Wow the power of search! I thought I was going to have to paraphrase from a vague memory, but no — here from the last chapter of Ulysses is a version of that misunderstanding joke:
—
I hate that confession when I used to go to Father Corrigan he touched me father and what harm if he did where and I said on the canal bank like a fool but whereabouts on your person my child on the leg behind high up was it yes rather high up was it where you sit down yes O Lord couldnt he say bottom right out and have done with it what has that got to do with it and did you whatever way he put it I forget no father
—
I meant to post script, with the right frame of mind you can still take “canal bank” as rather suggestive, and an even more serious offense then!
It works better in print than it would in real life, but notice that there’s no comma before “myself”.
And I would consider Baldo’s reply to be snarky rather than stupid.
Mitch4: I’m impressed that you made it to the last chapter of Ulysses! I guess Tom the Dancing Bug lied to me:
I don’t think this is supposed to be kids are stupid. I think it’s just a simply joke and would work just as well with an adult foil.
For what it’s worth *I* giggled.
Baldo didn’t say it with a wink or smirk, no sign he was joking or even being a smartass – he’s just a moron. I want to see the next frame, where that guy punches Baldo in the throat.
10,000th comment (since the January reboot)
Oh Lord, it’s a joke and not a commentary on today’s youth.
If Baldo was being anything but serious, that’s an incedible poker face.
Mark M, I lean toward “commentary…” since cartoonists so often fall back on “Kids these days, so stupid, right?”
Well, you can lean that way I guess, but seriously, it’s just a silly joke. The Born Loser would have done it with the middle age protagonist.
“I want to see the next frame, where that guy punches Baldo in the throat.”
Jeebus! Anger issues much?! It’s just a silly joke!
So what you’re trying to say is that it’s possible to read Ulysses? Because I disagree.
I read the topic line as “Billo” being stupid, which was a weird thing to read here.
This is Funky Winkerbean caliber.
I would go with Arthur’s “snarky” hypothesis, but the Baldo would have needed an “eye-roll” or something else to express the “rimshot” character of the silly joke. That wide-eyed and slack-jawed stare really does make him look incredibly stupid.
P.S. @ Lord Flatulence – OK, it wasn’t good, but it wasn’t that bad.
P.P.S. @ Mitch4 – I suffered through Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury” in senior-year English class, and have been rather happy that I never had to read a word of “Ulysses” (until now). I have read comments that claim it is a funny book, but I think the humor is beyond me.
I consider it axiomatic that anything you’re forced to read in high school is awful. It could be the best book ever written, but the very act of being forced to read it transforms it into Lord of the Flies.
Is that joke really as old as it sounds?
@ CIDU Bill – That’s not entirely true: “Huckleberry Finn” was on the same reading list. It was excellent for the first 85%, but did turn into worthless inanity as soon as Tom Sawyer showed up. Another good book was Hardy’s “Return of the Native“, but I think I was the only student in the class who liked it. On the other hand, “Crime and Punishment” was horrible, is horrible, and will always be horrible, and I can’t say anything good (or bad) about “Moby Dick” (because I read Cliff’s Notes instead).
I never really understood “The Great Gatsby” in school, but when I found a copy (in English!) in our local library, I decided to give it a second chance. I don’t think I would read it a third time, but I was glad I did read it again: it was much better than I remembered.
Reminds me of something I saw on Facebook this morning:
“I asked the associate at Home Depot if this bug spray was good for wasps. He said, ‘No. It kills them.'”
It might be deadpan humor, but that’s awful hard to convey in a comic strip.
Whenever I say I “need to put gas on the car,” Mrs. Shrug helpfully suggests it would be better *in* the car. But when I say that I “need to put gas in the car,” she comments that it would be best if I put it specifically in the gas tank. So, given that and similar wheezes (some of which I use on her wording in other situtations), I certainly read that as this guy is just being a bit of a deadpan joker, and not a moron.
I loved ULYSSES when I read it in college and recently bought a copy for upcomingre-reading. (And I just finished re-reading MOBY DICK.) On the other hand, never cared strongly one way or another for THE GREAT GATSBY or for Fitzgerald’s work in general.
Would we be having this conversation if it was a typical one-shot panel showing a generic middle-aged clerk making the same remark?
