The Poetry of Leonard Cohen Illustrated by Two Short Films

in Animation, Film, Literature, Poetry | July 18th, 2013

Look­ing back on the lit­er­ary career of Leonard Cohen—in full flower in the mid-six­ties before his sec­ond life as a folk singer/songwriter—one encoun­ters many com­par­isons to Joyce. For exam­ple, in the Nation­al Film Board of Canada’s descrip­tion of Ladies and Gen­tle­men… Mr. Leonard Cohen, the 1965 doc­u­men­tary film about the 30-year-old Cana­di­an poet, we find: “it tru­ly is, after Joyce, a por­trait of the artist as a young man.” On the back cov­er of Cohen’s sec­ond and final nov­el, the hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry, post­mod­ernist Beau­ti­ful Losers, we find a blurb from the Boston Sun­day Her­ald: “James Joyce is not dead…. He lives in Mon­tre­al under the name of Cohen.”

Beau­ti­ful Losers’ dense sys­tem of his­tor­i­cal ref­er­ences does put one in mind of Ulysses, but the lan­guage, the syn­tax, the eagle flights into the holy and dives into the pro­fane, remind me some­what of anoth­er Bud­dhist poet of Cana­di­an extrac­tion, Jack Ker­ouac. Cohen even sounds a bit like Ker­ouac, in the short 1967 film, “Poen” (above), an exper­i­men­tal piece that sets four read­ings of a prose-poem from Beau­ti­ful Losers to a mon­tage of stark­ly provoca­tive images from black-and-white film and pho­tog­ra­phy, Goya, and var­i­ous sur­re­al­ists. Made by Josef Reeve for the Nation­al Film Board, the short reels out four dif­fer­ent record­ed takes of Cohen read­ing the poem. At the end of each read­ing, he says, “cut,” and the film fades to black.

Tak­en from the novel’s con­text, the poem becomes a per­son­al med­i­ta­tion on med­i­ta­tion, or per­haps on writ­ing: “My mind seems to go out on a path, the width of a thread,” begins Cohen and unfolds an image of men­tal dis­cov­ery like that described by Don­ald Barthelme, who once said “writ­ing is a process of deal­ing with not-know­ing…. At best there’s a slen­der intu­ition, not much greater than an itch.”

In the ani­ma­tion above, from the NFB’s 1977 “Poets on Film No. 1,” Cana­di­an actor Paul Hecht reads Cohen’s poem “A Kite is a Vic­tim,” from his 1961 col­lec­tion The Spice-Box of Earth. Like the poem from Beau­ti­ful Losers, “A Kite is a Vic­tim” is also about process, but it’s a for­mal med­i­ta­tion, focused on the image of the kite, which flut­ters through each of the four stan­zas in metaphors of tam­ing, cap­tur­ing and nur­tur­ing lan­guage, then let­ting it go, hop­ing to be made “wor­thy and lyric and pure.” The pace of Hecht’s read­ing, the piano score behind his voice, and the vibrant col­or of the hand-drawn ani­ma­tion makes this a very dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence of Cohen’s writ­ing than “Poen.”

To see Leonard Cohen read­ing his poems as a young man, make sure you vis­it: Young Leonard Cohen Reads His Poet­ry in 1966 (Before His Days as a Musi­cian Began)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ladies and Gen­tle­men… Mr. Leonard Cohen

Street Artist Plays Leonard Cohen’s “Hal­lelu­jah” With Crys­tal Glass­es

Leonard Cohen and U2 Per­form ‘Tow­er of Song,’ a Med­i­ta­tion on Aging, Loss & Sur­vival

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Gertrude Stein Sends a “Review” of The Great Gatsby to F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)

in Literature | July 18th, 2013

SteinFitzgerald

“Here we are and have read your book and it is a good book.” That sen­tence about The Great Gats­by may read, in iso­la­tion, like one out of a par­tic­u­lar­ly unmo­ti­vat­ed high school stu­den­t’s sum­mer-read­ing report. But it actu­al­ly comes from astute woman of let­ters Gertrude Stein in a let­ter — and, in its way, a review of the then-new nov­el — to F. Scott Fitzger­ald him­self. This mis­sive from one dis­tin­guished lit­er­ary mem­ber of Amer­i­ca’s “Lost Gen­er­a­tion” to anoth­er con­tin­ues as fol­lows:

I like the melody of your ded­i­ca­tion and it shows that you have a back­ground of beau­ty and ten­der­ness and that is a com­fort. The next good thing is that you write nat­u­ral­ly in sen­tences and that too is a com­fort. You write nat­u­ral­ly in sen­tences and one can read all of them and that among oth­er things is a com­fort. You are cre­at­ing the con­tem­po­rary world much as Thack­er­ay did his in Pen­den­nis and Van­i­ty Fair and this isn’t a bad com­pli­ment. You make a mod­ern world and a mod­ern orgy strange­ly enough it was nev­er done until you did it in This Side of Par­adise. My belief in This Side of Par­adise was alright. This is as good a book and dif­fer­ent and old­er and that is what one does, one does not get bet­ter but dif­fer­ent and old­er and that is always a plea­sure. Best of good luck to you always, and thanks so much for the very gen­uine plea­sure you have giv­en me. We are look­ing for­ward to see­ing you and Mrs. Fitzger­ald when we get back in the Fall. Do please remem­ber me to her and to you always

Gtde Stein

Stein’s words, come to think of it, might make just the tick­et for the afore­men­tioned Eng­lish-class slack­er who may have actu­al­ly read The Great Gats­by, and might even have enjoyed it, but can’t pin down what every­one expects him to respect about it. “You write nat­u­ral­ly in sen­tences and one can read all of them” tells you every­thing you need to about why so many oth­er skilled writ­ers have made a habit of re-read­ing the nov­el every decade, every year, even every few months. “You are cre­at­ing the con­tem­po­rary world” sums up much of Fitzger­ald’s the­mat­ic accom­plish­ment, and that bit about “a mod­ern orgy” makes the point much more vivid indeed. And think­ing in the longer term, this hypo­thet­i­cal teenag­er might well ben­e­fit from the piece of all-pur­pose wis­dom that “one does not get bet­ter but dif­fer­ent and old­er and that is always a plea­sure.”

You can find much more plea­sure of the lit­er­ary-his­tor­i­cal vari­ety at Let­ters of Note, which orig­i­nal­ly post­ed this one. While there, do con­sid­er tak­ing a look at what Fitzger­ald’s edi­tor said about an ear­ly Gats­by draft, and a rejec­tion of Stein’s The Mak­ing of Amer­i­cans.

via Let­ters of Note

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Gertrude Stein Gets a Snarky Rejec­tion Let­ter from Pub­lish­er (1912)

The Wire Breaks Down The Great Gats­by, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Clas­sic Crit­i­cism of Amer­i­ca (NSFW)

Haru­ki Muraka­mi Trans­lates The Great Gats­by, the Nov­el That Influ­enced Him Most

83 Years of Great Gats­by Book Cov­er Designs: A Pho­to Gallery

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

David Foster Wallace’s Love of Language Revealed by the Books in His Personal Library

in English Language, Literature | July 17th, 2013

PainlessEnglish

“I didn’t think much of Infi­nite Jest in the begin­ning,” writes Jacque­line Munoz, librar­i­an at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas at Austin’s Har­ry Ran­som Cen­ter. But as she read fur­ther into Wal­lace’s seem­ing­ly “wordy and unfo­cused” land­mark nov­el, the author’s mind, and how it dealt with “how unfor­giv­ing it is to be human” and how dif­fer­ent gen­er­a­tions “strug­gle inter­nal­ly with the same issues,” won her over: “I thought, this man is a genius; I want to know him bet­ter.” Many of us Wal­lace fans har­bor the same desire, and now that the Ran­som Cen­ter has acquired and made avail­able a con­sid­er­able chunk of the writer’s heav­i­ly anno­tat­ed library, a few more of us can. The books in Wal­lace’s library, as Munoz puts it, reveal “a philoso­pher, math­ophile, physics buff, gram­mar­i­an, pop-fic­tion read­er, lit pro­fes­sor, cre­ative writer, and spir­i­tu­al seek­er,” and Maria Bustil­los, writ­ing in The Awl back in 2011, traced Wal­lace’s seem­ing­ly strange but ulti­mate­ly mean­ing­ful pres­ence of titles like The Spir­i­tu­al­i­ty of Imper­fec­tion and The Dra­ma of the Gift­ed Child.

