked a question, and then answer in whole paragraphs. It’s remarkably hard to find cartoons about Benedict that don’t go overboard, depicting him as a demon or a Nazi or … I’m kind of surprised there aren’t drawings of him as the evil emperor Palpatine from Star Wars—it would be an easy visual pun. But this one kind of sums him up the best, I think:

Laramie, redux   [19 February 2013] I can’t believe it’s been so long since Matthew Shepard’s death. Evidently the theater company that put together The Laramie Project has also done a sequel, and now the two form “The Laramie Project Cycle.”

When The Laramie Project was new, our little circle here hung out at a certain other virtual watering hole—and society could still be moved by an event like Laramie to focus itself to make something like a play out of it. Today—“It Gets Better,” Tyler Clementi, and everything else notwithstanding—you sort of wonder if anything could be that singular anymore, exactly because so much reaches us so quickly, and it all competes for our finite fund of attention and love.

Memento mori     [22 February 2013] Edward Gorey’s birthday is the subject of today’s Google homepage picture. Very cool—it’s about time.

Fittingly enough, the other day a Goreyesque children’s book was mentioned in the New York Times. It’s a German story called Ente, Tod, und Tulpe (or “Duck, Death, and Tulip”) and was made into an animated film that has won some acclaim. The Times writer calls it “a gentler version of Ingmar Bergman’s Seventh Seal.” The synopsis on Wikipedia (with images cribbed from the Internets):

The story involves a duck who acquaints [sic] a character called Death who, as it turns out, has been following her all her life.

The two become friends, discussing life, death, and what any afterlife might be like. They go diving together

and sit in a tree, pondering what would happen to the duck’s lake [sic] after her death. The duck reports that some ducks say that they become angels and sit on clouds, looking down on earth. Death says that this is possible since ducks already have wings. Then, she says that some ducks also say that there is a hell, down below, where bad ducks are roasted; Death replies that it’s remarkable what ducks all think of, and says “Who knows,” prompting the duck to respond, “So you don’t know either.”

In the end, the duck indeed dies, and Death carries her to a river, placing the duck gently in the water and laying the tulip on her:

“For a long time he watched her. When she was lost to sight, he was almost a little moved.”

[23 Feb 2013] A few more pics cribbed from the Internets. It’s kind of a neat-looking story.

Below, when they first meet. Putting together bits and pieces from the reviews and blurbs, it continues with Death replying, “Well, in case something happens to you. A bad cold, an accident—you never know,” and when Duck asks if he’s going to make something happen, he says, “No, life takes care of that.” Kind of like @pukemeister described.

And, as best I can make it out, the German on the spread below reads

verso:  Death smiled at her kindly. Actually he was nice, if you disregarded who he was—quite nice, in fact.

recto:  “Shall we go to the pond?” she asked. Death had been afraid of that.

[16 May 2013] Und, some clips from the animated film, also cribbed from the Internets. The first is the very beginning of the story (“For a while, Duck had had a feeling…”), the second is when Duck tells Death about how ducks say there is an afterlife in heaven and hell, and in the third, Duck says to Death, near the end, “I’m cold … will you warm me a little?” (As usual, most of it goes by too fast for me to follow except the parts that I already know from seeing the text.) Hearing their voices kind of brings it down a little. I liked it better when I just had to imagine them.   [18 May 2013] It looks like the whole thing is on the YouTubes, done up with Spanish subtitles. I guess the film doesn’t quite have everything in the book, like when they go diving and then Duck warms Death.

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