Tag Archives: Ogden Nash

Authors, Poetry, Religion

Looking for the Positives to Share

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My thoughts seem to be a wash today. Every idea I have I doubt, which is normal for me, but today I’m not getting around it. Usually when I feel like this, I try to multitask so I can get something easy done. I burned the brush in the backyard and read an article I thought I’d link to here, but no. It’s too negative. I’m tired of negatives at the moment.

I made a couple changes to comments today. You now have the ability to like comments and subscribe to posts or comments by email. Let me know if it performs as expected (not that I could do anything about it, if it doesn’t).

Faith: God is giving faith to Muslims.

It’s difficult to determine the number of Muslims who’ve converted to Christianity in the United States, but among those who have, Fouad Masri has observed the following two trends: an encounter with a practicing Christian and a vision or dream about Jesus, whom Muslims recognize as the prophet Isa.

“This is freaking out all the imams, because even imams, some of them had a dream of Jesus,” Masri said. “And they’re like, ‘Why did I not see Muhammad? Why did I see Jesus?’”

Critical Theory: Three books by Christians on Critical Race Theory

“Most stories of genies, lamps and wishes illustrate that our desires are discordantly arranged and fatally unwise. Even when we have good intentions, the results fail.” – Tim Keller, NYC

Tim Keller: Above is a somewhat random thought that relates to common themes on this blog. Keller’s last book was on forgiveness.

“At times, he writes, survivors of abuse have been pressured to forgive those abusers and just move on. Or forgiveness is used to cover up the truth about the harm people have done to others. ‘People have used forgiveness as a way of destroying the truth,’ said Keller.”

Here’s an illustration of forgiveness from the many stories people are sharing on Twitter.

https://twitter.com/TonyReinke/status/1659633050354094081
1/6 post thread from Tony Reinke of Desiring God on a time he disagreed with Keller and approached in a self-righteous way.

Ogden Nash: A great truth from this poet of light verse, the New York-born Frederick Ogeden Nash, whose great-great-grand-uncle was the General Nash of Nashville, Tenn.

In chaos sublunary 
What remains constant but buffoonery?

Photo: Postmen on Scooters (1911-17). Harris & Ewing. LOC.

Blogs, Socials, Bookselling, Fiction, Poetry, Reading

Old Ogden Nash Hardcovers, Praising e-Readers, and Brain-Changing Reading

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For some years, I’ve had a water damaged copy of Ogden Nash’s Good Intentions. Here’s a look at a good copy of it; this one has the slip cover too (I hadn’t seen it before).

Yesterday, I found similar red, hardback copies of Many Long Years Ago, a collection of mostly previously published verse from 1931-1945, and The Private Dining Room, new verse published in 1953. I refrained from replacing Good Intentions or buying another volume they had, so you know what that says about me. We don’t need to say it out loud. I also could have purchased one of a couple more recently published anthologies. This is one of them. But, if I do anything, I’d like a set of the five red hardcovers.

Here are a few lines from Many Long Years Ago.

“Who wishes his self-esteem to thrive
Should belong to a girl of almost five.”

“We’ll remind each other it’s smart to be thrifty
And buy our clothes for something-fifty.”

“If turnips were watches they’d make as good eating as turnips.”

Reading: In praise of e-readers and the joy of winning an argument with a print-only reader who has so many books that he loses the ones he has.

How would Jesus advertise? I have a hard time believing Jesus would encourage us to spend millions on advertising his character traits. How many vice is being funded with a Super Bowl ad? But I also have a hard time throwing stones at this.

Does reading change the brain? “When it comes to a cultural trace in the form of literature, we would really like to know whether there is some sort of permanent alteration to the structure of the brain.” They chose Robert Harris’s Pompeii to see if they could detect a small brain change.

Banned Books: Anthony Sacramone has a book challenge for public schools. “Try and get all these at one go onto a public school curriculum (NYC, LA, SF) and see how that goes. I’d love to be proven wrong.”

Mystery: John Wilson reviews another Cameron Winter story, A Strange Habit of Mind, by Andrew Klavan, to be released in a few days.

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Poetry, Religion, The Press

Don’t Call It a Culture War. Call It Being Salt.

