Illikipilliky!

Speaking of Edward Lear (which we were doing in the preceding post), in addition to the nonsense poetry and limericks for which he is famous, he was a gifted painter.

Here are two of his creations:

Not too shabby, eh?

According to Wikipedia, Edward Lear (1812 - 1888) was the 21st child of Ann and Jeremiah Lear. From the age of six he suffered frequent grand mal epileptic seizures, bronchitis, asthma, and in later life, partial blindness. He also suffered from periods of severe depression which he referred to as “the Morbids.”

Edward Lear was known to introduce himself with one of his long names, “Mr. Abebika kratoponoko Prizzikalo Kattefello Ablegorabalus Ableborinto phashyph” or “Chakonoton the Cozovex Dossi Fossi Sini Tomentilla Coronilla Polentilla Battledore & Shuttlecock Derry down Derry Dumps” which he based on Aldiborontiphoskyphorniostikos.

You just know I had to look that one up.

Aldiborontiphoskyphorniostikos was a book published in 1825 that contained a game in which players had to read the snippet for each letter of the alphabet as fast as they could without making a mistake. Alternatively, several players could read the snippets in a staggered manner. The snippets for each letter contain tongue-twisting mock-Latin names whose content is cumulatively appended at the end of each new letter snippet. The book is based on Chrononhotonthologos, which in turn was based on Henry Fielding’s Tom Thumb. The book was embellished with sixteen elegantly coloured engravings and sold for one shilling.

The following is the snippet for the letter O:

ODDS NIPPERKINS! cried Mother Bunch on her broomstick, here’s a to-do! as Nicholas Hotch-potch said, Never were such times, as Muley Hassan, Mufti of Moldavia, put on his Barnacles, to see little Tweedle gobble them up, when Kia Khan Kreuse transmogrofied them into Pippins, because Snip’s wife cried, Illikipilliky! lass a-day! ’tis too bad to titter at a body, when Hamet el Mammet, the bottlenosed Barber of Balasora, laughed ha! ha! ha! on beholding the elephant spout mud over the ’Prentice, who pricked his trunk with a needle, as Dicky Snip, the tailor, read the proclamation of Chrononhotonthologos, offering a thousand sequins for taking Bombardinian, Bashaw of three tails, who killed Aldiborontiphoskyphorniostikos.

And you think I’m strange.

Still, we mustn’t be too hard on Mr. Lear. There are, after all, those paintings.

The lands where the jumblies live

The silence is deafening.

No one, no one at all, not one single person left a comment about the poem in the preceding post.

My cyberfriends have abandoned me, all of them gone off,
I suppose, to greener pastures where bloggers exhibit fewer signs of mental instability.

I have to face it. I am talking to myself. Well, I enjoyed my poem even if nobody else did.

In other news, Elizabeth’s blog is broken, kaput, out of order; Reamus has moved again; and Katherine in Kiwi Land made a post about cockroaches and also one about grey house spiders but managed to separate them with one about how to prepare prawns a la TLVD.

I have no idea what TLVD is. Googling the term gave me the following choices:

1. Thang Long Vo Dao
2. Transient Left Ventricular Dilation
3. Tu Luc Van Doan
4. TLVD, a company in New York that has been providing what it calls Design, Interactive, and Motion Graphics services since 2001, specializing in development of branded advertising and interactive experiences.
5. Boomerang Toverland

And that was just on the first page.

I don’t think Katherine meant any of those.

Nonsense poetry has a rich history. Do the names Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear spring to mind?

They should.

Here’s someone reciting one of my favorites:

“The Jumblies” by Edward Lear

and here it is in printed form.

I think I know what happened to all of my cyberfriends.

They went to sea in a sieve.

The Owl and The Pussycat

Anatomy of a post, or How My Mind Works.

In the previous post, I included a photograph taken in 1945 of Coney Island, New York, in which you cannot see the beach for all the New Yorkers. In a comment, Reamus from California said, “I am not in that particular picture, but I am in a similar one no doubt at that very beach a number of 4th of July weekends later. Used to take the subway there all summer back when the world and we were young.”

I replied, “Why would you take the subway all summer long to a beach you couldn’t even see? Or maybe the beach wasn’t what you went to see.” The phrase went to see reminded me of the phrase went to sea which struck me as somewhat ironic since those folks at Coney Island couldn’t see the sea they went to sea to see and that further reminded me of Edward Lear’s poem, “The Owl and the Pussycat”:


The Owl and the Pussycat
by Edward Lear

The Owl and the Pussycat went to sea
In a beautiful pea-green boat,
They took some honey, and plenty of money,
Wrapped up in a five pound note.
The Owl looked up to the stars above,
And sang to a small guitar,
“O lovely Pussy! O Pussy, my love,
What a beautiful Pussy you are,
You are,
You are!
What a beautiful Pussy you are.”

Pussy said to the Owl “You elegant fowl,
How charmingly sweet you sing.
O let us be married, too long we have tarried;
But what shall we do for a ring?”
They sailed away, for a year and a day,
To the land where the Bong-tree grows,
And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood
With a ring at the end of his nose,
His nose,
His nose,
With a ring at the end of his nose.

“Dear Pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling your ring?”
Said the Piggy, “I will.”
So they took it away, and were married next day
By the Turkey who lives on the hill.
They dined on mince, and slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible spoon.
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
They danced by the light of the moon,
The moon,
The moon,
They danced by the light of the moon.


I poked around a little more on the internet and discovered that on May 12, 2000, the following paragraph appeared in the Writer’s Almanac:

It’s the birthday of painter and poet Edward Lear, born in Halloway, England (1812). He was the 20th of 21 children, and was raised by an aunt. He had to scramble to make a living: he traveled to Europe, Asia, and Africa to collect views that he would then turn into paintings to sell to Englishmen at home or abroad. Sometimes he set out a hundred paintings at a time and work on them simultaneously to have enough products to sell. He was a lonely man -- an epileptic who hid his seizures, a homosexual unable to find a mate, and a depressive, subject to what he called “the morbids.” But it’s not for his art or his sadness that he’s remembered, it’s for the little nonsense poems he wrote to give joy to the children of his friends and patrons. He always felt most comfortable around children, and he entertained them with poems such as “The Jumblies” and “The Owl and the Pussycat.” He popularized the limerick too.

That’s him up there in the picture.

And then it occurred to me that May 12 was also my Dad’s birthday -- May 12, 1906 -- and although he was neither an owl nor a pussycat, he went to sea too, though not in a beautiful pea-green boat. He served in the U.S. Navy during World War II as a machinist’s mate on the USS PCE-869, which was a patrol craft escort of the type known as Sub Chaser.

Then it occurred to me that my father died of pancreatic cancer on March 3, 1967, and that the anniversary of his death is just a few days away.

It’s enough to give a person “the morbids.”

And that, more or less, dear reader, is How My Mind Works.