This Year's Gleaning

It is that time again, or rather, it's past time, but here we are.  I'm always meaning to do things.  This is a thing I actually enjoy, so one might think I'd do it in a more timely fashion than not, but no. Well, just today it's done.   I've dropped off the pictures at Ave. Copy to have my annual calendar made, and I've approved the prototype, so now there's naught to do but wait for the printing, and the bill.

In the same spirit of belated industry, I finally went downstairs in the bookstore where I work and bought myself a proper "archival box" in which to store my caricatures.  Something I've meant to do for ages.  Heretofore all my pictures and doodles and assorted whatnot have all ended up in great messy piles, in and out of manila-envelopes and folders, all over my desk at home.  I've never made the least effort to organize the stuff; keeping them in no order at all, never separating the wheat from the chaff, as it were, losing some, no doubt, and letting others mingle indiscriminately with unpaid bills and forgotten notes about movies we should rent and phone-numbers I should put in my address-book.

So, the other night, I sat on the floor of my office at home, a great heap of unsorted paper in my lap, and began sifting pictures into my new, black box.  There were some very old pictures indeed, near the bottom of the haymow, but most were indeed drawings I've done for this blog.  I sorted by size -- putting the doodles on scrap-paper to one side, and putting the caricatures into the box.  (And handful of these were indeed so unsuccessful, and so painful to see again that I made a third pile for the shredder.  Most liberating.)  Still quite a tidy collection, by the time I'd finished.


I even found a caricature of the great Temple Grandin that I'd particularly liked, a picture I had intended to include in my calendar last year or the year before, but had been unable to locate.  Most satisfy to able to put it in this year's edition.

(As it turns out, I will need to buy a second box, just for the doodles, which tend to be on much smaller squares that would unbalance a larger, more uniform stack of typing paper-- my preferred medium for the fine work.  Ahem.  Seems I've used up a lot of scratch paper, indeed so a new box for the doodles too.)

In the process of sorting I arrived at perhaps two dozen pictures to consider for my calendar this year, not counting the Temple Grandin.  Of these, I decided to exclude anyone so obscure as to require more explanation than would be possible in a wall-calendar (Holbrook Jackson, Sadakichi Hartmann,) and anyone appearing under a pseudonym ("Robert Galbraith," "Oolon Culluphid.")  A couple of last minute substitutions for more balance between the sexes, and I'd found the mix I liked.

This year's cover will feature the traditional self-portrait, though this one seems a bit darker than usual, but then it was taken from a photograph illustrating the ill-effects of a long head-cold.  (Shown to a coworker, she remarked that I looked "more dignified than usual," which was both flattering in  one way and cutting in another, no?)

Anyway, it's done.

I've decided to reduce both the print-run and the number I intend to mail out to friends and family this year.  I can always have more made, should the demand demand.  There will be fewer for sale at the bookstore so as to avoid last year's embarrassment of seeing myself marked down in bulk come January and a few last remnants of glory left to circulate hopelessly in a discount bin marked "90% Off!  Last Chance!" until I bought them myself, just to see them gone.  Humbling indeed.  As for my own copies, I'm afraid I went a bit mad last year and papered the far corners of the Earth with unasked-for calendars, spending more on shipping ultimately than I had in making the damned things.  (I love everyone, honest, but enough already.)  Let's just see how the sales go in December, shall we?

Meanwhile, my archive if you will, begins to look a serious and most sober business with everything stowed in waxed-cardboard and ready for the scholarship of future generations (or the same incinerator into which my heirs are instructed already to pitch my earthly remains.)  I can't imagine anyone making much of a fuss over my pictures when I'm gone, but meanwhile it will be nice to finally have everything in some kind of order rather than heaped under the day-bed.

Perhaps I will someday invite some comely undergraduate back to my den to show him my "etchings."  "Have some madeira, my dear, I have a small cask of it here..."

And at least this year's collection has come to something already, if just another calendar, you know, like I gave you last year.