The climax of Moby Dick was incredibly powerful, but it took forever to get there (the wording of this comment wasn’t intentional, but was left in once noticed)
I don’t remember how we got to literature, but I KNOW this group will greatly ‘preciate these (and yes, you could just go to Shakespeare and press forward, except for one between Angelou and Salinger) . . .
I hope Dave Kellett continues these – so many to choose from!
Kilby: The first time I read “The Sound the the Fury,” I couldn’t understand what was happening at all. Then I read some materials explaining what was happening, and then when I reread “The Sound and the Fury,” I actually enjoyed it quite a bit. I realize this isn’t exactly a stunning endorsement of a book, though – generally, if I have to read something else to explain what I’m reading, I just give up on the book. :)
Shrug: “put gas on the car” sounds very odd to me. Is this a regional usage?
I think if you work in retail, you perfect the straight face to use when you say such things. Otherwise you wouldn’t work in retail for long.
How would we have responded had this been done in the ‘Retail’ comic?
“Whenever I say I need to put gas on the car”
Why would you say that? If I heard that I would at least question what exactly you meant.
@ Winter Wallaby – Actually, I found the technical details of the way “The Sound and the Fury” was printed(*) more interesting than the story. Our teacher was kind enough to let us read a set of explanations and an interview between Faulkner and some college students, and it was very gratifying to discover that those (older) students were having as much or more trouble with the book than we were having.
P.S. (*) – Which is why I can remember this, but not the story: Faulkner originally wanted the text to appear in four colors, one for each temporal period. The publisher refused (because of printing costs), and they compromised, settling on font changes instead. Unfortunately, instead of using four different type styles (which would have been very difficult at the time), the publisher limited the book to just “Roman” and “Italics“, and the convention was that any style shift meant a temporal scene shift. Therefore, it is impossible to say (just from the font) which time period any section is in, one has to keep track of the sequential changes and pay attention to clues in the text. Even worse, there were a number of mistakes made when the book was set, which resulted in a few time shifts that are not marked by font shifts, and a few superfluous font shifts within a passage that should have been all one time period. Fortunately, these “errata” were included in the notes that we received while we were working through the book. Without those notes it would have been hopeless.
@Brian in StL: ““Whenever I say I need to put gas on the car”
Why would you say that?
****************
To fit in with the other 5,649 hits the phrase gets when googled?
Some therein suggest it’s a Minnesota/North Dakota regionalism. Certainly it seems to me that I’ve heard it that way all of my life. (Mrs. Shrug, mostly an ex-Californian, apparently never had before moving here.)
I hugely profitted by using Stuart Gilbert’s book JAMES JOYCE’S ULYSSES as a companion/cheatsheet when reading ULYSSES itself. This (and similar works emphasizing hidden structures in the novel) have fallen out of favor to more recent critics, but I say pooh to them. I like what I like, and the appeal of seeing ULYSSES through the lens of Gilbert’s ordering reminds me of the pleasures of “solving” the most intriicate of detective stories (or, if you prefer, the world’s first 800-page Sudoku).
” (Mrs. Shrug, mostly an ex-Californian, apparently never had before moving here.)”
I have *never* heard “Put gas on the car” and I would definitely respond with either genuine puzzlement and confusion or a, entirely deserved in my mind, smart-assed “wouldn’t it be better to put it *in* the car”.
My mother once told a joke about taking expressions literally about a kid who responded to “Be careful how you step in those pies” with… well, my response was why in the heck would anyone say ‘be careful how you do something’ when they mean ‘be careful *not* to do something’. … Hmm, come to think of it shouldn’t my response be why the heck was the mother leaving the pies on the floor?
Kilby: Thanks, that’s really interesting! Given that Faulkner’s original plan was for it to be clear to the reader which time period they were reading, I wonder why he didn’t choose some other mechanism to make it clear, like putting [A], [B], [C], or [D] to mark off each change. Sure, it wouldn’t be as elegant as having four colors, or even four fonts, but if he originally wrote the book intending that we would know what time period was being referred to, taking that out seems like a really big change.
Shrug, thanks for bringing up the Stuart Gilbert. My main problem with him was that I could never remember who was Stuart Gilbert and who was Gilbert Stuart. A book on Ulysses I enjoyed and found very helpful, but not for use in a read-along-with-the-novel way, was Robert Adams https://smile.amazon.com/Surface-Symbol-Consistency-Joyces-Ulysses/dp/0195004671 . Birds nest women run him.
