A Blog of Bosh

After the launch of the new nonsenselit.org site I am moving the news section away from Blogger. I did not have any complaints, actually, but the new software, WordPress, will allow a better control of the posts and an improved support for RSS. Support for Atom will be provided through FeedBurner as soon as I can solve a few problems.

On 12 May 2004, Edward Lear’s birthday, I am at last releasing the new portal for Nonsense literature. The Lear pages do not contain anything new, updating and renewing them is my next project, but you should find lots of interesting material:

• A new Peter Newell site containing, among many other things, the first republication of a long run of his comic strip: The Naps of Polly Sleepyhead;
• A web edition of the tallest book ever:The Flight of the Old Woman who was Tossed up in a Basket, London, 1844;
• A comic book in which Santa Claus meets Alice;
• An all new Pictures section containing full scans of two different colour editions of the Book of Nonsense;
• A Sounds section, which at the moment only contains a BBC Radio 4 programme about The Owl and the Pussy-cat;
• A Reading Shelf with Nonsense short stories and essays;
• Well, much more…

I’ve been working on this for a very long time, so be kind: visit and share your thoughts and suggestions!

Literary nonsense of Sukumar Ray once again!
Dungaroo, Flipfloposaurus, Billy-Hawk Calf among other animals paid a peppy visit to a book store here and regaled book lovers!
They are, after all, characters from the nonsensical world created by legendary Bengali writer Sukumar Ray.
The occasion was the launch of ‘Abol Tabol: The Nonsense World of Sukumar Ray’ by Sampurna Chattarji, an English translation of the Bengali original, at the Oxford Bookstore here in association with Penguin Books India.
This was followed by a dramatic rendition from the book by Ravi Khote, a multiple-medium performance artiste.
This selection offers the best of Ray’s world — pun-riddled, fun-fiddled poetry from ‘Abol Tabol’ and ‘Khai-Khai’, stories of schoolboy pranks from ‘Pagla Dashu’ and madcap explorers ‘Heshoram Hushiyarer Diary’, and the unforgettable harum-scarum classic of ‘Haw-Jaw-Baw-Raw-Law’.
All the stories and poems are accompanied by Ray’s inimitable illustrations.
India News Channel | 29 April 2004

O Poetry! Let us celebrate month with anthologies of the bad, good
Bloom has assembled an anthology of representative poems by English and American writers. Seen in such a light, this is a fine compendium, particularly valuable for Bloom’s important and insightful introductions to the poets and comments on individual poems.
But many of those poems are far from “best.” Bloom’s tastes are catholic and so magnanimous that he includes work by such agreeable but minor poets (among the Americans) as Jones Very and Trumbull Stickney, Elinor Wylie and John Brooks Wheelwright. It’s a gathering, in part, of Bloom’s favorite forgotten poets, and his mantras in the book are “Now little regarded . . .” and “Now neglected . . .” He seems unable or unwilling to distinguish between “best” and “charming,” a category that would require a different book.
“Poe,” Bloom writes, “is a bad poet,” but since Poe “is also inescapable,” the anthologist “glumly” includes two poems, “Israfel” and “The City in the Sea.”
Bloom is fond of English odd balls like Thomas Love Beddoes and William Savage Landor – what, no George Crabbe?; of the sentimentalists of the flaming 1890s, a terrible decade for poetry, like Lionel Johnson and Ernest Dowson (“I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind”); and of the great purveyors of pungent nonsense Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, who, one admits, deserve a place in some pantheon.
commercialappeal.com | 4 April 2004

The kid in me is still alive
“Youth is such a wonderful thing; it’s a shame to waste it on the young!” This aphorism by George Bernard Shaw brilliantly exposes the ludicrous side of the romantic idealization of children, so characteristic of the 19th century.
For generations, religious leaders, educators and parents in the Western world had viewed childhood as an inferior, defective, irrational and sin-filled stage of human development. Then, this period of life underwent a cultural rehabilitation. From the late 18th century on, and especially in the 19th century, childhood was raised to the level of an ideal, representing moral purity, innocence, honesty and creativity. Childhood became the symbol of everything good in humanity, or for what humans could become if they were not spoiled by corrupt and hypocritical adult society.
…
Edward Lear, the eminent nonsense poet, was diagnosed by psychologists as someone who had ‘never emotionally recovered’ from his family’s adventures. ‘Perhaps because his childhood was cut short so suddenly and cruelly, he refused to grow up and remained, inside, an eternal child.’ Is the ‘eternal child’ inside the real, pure self the pinnacle of the realization of the artist’s unique personality, or is it no more than a construct, a projection, a regressive fantasy that charges the act of artistic fiction?
[A review by Galia Benziman of “Big Children: Beloved Children’s Authors – Their Lives and Work.” Three volumes: “The English” (228 pages); “The Americans” (262 pages) and “Especially the Europeans” (272 pages) by Yehuda Atlas, Yedioth Ahronoth Publishing, Sifrei Hemed, 2003.]
Haaretz – Israel News | 26 March 2004