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Last week, I wrote about an English teacher encouraging her students to read challenged books. Yesterday, World’s Doubletake podcast released a story on diversity libraries in schools and parents and teachers pushing back against school boards who advocate immoral reading. They mention a book “about a 17-year-old alcoholic girl in a sexual relationship with a 38-year-old man. . . . Other books describe teenagers in homosexual activity with adults. Others depict incest.

“Some parents, teachers, three school board members, and a librarian defended the material at that 2020 board meeting. They said young kids should be able to see themselves ‘reflected’ in the books. They said it was important to read about pedophilia because it was, quote, ‘culturally enriching.'”

This may be what school-choice supporters need to fuel their fire.

However, some have reacted negatively to this and any aspect that smells of a culture war. They would much rather Christians keep to themselves: “For all the voices calling our attention and energy to school-board politics right now, discipling our kids in a holistic and faithful way is a more constant, difficult, and worthwhile task.” Influencing your school board or, I guess, being a voice in your community is not within the scope of discipling your children. Maybe if we thought it as being the salt of the earth?

The World and Everything in It, another excellent podcast, has a segment reacting to the above article.

Discipline: “Religious discipline confounds the modern sensibility because it upends our ideas about the value of discipline and sacrifice. To a person steeped in modern heroics, religious discipline looks solely like abstention, with none of the benefits of lifestyle discipline. It is giving up pleasurable things just to make your life less enjoyable; it is overcoming, ignoring, or dismissing your own desires solely from masochism, or because of communal expectations, which is the worst possible sin these days, to do something because someone or some group expects you to.”

Faith: “O Timothy, guard the deposit entrusted to you. Avoid the irreverent babble and contradictions of what is falsely called ‘knowledge,’ for by professing it some have swerved from the faith.” (1 Tim. 6:20 ESV)

Poetry: A cottage in which John Milton resided for a short spell survives and is open to the public for half a year. A couple weeks ago, a group met there to read Paradise Lost.

Used Bookstores: Carl Lavigne writes about his time at The Dawn Treader Book Shop in Ann Arbor, MI. “Is there a German word for being surrounded by stacks of once-feted, now forgotten novels piled in a deeply haunted basement wondering, ‘What if this is where my book ends up?’

“A customer demands a book recommendation. ‘Something good.’
‘Sorry,’ I joke. ‘Fresh out.'”

Poetry: Speaking of Ogden Nash (see post earlier this week), his last surviving daughter, Linell Chenault Smith, “an extremely classy woman,” died last month at age 90.

Photo: YMCA, Geneva, New York. 1995. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Poetry

‘Portrait of the Artist as a Prematurely Old Man’

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One of the shifting and inchoate goals I pursue in this blog, when I think of it, is promoting Ogden Nash as a great American light poet. Above, he reads his poem, “Portrait of the Artist as a Prematurely Old Man.” It’s about sin, and not doctrinally correct. But perceptive nonetheless.

Religion

Faith lessons under the bathtub

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This 1920 American film is only a little older than my pipes.

Ogden Nash wrote a poem long ago about owning an old house. In it he parodied a popular line from the popular poet Edgar A. Guest: 

It takes a heap o’ livin’ 
To make a house a home.

Nash’s poem is called, with typical Nashian disregard for titling conventions, “Lines to a World-Famous Poet Who Failed to Complete a World-Famous Poem, or, Come Clean, Mr. Guest!” He discusses facts about home-ownership that Guest’s poem fails to mention.

It contains the lines,

And unless you’re spiritually allied to the little Dutch boy who went around inspectin’ dikes lookin’ for leaks to put his thumb in,
 It takes a heap o’ plumbin’.

These lines have haunted my lonely nights over all the years I’ve owned a house built in the same year as the Great Stock Market Crash. Yesterday I had a plumber out to clear a clog in my bathtub drain, a fairly common experience around here. And he gave me the Doleful Word I’d been expecting so long – “We can clear it out, but you’ve got pipes leaking in the basement, and you need some major work done down there.”

He went on to say that he wasn’t qualified to talk to me about the big job himself. But they could have a specialist come out to look at it today. He did, however, take a substantial down payment.