But you know what? While of course it adds something to have the schema and think about the Homeric parallels, and get some help with opaque passages, ultimately those are not really necessary — IF you are prepared to tolerate not making sense of many opaque passages but continuing to read on and gather what is happening and how it all sounds.
@Woozy: “I have *never* heard “Put gas on the car”
You need to hang around with more Minnesotans. It’s O.K.; we don’t bite. (Aside from the mosquitoes, anyway.)
What always puzzled me as a kid was the expression “gas up the car.” Surely when filling a gas tank, the gas is going down, not up?
Kilby says: “I never really understood “The Great Gatsby” in school, but when I found a copy (in English!) in our local library, I decided to give it a second chance. I don’t think I would read it a third time, but I was glad I did read it again: it was much better than I remembered.”
Cartoon on giving an author a second chance:
Eventually I read Gatsby for a class, but in college or in fact grad school. But in high school I did a lot of exploratory reading on my own, and that included a lot of Lost Generation. I wrote a paper for the luminary Wayne C. Booth about some theoretical points about critics delivering evaluations of literature, and made Fitzgerald one of my central cases. My view was that there are reasons for *admiring* Gatsby but the greater novel for sure, for readers, is Tender is the Night.
Andréa – I find it interesting to note which of those Sheldon comics has been purchased and the ones that have not.
P.S. We generally refer to him as “F. Scott Fitzgerald”. Do you know what that “F.” stands for? In full, he was Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald.
Filling UP the gas tank = gas UP the car.
“This round of drinks is on me!”
“Don’t you find it difficult to balance them all?”
Hmmm… I never read the Great Gatsby in high school and somehow I had a completely different idea what it was. I read it about 7 years ago and it was very different than what I thought it’d be. My experience is different then everyone else’s. I didn’t care for it at all.
In J R by William Gaddis there is a guy (one of the teachers or coaches at the Long Island middle school where much of the book is set) who, when someone excuses himself to go to the restroom, will call out after him, “Have one on me!”. Very odd to guess what he means.
Like this?
I have this weird theory that if I need somebody to explain to me why Great Gatsby is… great, then it isn’t.
I finally read it a couple of years ago and came away thinking “So that’s it?”
I commented to Robert some years ago that I had realized that I was not well read. I had not read most of the classics. I know the books. I know the characters. I know the plots. I just have never actually read the books. He wanted to know how I got away with same and still graduated from high school and college without doing so. I don’t know. I just know the books without having read them. I first found this out in sophomore English in high school (we did not have freshmen that was junior high 9th grade) when we were suppose to read Anthony and Cleopatra. I did not read it. I kept raising my hand and answering questions in class. My friend at the time – a future boyfriend before Robert – could not understand how I did it. I just knew the answers.
Robert watched me write a book report in college without reading the book – in this case – read the first chapter, read 3 chapters randomly in the middle. Read the last chapter. Write the book report.
Well, I have recently had my comeuppance. Robert had found me a copy of a book called “Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Four Kings” I am reading it. After reading a chapter (fun reading I actually read the book) I turned back to the front of the book and double checked that it was a US written book (and not British written) and had been a book of the month club book in 1950 (meaning it is for regular people and not scholars) as I had read. I have a fairly good vocabulary, but I think I need a dictionary with me to read this book. I suppose it meets the immediate purpose of reading it – I try to read something philosophical or educational on the Jewish High Holy days to make them different as I do not belong to a synagogue (although I watch services on JBS on cable). Well this book is serving the purpose of making me more humble as I am having so much trouble with the vocabulary. Perhaps if I not jumped over reading all those other books in the past I would not have this problem.
Overall, I agree with CIDU BIll that the majority of books assigned in high school are not such great reading. Hated Gatsby and Moby Dick, didn’t care for Catcher in the Rye. Tolerated Animal Farm, detested Babbit. On the other hand, I was one of the few who liked Great Expectations, and I thought Huckleberry Finn was great. And in 1970 I was introduced to a whole new world when eighth grade literature assigned The Hobbit. Went right down to the public library and checked out the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
So that dress pictured above is a wedding dress? (I had to look it up via Google Reverse-Image Search.) I would have thought it was a cocktail dress.