Garner_usage_cover

Bustil­los’ explo­ration of Wal­lace’s pro­cliv­i­ty for self-help brings in a vol­ume writ­ten by Sal­ly Fos­ter Wal­lace, David’s moth­er: a gram­mar text­book called Prac­ti­cal­ly Pain­less Eng­lish, “the only book of Eng­lish gram­mar I know of that can hold a can­dle to the works of the Fowler broth­ers.” Her book has a place in the Ran­som Cen­ter’s col­lec­tion, and any­one who’s read Wal­lace’s Harper’s arti­cle “Tense Present” may smile at its pres­ence, remem­ber­ing sto­ries of the songs about sole­cisms and oth­er lin­guis­tic mis­us­es his fam­i­ly would sing on car trips. Osten­si­bly a review of Bryan A. Gar­ner’s A Dic­tio­nary of Mod­ern Amer­i­can Usage, a copy of which also made it into the col­lec­tion, the piece reveals Wal­lace’s thor­ough­go­ing inter­est in the mechan­ics, well-func­tion­ing or oth­er­wise, of Eng­lish. You can fol­low the thread through sev­er­al oth­er titles in his pos­ses­sion, includ­ing Albert Baugh­’s A His­to­ry of the Eng­lish Lan­guage, John D. Ram­age’s Rhetoric: A User’s Guide, all the way to Peter Lade­foged’s Ele­ments of Acoustic Phoe­net­ics. And when you’re done, you will want to keep fol­low­ing the thread a lit­tle fur­ther by check­ing out our pre­vi­ous post: David Fos­ter Wal­lace Breaks Down Five Com­mon Word Usage Mis­takes in the Eng­lish Lan­guage.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

30 Free Essays & Sto­ries by David Fos­ter Wal­lace on the Web

David Fos­ter Wal­lace: The Big, Uncut Inter­view (2003)

David Fos­ter Wallace’s 1994 Syl­labus

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Read Ulysses Seen, A Graphic Novel Adaptation of James Joyce’s Ulysses

in Books, Comics/Cartoons, Literature | July 16th, 2013

ulysses seen 2

You’ve start­ed read­ing Ulysses, James Joyce’s mod­ernist clas­sic, and nev­er quite made it the whole way through. Sound famil­iar? You’re in good com­pa­ny.

So here’s anoth­er approach. Start read­ing Ulysses Seen, the graph­ic nov­el adap­ta­tion of Joyce’s tome. The artist behind Ulysses Seen is Rob Berry, and he’s devot­ed to using “the visu­al aid of the graph­ic nov­el” to “fos­ter under­stand­ing of pub­lic domain lit­er­ary mas­ter­works.” He’s clear to point out that Ulysses Seen isn’t meant to replace Ulysses. Rather it’s meant to be a visu­al com­pan­ion to the orig­i­nal work. It uses the com­ic nar­ra­tive to “cut through jun­gles of unfa­mil­iar ref­er­ences” and to help read­ers “appre­ci­ate the sub­tle­ty and artistry” of Joyce’s text. So far Berry has com­plet­ed about 138 pages of Ulysses Seen, and more pages will be com­ing online at the Joyce Cen­ter web site in the near future. Accord­ing to Pub­lish­er’s Week­ly, the artist esti­mates that it will take rough­ly a decade to com­plete the full adap­ta­tion. (The orig­i­nal nov­el spans more than 700 pages after all.) In the mean­time, here are some more resources to help you get through Joyce’s great work:

James Joyce’s Ulysses: Down­load the Free Audio Book

Read Joyce’s Ulysses Line by Line, for the Next 22 Years, with Frank Delaney’s Pod­cast

James Joyce Man­u­scripts Online, Free Cour­tesy of The Nation­al Library of Ire­land

Stephen Fry Explains His Love for James Joyce’s Ulysses

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Watch a Whimsical Animation of Italo Calvino’s Short Story “The Distance of the Moon”

in Animation, Literature | July 15th, 2013

“What was Ita­lo Calvi­no?,” asks sci-fi doyenne Ursu­la K. Le Guin in a Guardian review of the Ital­ian author’s col­lec­tion of short sto­ries Cos­mi­comics. “A pre­post­mod­ernist? Maybe it’s time to dis­pense with mod­ernism and all its pre­fix­es.” Calvi­no cer­tain­ly exists in a cat­e­go­ry all of his own. In short nov­els like Invis­i­ble Cities and his numer­ous sto­ry col­lec­tions, the “prepostmodernist”—or whatever—created a voice as won­drous and indi­vid­ual as his con­tem­po­rary, Borges. Calvi­no coined his own genre, which he called “Cos­mi­comics,” and which Le Guin describes as “a sub­species of sci­ence fic­tion [which] con­sists typ­i­cal­ly of the state­ment of a sci­en­tif­ic hypoth­e­sis (most­ly gen­uine, though some­times not cur­rent­ly accept­ed) which sets the stage for a nar­ra­tive, in which the nar­ra­tor is usu­al­ly a per­son called Qfwfq.”

