#runcible

Hello Darlings! It's been a while. I'm sifting through Bright Young Things again, scavenging for more Miles because I need it. 😂 I was mostly taking many screenshots for facial expression references, but here are a few GIFs that i've made today. I'll mix in a few screenshots because he's pretty. Somehow I forgot that this smoochy moment existed and its giving me life. She ran across an entire room, dodging people just to give him kissies. She places her hand on his hand, which is holding a cane (unexplained why he has a cane in this scene.. Stephen Tennant reference perhaps?) I've included a few stills for you since it's so quick. I did slow the gif down as much as I could.

Miles and Mummie have a conference before he attempts to get Mrs Ape's attention, or perhaps hook her with the cane to drag her offstage? It didn't work but it was really hilarious to me, like I saw a random moment that Michael created and it was caught on film. A close-up, because I thought it was so cute that he's making that face while shouting at her. Nose wrinkled, eyes squinting, brows angry, mouth growling. The makeup is really doing its job, you can really see his expression despite the light and blur effect from the camera swinging.

Ending with a cute flirty-eyed Miles, because I'm weak for him. Send help.

Lucky me! 827 was my random Dewey number and that's (Non-North American) English humor. I had any number of Pythons, Douglas Adams, or P.G. Wodehouse to choose from, but the books in this category weren't on any online catalog since technically the last twos' novels weren't included. I saw Edward Lear's Nonsense Books and decided to go for those since I knew they were available on Project Gutenberg for free, being old enough to be public domain. While on Gutenberg I also considered going for a William Makepeace Thackeray essay on English Humorists, but a quick glance showed it was going to be a long, dry lecture just to get to the punchline that the upright, respectably brought up Dean Swift wrote a treatise under the pen name "Dr. Shite".

So Edward Lear it was, and if the name sounds familiar but you can't place him he's famous for having written The Owl and the Pussycat and introduced the word "runcible" to English. (No, nobody uses it, except some people call a spork a runcible spoon, which from his illustrations isn't what a runcible spoon is, but word inventors can't be choosers.)

Nonsense books is 4 books of Lear's poems, illustrations and the occasional prose story. It starts off with some limericks which is always nice, unfortunately Lear hasn't quite mastered the form. In nearly all 200 or so of the limericks that appear in the book the last line is just a small rephrase of the first line

There was an Old Person of Buda, Whose conduct grew ruder and ruder, Till at last with a hammer they silenced his clamor. By smashing that Person of Buda.

So, being used to more sophisticated limericks that make use of the whole poem, that was a little disappointing to read. Many make very clever use of the 4 lines they do have though.

There are also fake botanical illustrations of fantastical plants that are cool and interestingly enough a lot of callbacks to previous stories and poems. There's also a pretty funny story of a gentleman at a party declaring Lear didn't exist and that his book dedicated to Edward, Earl of Derby's child relatives proved the Earl himself had written it. Lear burst his bubble on that one.

BEST LINE: "the whole party from the boat was gazing at him with mingled affection and disgust"

SHOULD YOU READ THIS BOOK: If you're looking for some whimsy it's available for free and Owl and the Pussycat is always a good read. There does seem to be some disregard for animal life played off as humor maybe? Oh, and one or two of the limerick's caricatures are racist, so that sucked.

ART PROJECT: In all but one of his Alphabet books (he had 5) Lear uses the Persian King Xerxes as his X, so here they all are colored in along with a couple other illustrations

the best things in life life itself

will be messy

birth cooking sex art

creating feasting becoming

let the juice drip down your chin

lie panting towel under you sweat

forget to notice paint and clay sawdust plaster chips the juicy bits left over from something rather than nothing

Saral: The other are, uh-

Saral: They’re harder to talk to…