The library of St John’s College, Oxford, used to hold a copy of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene that bore a student’s penciled comment on the last page:
“First I thought Troilus And Criseyde was the most boring poem in English. Then I thought Beowulf was. Then I thought Paradise Lost was. Now I know that The Faerie Queen is the dullest thing out. Blast it.”
It had been written by Philip Larkin, who had studied English there in the 1940s.
The plot of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in the meter of Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha, by Martin Woodhead:
You shall hear how Lady Constance,
Tiring of her wounded husband
(Poor Sir Clifford, high war-hero,
Inconvenienced by shrapnel),
Found a gamekeeper called Mellors
Who would teach her in his lunch-hour
(And in language frank and fearless
Such as wives and servants blush at)
To admire the lower orders
While that blighted Bart, Sir Clifford
(Let us waste no pity on him,
For the man was paraplegic),
In his new electric wheelchair
Tried to drive it up a tunock —
Tried and tried, and couldn’t make it.
From a Spectator competition. Chatterley in Field & Stream. Hiawatha in condensed matter physics.
In 1986, Michael Kinsley, editor of The New Republic, spotted the headline “Worthwhile Canadian Initiative” in the New York Times and challenged his readers to come up with a more boring one. This was a tall order: The Times head, someone said, manages to be “not only boring as a whole, but boring word by word.” Submissions included:
The winner was found in the New York Times science section: “Debate Goes on Over the Nature of Reality.”
In the 19th century, the index to the London Times was compiled by Samuel Palmer. Palmer had an unusual way of working, which apparently wasn’t noticed until 1890, when a mystified reader, Corrie Thompson, wrote to Notes and Queries with some examples:
Apparently Palmer had simply been compiling headlines without reading the articles. This accounts for entries such as “Extraordinary Escape of Boy at Erith Station, From a Bull Being on the Line” and “Extraordinary Marriage Adventure.” Thompson wrote, “One would expect to find this system adopted in a ‘table of contents,’ but surely it is out of place in an ‘index.'”
One wonderful exception, which Palmer apparently wrote himself:
“Death of Jane Thomas in her Mother’s Arms in Holborn at Joy in Seeing her parent at the Stage Door to Receive her.”
Henry Wheatley’s 1878 monograph “What Is an Index?” gives a list of “titles of books that have given trouble to bibiographers” or been assigned to the wrong subjects:
Best: German naturalist Johann Heinrich Linck’s De stellis marinis liber singularis, a treatise on sea stars, has been listed under Astronomy.
A paper kite, that soared on high,
While looking down was able to descry
A joyous butterfly,
And cried, “We faintly see your foolish efforts zealous;
Confess that you are rather jealous,
When you behold our elevated lot.”
“Jealous? Oh, surely not.
Your grandeur is a phantom, or an empty vision,
Your tethered flight awakes, believe me, but derision;
Can happiness be got from an existence ever fettered?
And how could life for me be bettered?
As I aspire I venture higher,
And never, solely for another’s idle leisure
And pleasure,
Lose freedom I desire.”
— Ivan Krylov
I can see the stairs down which Smerdyakov tumbles. Dostoevsky gives us a certain description. As a result, I know exactly what this staircase looks like. I know where it starts, how it gets darker and then turns to the left. All this is clear to me in the most concrete way and yet I also know that no one else ‘sees’ the staircase the way I do. But anyone who is receptive to this masterly narrative will ‘see’ the staircase in a most specific way and be convinced that he sees it as it really is.
— Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, 1986
“Think before you speak is criticism’s motto; speak before you think creation’s.” — E.M. Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy, 1951
“Sometimes an admirer spends more talent extolling a work than the author did in creating it.” — Jean Rostand, De la vanité, 1925
In Dante’s Purgatorio, souls are surprised to see that their visitor casts a shadow and thus is not dead:
When they perceiv’d that through my body I
Gave way not for the rays to pass, their song
Straight to a long and hoarse exclaim they chang’d;
And two of them, in guise of messengers,
Ran on to meet us, and inquiring ask’d:
“Of your condition we would gladly learn.”
That’s a bit of a puzzle, note Roberto Casati and Patrick Cavanagh. “To be visible, supernatural entities must reflect light (if they do not emit it). But as a consequence they must be opaque to at least some light, and thus they should cast shadows.”
(Roberto Casati and Patrick Cavanagh, The Visual World of Shadows, 2019. Related: Why do ghosts wear clothes?)
In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl. See how it looks in print — I translate this from a conversation in one of the best of the German Sunday-school books:
Gretchen. Wilhelm, where is the turnip?
Wilhelm. She has gone to the kitchen.
Gretchen. Where is the accomplished and beautiful English maiden?
Wilhelm. It has gone to the opera.
… A tree is male, its buds are female, its leaves are neuter; horses are sexless, dogs are male, cats are female — tomcats included, of course; a person’s mouth, neck, bosom, elbows, fingers, nails, feet, and body are of the male sex, and his head is male or neuter according to the word selected to signify it, and not according to the sex of the individual who wears it — for in Germany all the women wear either male heads or sexless ones; a person’s nose, lips, shoulders, breast, hands, and toes are of the female sex; and his hair, ears, eyes, chin, legs, knees, heart, and conscience haven’t any sex at all. The inventor of the language probably got what he knew about a conscience from hearsay.
— Mark Twain (from A Tramp Abroad)