Rimshot/eyeroll…
Frankly I’m finding the book thread more interesting than the comic itself.
Some years ago I started reading one of the old Icelandic Sagas (this particular one happened to be of a king named Olaf Tryggvason), and it was in the form of a rather fragile large and thick century-old print edition that had been kicking around the house for a long time, apparently without much previous notice by me.
While I generally enjoyed reading it, I found it difficult to keep the momentum going. I never finished it. I still would like to try other Sagas. I suspect it might be the particular translation that I was finding lackluster?
And then there’s the paperback Asimov novel I, Robot that I’ve brought along on two summer vacations now but still haven’t gotten around to starting.
I hear it’s good?
:-)
DanV: I didn’t take Bill to be saying that books assigned in high school are bad, so much as the fact that you’re being forced to read a book can transform an otherwise good book into a bad one. Or perhaps I’m reading my opinion into Bill’s comment, because that’s how I feel. “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter” is one of my favorite books now, but when I was forced to read it in high school, I just had to slog through it. (Some of that may be different life experiences, I dunno.)
Brian Austin: “I, Robot that I . . . still haven’t gotten around to starting.”
OH SWEET JESUS, WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?! READ IT NOW! :)
Mitch4: Getting back to the theme of this blog, I don’t get that Dostoyevsky comic. People do give authors that they didn’t like the first time around a second chance, particularly when the author is supposed to be one of the greats. But why is that funny?
You’re correct, WW: I’m of the opinion that high school English teachers can suck very drop of enjoyment out of even the greatest of books.
Years after high school I read and enjoyed Tale of Two Cities. At the time, though, it was my good luck that my cousin had just been forced to read it, and she gave me a good enough summary that I aced the exam.
A 30-question exam on the minutiae of a great work of literature. Seriously, why teach it at all?
But that said, Dan V was correct in my assessment of Lord of the Flies, which nobody but English teachers can tolerate.
My best guess is that he’s giving Dostoyevsky a chance to put him to sleep. Safer than chemicals, and just as effective.
Ah, “Lord of the Flies”, the book with a major plot point that you can start fires with negative diopter lenses. No, I didn’t read it, but I’ve read *about* it.
With admiration for the excellent poker face?
Wow! I received the honor of posting the 10,000th comment (since the reboot) AND this is the first time anyone’s ever acknowledged and responded to one of my comments! Double delight! Too bad the responder only did so because he takes everything literally. Oh well, I’ll take what I can get.
Brian, the original Asimov “I, Robot” is not really a novel, but a collection of linked and consistent short stories.
There are plenty of good books like that. For probably okay reasons, sometimes they get labelled as a novel, the “chapters” get numbers and lose the titles they had as published stories, and maybe there is some rewriting or added bridge material. But the book’s copyright page may well say what the original publications were.
A really great book with that sort of genesis is Pnin by Nabokov. Some critics are so impressed by the unity and patterning of the book (e.g., the chapters sort of alternate with relatively private and relatively public concerns), that they claim he wrote it as a novel all along, but made sure there was enough closure to each episode that he could sell them as freestanding stories to The New Yorker.
Bill: Personally, I don’t put the blame on anything my English high school teachers did. For me, it was just the fact that I was required to read a book that made it work, rather than enjoyable.
The Bad Seed: Do you seriously mean that no one has ever responded to any of your comments? That seems surprising, and maybe I’m taking you too literally. Anyway, if so, here is a third response.
I saw the Family Guy version of The Great Gatsby, so I’m good.
Sometimes they do “fix-up” novels, where the author uses the original shorts but makes some changes and/or provides linking passages to improve continuity.
Yep. In fact, “I, Robot” is a fix-up novel.
I agree with Winter Wallaby: I’m sure that I’ve replied or commented upon a “bad seed” item at some point or another, but I have no idea how to find it now.
Kilby: You replied to TBS here. So I guess I took their comment too literally?
Anyway, TBS, now you have a bunch of comments in a thread, and a whole discussion just about you! Happy Birthday!
I wish we still had larK’s plug-in that let us search for individual commenters.
