Book Giveaway: The Overwrought Urn

 Darwin is traveling to Texas for a few days, so in lieu of a substantive post today, I offer another book giveaway from our inherited library. Up this time: The Overwrought Urn; a Potpourri of Parodies of Critics Who Triumphantly Present the Real Meaning of Authors From Jane Austen to J. D. Salinger, edited by Charles Kaplan.

The black spot in the photos is courtesy of my phone's camera and should be taken as no reflection on the book. 

The Overwrought Urn is a selection of parodies of lit crit, in the style of The Pooh Perplex (in fact, one of the Pooh Perplex essays is included). I would maintain that The Pooh Perplex is generally funnier and more enduring, but some of the essays here are brilliant. Jorge Luis Borges contributes a delightfully pompous analysis of Pierre Menard, a Frenchman whose aim was to immerse himself in the study of the life and times of Cervantes and thus to be able to write for himself, in the exact same words, Don Quixote.

The text of Cervantes and that of Menard are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer. (More ambiguous, his detractors will say, but ambiguity is a richness.) It is a revelation to compare the Don Quixote of Menard with that of Cervantes. The latter, for instance, wrote (Don Quixote, Part One, Chapter Nine): 

...La verdad, cuya madre es la historia, emula del tiempo, deposito de las acciones, testigo de lo pasado, ejemplo y aviso de lo presente, advertencia de lo por venir. 

[...truth, whose mother is history, who is the rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, example and lesson to the present, and warning to the future. ]

Written in the seventeenth century, written by the "ingenious layman" Cervantes, this enumeration is a mere rhetorical eulogy of history. Menard, on the other hand, writes: 

...La verdad, cuya madre es la historia, emula del tiempo, deposito de las acciones, testigo de lo pasado, ejemplo y aviso de lo presente, advertencia de lo por venir. 

[...truth, whose mother is history, who is the rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, example and lesson to the present, and warning to the future. ]

History, mother of truth; the idea is astounding. Menard, a contemporary of William James, does not define history as an investigation of reality, but as its origin. Historical truth, for him, is not what took place; it is what we think took place. The final clauses -- example and lesson to the present, and warning to the future, are shamelessly pragmatic. 

Equally vivid is the contrast in styles. The archaic style of Menard -- in the last analysis, a foreigner -- suffers from a certain affectation. Not so that of his precursor, who handles easily the ordinary Spanish of his time.

I was also amused by W.B. Scott's Chicago Letter.

April, 1949
Agony, a sense of plight; a sense of agony, plight -- such, one soon preceives, are the attributes of the Chicago of our time. But I shall have more to say about them later in this letter.
I traveled by the Erie, as one must, I think, do, now and then. The trip is longer, to be sure, on its ancient twisting right-of-way than on other roads. But there one escapes the "lumpenaristokratie" (in Roscoe Chutney's phrase) of the Century or the Broadway, and it is only from the Eire, of course that one my catch those extraordinary night glimpses of Youngstown and Akron.

The longest and silliest essay contains a "new reading" of the old chestnut "Trees".

I think that I shall never see /A poem as lovely as a tree.

Instead, we are given to contemplate the original draft of the poem, written by one Joe E. Skilmer, entitled  "Therese".

I think? That I shall never, see?
Up, owe 'em love. Leah's a tree. 

The resulting analysis of the entire piece makes about as much sense as the version to which we're accustomed.

So. If you like that sort of thing, it's the sort of thing you'll like. A few of the essays fell rather flat, but most of them made me smile at least. And it's free -- you can't say fairer than that!

Leave a comment to get your name in the drawing, and I'll have one of the kids draw names from a hat on Saturday.

Christmas Giveaway Winner!

And the winner of The Years With Ross by James Thurber is:

Christina!

I wish I could send something to everyone who entered, but as I haven't even sent a Christmas card to my grandmother yet, I can but blow good wishes your way. (Andy, I gave the hat a special shake in honor of Jordana's youngest, but it didn't cooperate).

There are plenty more oddball or esoteric tomes that we inherited from the former owners, so stay tuned. I think we'll have more giveaways in the future.

Christmas Giveaway: The Years With Ross, by James Thurber

Merry Christmas, gentle readers!

I've long wanted to have a blog giveaway with a inherited book from our library, and I think I've found the right volume for the purpose: The Years With Ross, by James Thurber.

Harold Wallace Ross was the founding editor of the New Yorker, and, if Thurber is to believed, a Character of outsized contradictions. Swearing came as naturally to him as breathing, yet he was alarmed and bashful in the presence of women, a sex he feared (and yet his marriages numbered three). He apparently couldn't bear the company of young women, whom he judged to be flighty temptresses.

"I want you to fire So-and-so," he said, changing the object, but not the subject, of his wrath. So-and-so was a young woman, long since in heaven with the angels, who wrote one of the back-of-the-book departments. "She makes me nervous," Ross said. "Last night, at Tony's, she was damn near sitting in the lap of the man she was with." It happened that I had been at Tony's the night before, too, and had seen the couple, sitting and drinking and talking like any other couple in Tony's, and I told Ross that. Then he came out with one of his accusations that were pure, patented Ross. "They were talking in awful goddam low tones," he said. It wasn't often that I laughed in the inner sanctum in those first months, but that was too much for me. Then I said, "Don't you know your Shakespeare: Her voice was ever gentle and awful goddam low, an excellent thing in woman?" Ross turned away so that I couldn't see his grin, but his torso had one of those brief spasmodic upheavals that so often served as a sign of his amusement in the art meeting when he looked at a drawing he thought was really funny. When he turned around he was scowling. "Goddam it, Thurber, don't quote things at me," he said. The firing mood was gone.

He ran the New Yorker almost by sheer force of his personality, but was so financially oblivious that he had $71,000 stolen right under his nose by an unscrupulous assistant. He had both an eye for talent, and a gift for driving it from his magazine through overwork. In the early years of the New Yorker, Ross, Thurber, and E.B. White wrote much of the magazine themselves, and the book is chockfull of big names of mid-century American literature: Noel Coward, Alexander Woollcott, George S. Kaufmann, Henry Luce, H.L Mencken, and, a bit incongruously, the Marx Brothers. Here's Dorothy Parker making an appearance in the magazine's early days.

Meanwhile, the New Yorker kept going downhill. From an original runoff of fifteen thousand copies in February, its circulation fell to a pernicious-anemia low of twenty-seven hundred copies in August. One evening, during that summer of Harold Ross's greatest discontent, the harried editor ran into Dorothy Parker somewhere. "I thought you were coming into the office to write a piece last week," he said. "What happened?" Mrs. Parker turned upon him the eloquent magic of her dark and lovely eyes. "Somebody was using the pencil," she explained sorrowfully.

Ross, worn down by cancer, died on the operating table a month after his fifty-ninth birthday. The Years With Ross grew out of a series of articles Thurber wrote for the Atlantic Monthly.

Want a chance to read more wry Thurberian wit? Leave a comment on this post (and don't be anonymous!), and on Christmas Eve we'll toss all the commenter names into a hat and draw a lucky winner. This is one of the few uninscribed volumes of the inherited books -- the previous owners of the house were fond of putting names and dates into their books -- so we'll even inscribe it, if desired.

Bonne chance!