One of the sto­ries from the col­lec­tion, “The Dis­tance of the Moon,” gets an ani­mat­ed treat­ment in the video above, scored by Erik Satie’s “Gnossi­enne No. 1.” The fan­tas­tic sto­ry, nar­rat­ed by the mys­te­ri­ous Qfwfq, also includes char­ac­ters like Cap­tain Vhd Vhd and Xlth­lx, and, like all of Calvino’s work, it com­bines a child-like won­der with his play­ful, myth­ic imag­i­na­tion and sci­en­tif­ic intel­li­gence. The ani­ma­tion, nar­rat­ed in Hebrew with Eng­lish sub­ti­tles, beau­ti­ful­ly illus­trates the strange whim­sy of the sto­ry with stop-motion cut-outs. And in the audio above, you can hear actor Liev Schreiber explain the sci­en­tif­ic the­o­ry behind Calvino’s sto­ry, then read the sto­ry itself. The read­ing took place at a live event host­ed by Radi­o­lab and orig­i­nal­ly aired on WNYC and PRI’s show “Select­ed Shorts.”

And if this leaves you desir­ing more ani­mat­ed Calvi­no, then don’t miss our pre­vi­ous post: John Tur­tur­ro Reads Ita­lo Calvino’s Ani­mat­ed Fairy Tale, The False Grand­moth­er.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Piotr Dumala’s Won­der­ful Ani­ma­tions of Lit­er­ary Works by Kaf­ka and Dos­to­evsky

Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Mas­ter and Mar­gari­ta, Ani­mat­ed in Two Min­utes

Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea Ani­mat­ed Not Once, But Twice

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Writing Life of Joyce Carol Oates

in Books, Literature, Writing | July 15th, 2013

Joyce Car­ol Oates is often described as Amer­i­ca’s fore­most woman of let­ters. Since 1963 she has pub­lished more than 50 nov­els and a great many short sto­ries, plays, essays, poems and chil­dren’s sto­ries — all of unusu­al­ly high qual­i­ty. Her pro­duc­tiv­i­ty has been leg­endary, almost from the start. When her for­mer Syra­cuse Uni­ver­si­ty class­mate Robert Phillips inter­viewed Oates for the Paris Review in 1978, he recount­ed a rumor that cir­cu­lat­ed cam­pus about how she would fin­ish a nov­el, turn it over, and begin com­pos­ing anoth­er one on the oth­er side–only to throw the man­u­script away when both sides were cov­ered and begin again. Oates did­n’t deny the rumor. “I began writ­ing in high school,” she said, “con­scious­ly train­ing myself by writ­ing nov­el after nov­el and always throw­ing them out when I com­plet­ed them.” But sheer vol­ume was nev­er the point, as Oates told Phillips:

Pro­duc­tiv­i­ty is a rel­a­tive mat­ter. And it’s real­ly insignif­i­cant: What is ulti­mate­ly impor­tant is a writer’s strongest books. It may be the case that we all must write many books in order to achieve a few last­ing ones — just as a young writer or poet might have to write hun­dreds of poems before writ­ing his first sig­nif­i­cant one. Each book as it is writ­ten, how­ev­er, is a com­plete­ly absorb­ing expe­ri­ence, and feels always as if it were the work I was born to write.

Oates has won many hon­ors for her work, includ­ing the Nation­al Book Award, the Pen/Malamud Award, the Nation­al Medal of the Human­i­ties, and a life­time achieve­ment award from the Nation­al Book Crit­ics Cir­cle. Her lat­est nov­el, The Accursed, is a Goth­ic tale of a super­nat­ur­al curse vis­it­ed upon Prince­ton, New Jer­sey, the town where she lives and teach­es. Last month the New York­er vis­it­ed Oates at her home in Prince­ton. The short film above offers a rare look inside the writer’s pri­vate world. Oates talks about her work rou­tine, her inter­est in lan­guage and struc­ture, and her sense of her own per­son­al­i­ty. “I can basi­cal­ly write almost all day long with inter­rup­tions,” she says in the film. “It’s not real­ly that I sit down to write as if it were some extra­or­di­nary act. It’s basi­cal­ly what I do.”