Hence, last night was an exercise in faith. It was one of those times when I have to say, “God has always made sure my financial needs were covered. I believe He’ll look after me now. And if He doesn’t (from a human point of view; it’s not out of the question he might want me to lose the place) then that will be in His blessing too.”

When I got up this morning, having uploaded last night the big script I’d been working on, there was a note from my boss: “We’ve got lots of work coming in, if you’re available.”

These are the words you want to hear on a day like this.

I feel that blessings of this kind coming from God must be acknowledged. And this is my acknowledgement.

Reviews

Amazon Prime review: ‘One Touch of Venus’

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I’m reading Tolkien’s Beren and Luthien right now, and haven’t finished it yet. So I must find something else to post about. (Note to bloggers: Try to have interesting lives, because if you haven’t got a book review handy every day, you need something more interesting to write about than dentist visits and plumbing emergencies. Unless you’re James Lileks. Addendum to self: I’m not James Lileks.)

I think I mentioned that I’ve been watching old TV and movies on Amazon Prime. One thing that popped up in my suggestions the other day, which I selected, I’m not sure why, was an old 1940s musical called One Touch of Venus. It was a reasonable hit on Broadway, starring Mary Martin, and was made into a movie with Ava Gardner in 1948 – though they reportedly cut a lot of the songs (I’ve never seen it). The version I saw was a different one, done live on NBC TV in 1955, performed, according to the credits, by the Texas State Fair Musical Theater organization. The cast, most of whom are trying too hard in the tradition of live theater, features actress Janet Blair as Venus. The only other familiar face was Louis Nye in a small role.

It’s got a silly premise – a feckless barber named Rodney Hatch gets into an argument with an art collector over an ancient Greek statue. The collector declares the statue (which is surprisingly non-nude, and also bears a suspicious resemblance to a department store mannequin painted white) the image of female physical perfection. Indignantly, Rodney slips onto the statue’s finger the engagement ring he recently bought for his girlfriend – to prove that her hands are just as well-proportioned as a goddess’s. This action brings the statue to life, and Venus proceeds to ensnare Rodney in her charms, break his engagement, and (SPOILER ALERT) abandon him in the end to return to her worshipers (who appear, oddly, to be Hindu or Muslim). Rodney ends up with an entirely different girl from his original girlfriend, which strikes me as an odd plot resolution. I kind of felt sorry for the original girl. I probably dozed off during a scene where we learn why she’s unworthy of a barber.

A fact I missed going in dawned on me suddenly as Rodney was singing one of the production’s comic numbers – “How Much I Love You.”

“More than a catbird hates a cat, or a criminal hates a clue –

“As the high court loathes perjurious oaths, that’s how much I love you.”

 I tried to figure out where I’d heard this before. Finally I realized that I hadn’t heard it, I’d read it. It was published as a poem, and its writer was the great Ogden Nash. Then I remembered that Nash had written the lyrics for a Broadway production called “One Touch of Venus.” (The music, you may be surprised to learn, was by Kurt Weill, better known for “Mack the Knife.”)

My major reaction to the whole thing was, “Wow, culture sure has changed since the 1950s. They’d never do this play today.” Then I looked and found that it’s been revived several times recently. Judging by the sexual (or gender, if you prefer) norms portrayed in the original show, I have to assume considerable revision has been done.

I found a YouTube video of somebody singing “How Much I Love You,” but the actor was so annoying I refuse to post it. You can look it up yourself if you’re curious. They changed some of the lyrics too.

Goofing, Poetry

Happy Valentine’s Day

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My love for you is like a slough
of water flowing out
that soaks the town of Kilkey Down
whose folks pray for a drought.

That one’s for you, dear reader, but here’s another bound to enliven a lover’s heart. From Ogden Nash.

A flea and a fly in a flue
Were imprisoned, so what could they do?
Said the fly, “let us flee!”
“Let us fly!” said the flea.
So they flew through a flaw in the flue.

Isn’t that sweet? Here’s more on Ogden Nash in The Hindu.

Mimi Matthews has a few creative verses for telling someone who may or may not be interested in you to seek other pastures.

Don’t credit the advertisements
In paper or in serial,
You cannot manufacture charms
With ugly raw material.