PARVUM OPUS
Number 213
______________________________________________
Bob
Weaver was one of those who left and then returned. He started this newspaper
with paper and ink, but it became so popular that it became too expensive to
print, so he went to the Web. The Hur Herald sprang from classic
newspaper motives: there was only one other paper in the county, which didn't
cover everybody's point of view or even everybody's news, so Bob stepped in.
Good work, Bob, and thanks.
I
had to buy a Perelman anthology (The
Most of S. J. Perelman) just so I could find the floy floy story again.
The plot of "Swing Out, Sweet Chariot" (written sometime in the
1940s) wasn't exactly as I had remembered it, but pretty close, and my favorite
line is still: "The little lady loves Cal for his floy floy alone."
Perelman served up some other contemporary slang from The Jitterbug
bimonthly paper, which included a glossary: an alligator was a hepcat or
jitterbug dancer; Scobo queen was a girl jitterbug; frisking the
whiskers = warming up; zeal girl = hot dancer; a wheat bender
played sweet music instead of swing. Now I know that "See you later,
alligator" didn't spring out of rock and roll.
Another
great humor writer, Dorothy Parker, said this about humor writing in her
foreword to the anthology:
There must be courage; there
must be no awe. There must be criticism.... There must be a disciplined eye and
a wild mind. There must be a magnificent disregard of your reader, for if he
cannot follow you, there is nothing you can do about it. There must be some
lagniappe in the fact that the humorist has read something written before 1918.
There must be, in short, S. J. Perelman.
Maybe
I'd change 1918 to 1958 now. But it is necessary to read from previous
generations. If the reader has no context, all that's left is painstakingly
explaining your jokes, or else slipping on a banana peel.
Dave
DaBee wrote:
I just got the connection with
frignen & fricnan. (What are the odds that they're the ancient root of
Frick 'n' Frack, the tappet brothers?)
It
turns out Frick and Frack were Swiss comedy ice skaters
(before Click and Clack, our tappet brothers, the Car Talk guys), so the theory I was working
on is dashed: I thought maybe there was an etymological connection between the
roots of prayer (frignen and fricnan) and "freaking", and Dave
thought maybe Frick and Frack came from the same place. Apparently not. But
wait ~ "frock" comes from a
Middle English word for a monk's habit. But that might be related to
"flock", as in a flock of sheep ... a shepherd. Never mind. You can
see how people come up with bogus etymologies.
Someone
told me once that maybe I needed to get older to enjoy reading Trollope, and I
said I didn't think I wanted to be that old. Now I'm at least old enough to
appreciate the classic The God That Failed (ed. Richard Crossman, 1949),
six essays by journalists who either joined the Communist Party in the early
20th century, or who were "worshippers from afar", all of whom later
became disillusioned with the reality if not the ideal of communism, which ever
receded like the green light on Gatsby's dock. The writers are Arthur Koestler
(author of Darkness at Noon), Richard Wright (Native Son), Louis
Fischer, Ignazio Silone, Andre Gide, and Stephen Spender.
Maybe
it doesn't matter so much about these particular writers, but what they went
through, we all go through in various ways. The belief in communist theory is
definitely a religious-type belief, which these writers affirm either
explicitly or implicitly. I've written before about the religious vocabulary
used by the true believers, specifically Emma Goldman (PO 62). A
new style of language not only developed but was required.
///
Koestler
wrote:
Repetitiveness of diction, the
catechism [note the religious term] technique of asking a rhetorical
question and repeating the full question in the answer; the use of stereotyped
adjectives and the dismissal of an attitude or fact by the simple expedient of
putting words in inverted commas and giving them an ironic inflection (the
"revolutionary" past of Trotsky, the "humanistic" bleatings
of the "liberal" press, etc.); all these were essential parts of a
style...
///
When
Richard Wright began to fall out of favor with the party, he was called various
colorful names: smuggler
of reaction, petty
bourgeois degenerate, bastard intellectual, incipient Trotskyite,
with an anti-leadership attitude manifesting seraphim tendencies.
Then he got physically ejected from a parade of comrades who didn't want him
anymore.