You can read online Oates’ ear­ly short sto­ry, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”. It was writ­ten for Bob Dylan in 1966.

via Page-Turn­er

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Can Science Fiction Save the Liberal Arts? (Asks The New Republic)

in Education, Literature | July 12th, 2013

Both the lit­er­ary and sci­ence fic­tion worlds have come out in the past few weeks with poignant trib­utes and acco­lades for recent­ly deceased Scot­tish writer Iain Banks. The remem­brances from both quar­ters are very well deserved, and very rare. Banks was an unusu­al kind of artist; he main­tained a high­ly respect­ed pres­ence as both a writer of real­ist lit­er­ary fic­tion (as Iain Banks) and superbly well-craft­ed, high­ly imag­i­na­tive sci­ence fic­tion (as Iain M. Banks). In the brief video inter­view above, you can hear Banks recount the ori­gin of the two names and make an impas­sioned case for sci­ence fic­tion as “the most impor­tant genre” of fic­tion.

Banks’ accom­plish­ments are all the more extra­or­di­nary giv­en that so-called lit­er­ary fic­tion and so-called genre writing—sci-fi, hor­ror, romance, etc.—have for so long occu­pied entire­ly dif­fer­ent cul­tur­al spheres, worlds, to use the words of Thomas Pyn­chon, as dif­fer­ent as “the hot­house and the street.” There were the obvi­ous exceptions—the work of Franz Kaf­ka, Drac­u­la and Franken­stein, 1984, Fahren­heit 451—that slipped through the gates, grand­fa­thered in as lega­cy cas­es or exem­plars of “Spec­u­la­tive Fic­tion,” the respectable term for genre writ­ing deemed “seri­ous” by aca­d­e­mics and the literati. Lit­er­ary schol­ar Fred­er­ic Jame­son has long been a fan of sci-fi. Crit­i­cal the­o­rist Felix Guatari once wrote a sci­ence fic­tion film script. Again, more excep­tions.

All of this has changed. After the suc­cess of pop­u­lar cul­ture stud­ies pro­grams in the free­wheel­ing post­mod­ern 90s, even the most tra­di­tion­al depart­ments have begun turn­ing toward genre fiction—the cur­rent pop­u­lar obses­sion with vam­pires and zom­bies, for example—as a means of re-invig­o­rat­ing the lib­er­al arts and reclaim­ing rel­e­vance. (I myself once helped an aca­d­e­m­ic press acquire and pub­lish a fun col­lec­tion called Bet­ter Off Dead: The Evo­lu­tion of the Zom­bie as Post-Human.)

FedFundingCharts

Is this a cyn­i­cal piece of strat­e­gy to mar­ket strug­gling human­i­ties pro­grams to increas­ing­ly busi­ness- and sci­ence-mind­ed stu­dents? A gen­er­a­tional turnover in the pro­fes­so­rate? An attempt to expand the mar­ket share of the human­i­ties in the over­all pic­ture of uni­ver­si­ty fund­ing? In a recent arti­cle in the New Repub­lic, sci­ence edi­tor Judith Shule­vitz argues, like Banks, that sci-fi is a genre of fic­tion that the acad­e­my should take more and more seri­ous­ly on prac­ti­cal grounds—sci-fi writ­ers show us the future of tech­nol­o­gy more accu­rate­ly than any tech­nol­o­gist. Shulavitz also writes that doing so will raise the pro­file, and fund­ing, of human­i­ties pro­grams.

As you can see from the charts above, the arts and sci­ences have reached a dire fund­ing asym­me­try. Shule­vitz quotes Vladimir Nabokov, who wrote, “There is no sci­ence with­out fan­cy and no art with­out fact” as part of her case for the impor­tance of lit­er­a­ture to the “prac­ti­cal arts” and vice-ver­sa. I don’t know if I’m entire­ly con­vinced, but Shulevitz’s argu­ment is wor­thy of con­sid­er­a­tion, unless you believe, with Oscar Wilde, that “all art is quite use­less” and in no need of an apolo­get­ics or a defense to bureau­crats.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Sci­ence Fic­tion Clas­sics Avail­able on the Web (Updat­ed)

Andy Sam­berg Announces Death of Lib­er­al Arts, Cool­ness of Sci­ence Majors at Har­vard Class Day

Ser­i­al Entre­pre­neur Damon Horowitz Says “Quit Your Tech Job and Get a Ph.D. in the Human­i­ties”

