Details to follow…
I was mortified to learn today from Mrs. P that the vast majority of the blog-0-sphere thinks that Sir Basil Seal is made up, a chimera, a virtual actor on the internet stage…Well, you’re all wrong, as Mr. and Mrs. P’s increased alcohol intake will attest…I am sure that most find a fictional Sir Basil rather droll and funny in a dangerous way , but the idea of Sir Basil actually being a real person loose in the community somewhat frightening…I don’t blame you. I am very much worse in person than I am on paper, so to speak. I am a living, walking museum piece here to annoy any and all who aspire to modernist pretensions and never cease in my war against the common and the vulgar…The Countess and I have spent several evenings at the P’s with some friends of theirs…You should see the P’s trying to explain Sir Basil to them…Quite fascinating… And to their credit they stopped trying to explain after a few minutes and just noted that I was an acquired taste, and yes, those really are his real clothes and something about a cross they choose to bear, but I didn’t catch the whole thing……What was even more fascinating was that we were invited back…Obviously folks with good taste I would say.
If you don’t believe me you all know where the P’s live…Stop by for a visit and have a beer (not the ones on the second shelf, those are mine)…I’ll soon be round to liven up the party.
The Black and Tan or The Blacksmith
All Irish, All the time…
The Black Velvet or The Prince Albert, aka The Bismarck
Invented by the Irish in order to conceal the fact that they were toasting the death of an Englishman by topping off their champagne with stout…The Limeys never did figure it out. Bismarck reportedly drank them while resting after a hard day of contemplating the subjugation of Europe…Restored the tissues, as it were…
In all cases pour the stout over the back of a spoon in order to enhance the seperation.
Happy Birthday Marines
I just received my copy of the Overlook edition of Wodehouse’s The Luck of the Bodkins…I’ve been trying for years to get the damn thing, but it has just now become available in the States…Anyway, it begins with, what is probably the greatest first sentence in literary history:
“Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French.”
What can I say? The Master…
The Book of William: How Shakespeare’s First Folio Conquered The World by Paul Collins
Shortly after the death of William Shakespeare in 1618, two of the Bard’s colleagues, the aging actors John Heminge and Henry Condell, set out to compile a complete edition of their old friend’s plays. Printed in 1623, it’s known today simply as the First Folio, and a single copy is worth millions. Now in The Book of William, English professor and well-known literary detective Paul Collins tells the story of the world’s most obsessively pursued book. It’s a breezy blend of travelogue and history broken into five acts that span the globe and the centuries. And so, beginning in an auction room in contemporary London, where we see one First Folio sell for 2.5 million pounds, we travel back in time to the 1750s, when the edition first began to be worth more than its original price of one pound: it crossed the border from used book to collectible. Then in 1824 one of England’s most celebrated bibliophiles, the Reverend Thomas Dibdin, described the location and condition of 30 specimens of First Folio. As a result it’s the only book whose individual copies can be consistently traced back through the 19th and often well into the 18th or even 17th century. Nowadays there are 230 known copies of the First Folio, and Collins travels around the world in search of them. He goes to the Folger Library in Washington DC, which houses oilman Henry Clay Folger’s collection of the printed works of Shakespeare, including 79 First Folios, kept together in an underground vault. And he travels to Japan, to see the Folio collection of Meisei University, whose collection of 12 numbers more than those owned by the British Library and New York Public Library combined. New copies still turn up. For Collins, one incident in 2004 reads like a fairy tale: A homemaker living near Manchester, surprised to be named the sole surviving heir of a late cousin she’d never heard of before, found among the elderly recluse’s effects a Folio that executors had assumed to be a facsimile edition. But it was the real thing—and a previously unknown copy. Collins pauses often in his journey to indulge in delightful digressions on a range of topics, from the longstanding relationship that the Japanese have with Shakespeare, to the fact that the experts who handle rare books never wear gloves: “The exquisite sensation of human touch is paradoxically vital to book preservation; wear gloves, and you are liable to misjudge the precise action of turning a leaf, and tear a page. Dirty, sweaty fingers keep these old volumes intact.” The Book of William is an enormously entertaining journey into a world where fragile paper and immortal words come together to create one of the world’s ultimate objects of desire.
The Complete McAuslan by George MacDonald Fraser
Supremacy and Survival: How Catholics Endured the English Reformation by Stephanie A. Mann
Fusiliers: The Saga of a British Redcoat Regiment in the American Revolution by Mark Urban
The Training Ground: Grant, Lee, Sherman and Davis in the Mexican War by Martin Dugard
Quarrel With The King: The Story of an English Family on the High Road to Civil War by Adam Nicloson
Barbarians To Angels: The Dark Ages Reconsidered by Peter S. Wells
Fires of Faith: Catholic England Under Mary Tudor by Eamon Duffy
The Spartacus War by Barry Strauss
How Rome Fell by Adrian Goldsworthy
The American Civil War by Sir John Keegan
The War That Killed Achilles by Caroline Alexander
Start with these, more to come…
“A satirist is a man profoundly revolted by the society in which he lives. His rage takes the form of wit, ridicule, mockery. Aldous Huxley puts satire somewhat far down the scale of literary esthetics, making the good point that “the pure comic genius must be a great inventor” on the order, say, of Aristophanes, who created worlds, as opposed to the “mere satirist,” who necessarily is rooted in this world. Almost by definition, the satirist does not create; he reacts to what exists with caricature and burlesque, two skills Max Beerbohm described: “Burlesque consists in the application of incongruity. Caricature consists merely in exaggeration. To burlesque a statue of Hermes, you need but put a top hat on his head. To caricature it you must exaggerate its every limb and feature.” A satirist may do anything he likes to that Hermes except carve it originally from the stone. Someone must do that for him. In the nicest sense, he is critic.
Our time’s first satirist is Evelyn Waugh. For thirty years his savagery and wit have given pleasure and alarm. His mixed dish is celebrated: the Bright Young People of the Twenties, the popular press, Africa’s political pretensions, death in Hollywood. . .all set down in a prose so chaste that at times one longs for a violation of syntax to suggest that its creator is fallible, or at least part American…”
Does FLG really listen to Enya? Is he, by chance, a closet John Tesh groupie? Chasing after Yanni as fast as his Birkenstocks will carry him? It makes me uneasy somehow…And he was making such great progress too…