///
Bourgeois
was a bad thing to be, bourgeois ideas were sentimental claptrap. As Louis
Fischer wrote, "The
Kremlin decreed equality 'a bourgeois virtue.'"
///
Stephen
Spender addressed the particular problems of writers and artists, who write of
and out of their own experience. But "since what was most important was to be a theoretical Marxist, it
followed that the best Marxists, who were often the worst writers, had an
advantage over those writers who with humility looked to their experiences for
their art." Marxist critics really stretched when reviewing
non-Marxist writers, especially pre-Marxists. Virginia Woolf was congratulated
for having committed suicide in 1941, as she had "chosen the path of historic necessity."
Keats wasn't a Marxist but at least "in being the son of an ostler, and ill with consumption which the
State did not attend to, he had the merit of being a victim of
capitalism." This, I believe, is the womb from which today's
deconstructionist readings of art sprang.
A
Miss USA contestant talking about her role model, Oprah: "She's getting so much
slack because she built that school in Africa." She meant flack.
Slack = loose = leeway. Flack = attack. What she's been getting
is flack for not building a school in the U.S. She visited inner-city schools
here and found that the kids wanted iPods and expensive tennis shoes, while
kids in Africa wanted uniforms so they could attend school.
Oprah
can buy slack if she needs it. Which reminds me of The Church of the Subgenius, which you can
join and become a subgenius yourself. Their motto is, "The subgenius must
have slack."
It's
bitterly cold here. All the trees are dripping and bending with ice,
glitteringly beautiful. I don't know what to do with all that beauty, since I'm
not a poet. I heard birds singing outside the window, though, at 4 degrees.
That's more than I can do.
SUE
S.
Another
PO reader, an old friend from college, is ill. Sue S., who has sent us comments
from the Southwest from time to time, is being treated for leukemia. Please
include her in your prayers.
______________________________________________
Short Order is a new series of my short stories in 5
1/2" x 8 1/2" booklet format. The first two are available now for $5
each (includes mailing).
/// In Carl Kriegbaum Sleeps with the Corn, a young
computer guy who dreams of becoming a big-time gambler sets up web sites for
his role model, a real big-time gambler, Stockyard Stan of Kansas City. But
when Carl comes up short on his gambling debts, he finds himself wearing
concrete boots in the middle of a Kansas cornfield. 26 pages.
/// Still Ridge is about what happens when the old-time moonshine business meets up with a predatory modern bottled water corporation. How far will Kate, a newcomer to the mountains, go to protect the water supply? 22 pages.
THIS IS REALLY NEW! For women who get massage or chiropractic treatment, who
sleep on their stomachs, or have implants, try Rhonda's original Breast Cushion
to take the pressure off. Go to www.keithops.us/cushion.
WHEN SONNY GETS BLUE! Check out the video clips of Sonny Robertson and the
Howard Street Blues Band at www.sonnyrobertson.com and
www.youtube.com/rondaria.
Check out the new "Someone went to Heaven and all I got was this lousy T-shirt" shirts in the Parvum Opus CafePress shop, plus a new Parvum Opus mouse pad! Now you can buy neat products with the Parvum Opus / KeithOps Catti logo at CafePress.com/parvumopus.
SEARCH
IT OUT ON AMAZON : It is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honour of kings is
to search out a matter. Proverbs 25:2
The
poet Muriel Rukeyser said the universe is not composed of atoms, but stories.
The physicist Werner Heisenberg said the universe is not made of matter, but
music.
NEED SOMEONE TO ORGANIZE A
MEETING OR CONFERENCE? CALL KEITHOPS.
Go to Babelfish to translate this page into Chinese, Dutch, French,
German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, or Spanish!
Parvum Opus is a
publication of KeithOps / Opus Publishing Services. Back issues may be found
at http://www.keithops.us/. Feel free to
e-mail me with comments or queries.
The PO mailing list is private, never given or sold to anyone else. If you don't want to receive Parvum Opus, please reply with "unsubscribe," "quit," "enough," or something like that in the subject line, and I'll take you off the mailing list.
Copyright Rhonda Keith 2007. Parvum Opus or part of
it may be reproduced only with permission, but you may forward the entire
newsletter as long as the copyright remains.