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

Virginia Woolf and Friends Dress Up as “Abyssinian Princes” and Fool the British Royal Navy (1910)

in History, Literature, Random | July 11th, 2013

WoolfDreadnought

Click image for larg­er ver­sion

On Feb­ru­ary 7th, 1910, Vir­ginia Woolf (then Vir­ginia Stephen) and five of her Blooms­bury companions—painter Dun­can Grant, Woolf’s broth­er Adri­an, Antho­ny Bux­ton, Guy Rid­ley, and Horace de Vere Cole—boarded the pride of the British Roy­al Navy, the HMS Dread­nought, dressed in black­face and out­landish stage cos­tumes. (In the pho­to above, from left to right.) In what became known as “The Dread­nought Hoax,” the six con­vinced the Dread­nought’s offi­cers that they were the “Emper­or of Abyssinia” (now Ethiopia) and his entourage, and they were received with high hon­ors.

The hoax, mas­ter­mind­ed by Cole, began when he sent a telegram to the ship telling the crew to expect a vis­it from some North African dig­ni­taries. Once on board, the group spoke in accent­ed Latin (quot­ing the Aeneid) and gib­ber­ish. Woolf kept qui­et so as to dis­guise her gen­der. One of the offi­cers on the ship was a cousin of Vir­ginia and Adri­an, but he failed to rec­og­nize them. It wasn’t a flaw­less per­for­mance on either side: at one point, Bux­ton sneezed and almost lost his mus­tache, and the Navy, unable to find an Abyssin­ian flag, flew the flag of Zanz­ibar instead.

The “princes” asked for prayer mats, pre­sent­ed the offi­cers with fake mil­i­tary hon­ors, and exclaimed “bun­ga, bun­ga!” each time they were shown some mar­vel of the ship. The Dread­nought was then, in the words of Woolf’s nephew and biog­ra­ph­er, Quentin Bell, “the flag­ship of the Home Fleet, the most for­mi­da­ble, the most mod­ern, and the most secret man o’ war then afloat.” (This inci­dent is said to be the ori­gin of the ludi­crous phrase “bun­ga, bun­ga,” most asso­ci­at­ed with the exploits of the recent­ly con­vict­ed Sil­vio Berlus­coni.) The next day, Cole anony­mous­ly sent the pho­to­graph at the top to The Dai­ly Mir­ror, reveal­ing the hoax. Accord­ing to Woolf schol­ar Mairead Case—who sees the inci­dent as a pre­cur­sor to Woolf’s gen­der-bend­ing nov­el Orlan­do—the Mir­ror described the “Abyssini­ans” thus:

All the princes wore vari-coloured silk sash­es as tur­bans, set off with dia­mond aigrettes, white gib­bah tunics, over which were cast rich flow­ing robes and round their necks were sus­pend­ed gold chains and jew­eled neck­laces … They also all wore patent leather boots which, Ori­en­tal fash­ion, tapered to a point, the ends pro­ject­ing ful­ly six inch­es beyond the toes. White gloves cov­ered the princes’ hands, and over the gloved fin­gers, they wore gold wed­ding rings – heavy, plain cir­clets, which looked very impres­sive.

DreadnoughtHoaxCartoonDailyMirrorFebruary1910

In a recent­ly dis­cov­ered let­ter, Cole wrote to a friend that the hoax was “glo­ri­ous” and “shriek­ing­ly fun­ny.” The group intend­ed to mock what they saw as an out­mod­ed Vic­to­ri­an impe­ri­al­ism, and they suc­ceed­ed, at least in the pop­u­lar press. The Mir­ror pub­lished the car­toon above and the Roy­al Navy was a laugh­ing­stock for weeks after­ward. None of this pseu­do-racist prankster­ism (which reflect­ed just as bad­ly on the offi­cers) struck the actu­al Emper­or of Ethiopia—Mene­lik II—as par­tic­u­lar­ly fun­ny. When he vis­it­ed Eng­land lat­er that year, he was taunt­ed in the streets by chil­dren shout­ing “Bun­ga! Bun­ga!” and denied per­mis­sion to inspect the navy’s fleet for fear that his vis­it might cause fur­ther embar­rass­ment.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Pat­ti Smith Read from Vir­ginia Woolf, and Hear the Only Sur­viv­ing Record­ing of Woolf’s Voice

Look­ing Inside Darwin’s Room (and Also Where Vir­ginia Woolf, Lord Byron, & Kipling Did Their Thing)

F. Scott Fitzger­ald in Drag (1916)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

« Go Back — More in this category... »
Quantcast