Daily Dose

From Liberalism: The Life of an Idea, by Edmund Fawcett

AFTER

"After the death of her husband in 1851 Mill married Harriet Taylor, his companion of two decades.  Hard as later writers found it to accept, their long affair, though scandalous to friends and taxing to her complaisant husband, was probably not sexual.  Harriet confided as much in letters.  Carlyle, with his keen eye and sharp tongue, nicknamed her 'Platonica.'"

From 2: Guiding Thoughts from Founding Thinkers

A Caricature

Liberty of the Individual

Daily Dose

From On Liberty, by John Stuart Mill

WHERE

"Where, not the person's own character, but the traditions of customs of other people are the rule of conduct, there is wanting one of the principal ingredients of human happiness, and quite the chief ingredient of individual and social progress."

From Chapter III, On Individuality, as One of the Elements of Well-Being

A Brief Tribute, Eventually in Verse

Here I've been droning on about some terribly important English poets, when just today the sun not only came out, but stayed. I know this because the room grew unusually warm while I was reading. Inspired by the abrupt arrival of Spring, I set down the George Eliot I was trying, and repaired to my shelves of poetry, in search of something more appropriate to the Season. Now, I might have picked up Wordsworth, always so good about this sort of thing, nature and the like, but instead I found myself drawn to something less profound, something lighter, brighter and if not better, certainly less taxing. I was in need of something silly. Of all the silliness ever to come out of England, and the English are a surprisingly silly people, bless 'em, there is no more delightfully useless form than that invented by the author of the classic mystery novel Trent's Last Case, Mr. E. C. Bentley. His mysteries aren't silly, actually his mysteries are superbly plotted, in the crackerjack style, and he is widely credited with having all but invented the modern mystery form. But about that, I don't much care. What I am very grateful for is the author's middle name.

Edmund Clerihew Bentley did that rarest of things in literature, he invented something new. The clerihew is is a four line poem, biographical in subject. The first and second lines rhyme, as do the third and fourth. The first line names the subject, and the second line ends with something that rhymes with the name. (In some cases, the person’s name comes at the end of the second line, in which case the first line rhymes with the name.) The lines can vary in length, they just have to rhyme. Bentley is said to have invented the form while a bored schoolboy. Here is his first acknowledged effort:

Sir Humphrey Davy
Abominated gravy.
He lived in the odium
Of having discovered sodium.

Perhaps his most famous is as follows:

George the Third
Ought never have occurred.
One can only wonder
At so grotesque a blunder.

And then there is this:

John Stuart Mill,
By a mighty effort of will,
Overcame his natural bonhomie
And wrote Principles of Political Economy.

I have too many favorites, drawn from Clerihews Complete. Here are just a few others:

What I like about Clive
Is that he is no longer alive.
there is a great deal to be said
For being dead.

Geoffrey Chaucer
took a bath (in a saucer)
In consequence of certain hints
Dropped by the Black Prince.

The meaning of the poet Gay
Was always as clear as day,
While that of Blake
Was often practically opaque.

Bentley was the lifelong friend of Gilbert Keith Chesterton, who occasionally illustrated Bentley's poems, and even wrote some clerinews himself, but of all those who have taken up the form since, I think my favorites are from Wystan Hugh Auden, who did a batch, in tribute to Ogden Nash, titled "Academic Graffiti." Here's the first:

My First Name, Wystan,
Rhymes with Tristan,
But -- O dear! -- I do hope
I'm not quite such a dope.

and just one more:

Robert Browning
Immediately stopped frowning
And started to blush,
When fawned on by Flush.

So, in celebration of this new Spring day, and in brief tribute to dear Edmund Clerihew Bentley and all the subsequent practitioners of his art, I offer the following:

EDMUND CLERIHEW BENTLEY

Edmund Clerihew Bentley
All but incidentally,
Invented the clerihew,
Which is considerably more than I could do.