Getting back off the subject: I think DanV was exceptionally lucky. When my English teacher assigned us a book by Tolkien, I was really looking forward to it, but soon discovered that his “Sir Gawain & the Green Knight” was an incredibly tedious translation of an ancient English poem into modern English.
One aspect that I still hold against Fitzgerald is that he (supposedly) wrote “Gatsby” with the express intention that it was to become “great literature”. I ran into this pretension again when reading “My Family and Other Animals” by Gerald Durrell, and again when I read his biography. He himself was not the offender, but rather his brother, Lawrence Durrell, who is quoted on more than one occasion as stating that he was working on “great literature”, and complaining about “disturbances” that were keeping him from it. I’ve never been able to find any evidence that would suggest that I would enjoy anything that Lawrence Durrell wrote. I much prefer the unpretentious, and very amusing works by Gerald Durrell.
“I wish we still had larK’s plug-in that let us search for individual commenters.”
It appears to work fine, even though it still has the colors & design of the old site. Perhaps Bill could install a link to it here (or on the “random comments” page)?
Yeah, I still use that. I prefer to search for “everyone” and scroll down to the last followed link the open threads that have been updated since.
So do I.
As do I. Would be helpful if the coloration could be changed slightly so visited links are more prominent :-)
Dave in Boston, there are extensions for browsers that will change the color of links. I use Link Visitor.
Comics I Don't Understand 
Wow the power of search! I thought I was going to have to paraphrase from a vague memory, but no — here from the last chapter of Ulysses is a version of that misunderstanding joke:
—
I hate that confession when I used to go to Father Corrigan he touched me father and what harm if he did where and I said on the canal bank like a fool but whereabouts on your person my child on the leg behind high up was it yes rather high up was it where you sit down yes O Lord couldnt he say bottom right out and have done with it what has that got to do with it and did you whatever way he put it I forget no father
—
I meant to post script, with the right frame of mind you can still take “canal bank” as rather suggestive, and an even more serious offense then!
It works better in print than it would in real life, but notice that there’s no comma before “myself”.
And I would consider Baldo’s reply to be snarky rather than stupid.
Mitch4: I’m impressed that you made it to the last chapter of Ulysses! I guess Tom the Dancing Bug lied to me:
https://www.gocomics.com/super-fun-pak-comix/2014/11/22
I don’t think this is supposed to be kids are stupid. I think it’s just a simply joke and would work just as well with an adult foil.
For what it’s worth *I* giggled.
Baldo didn’t say it with a wink or smirk, no sign he was joking or even being a smartass – he’s just a moron. I want to see the next frame, where that guy punches Baldo in the throat.
10,000th comment (since the January reboot)
Oh Lord, it’s a joke and not a commentary on today’s youth.
If Baldo was being anything but serious, that’s an incedible poker face.
Mark M, I lean toward “commentary…” since cartoonists so often fall back on “Kids these days, so stupid, right?”
Well, you can lean that way I guess, but seriously, it’s just a silly joke. The Born Loser would have done it with the middle age protagonist.
“I want to see the next frame, where that guy punches Baldo in the throat.”
Jeebus! Anger issues much?! It’s just a silly joke!
So what you’re trying to say is that it’s possible to read Ulysses? Because I disagree.
I read the topic line as “Billo” being stupid, which was a weird thing to read here.
This is Funky Winkerbean caliber.
I would go with Arthur’s “snarky” hypothesis, but the Baldo would have needed an “eye-roll” or something else to express the “rimshot” character of the silly joke. That wide-eyed and slack-jawed stare really does make him look incredibly stupid.
P.S. @ Lord Flatulence – OK, it wasn’t good, but it wasn’t that bad.
P.P.S. @ Mitch4 – I suffered through Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury” in senior-year English class, and have been rather happy that I never had to read a word of “Ulysses” (until now). I have read comments that claim it is a funny book, but I think the humor is beyond me.
I consider it axiomatic that anything you’re forced to read in high school is awful. It could be the best book ever written, but the very act of being forced to read it transforms it into Lord of the Flies.
Is that joke really as old as it sounds?
@ CIDU Bill – That’s not entirely true: “Huckleberry Finn” was on the same reading list. It was excellent for the first 85%, but did turn into worthless inanity as soon as Tom Sawyer showed up. Another good book was Hardy’s “Return of the Native“, but I think I was the only student in the class who liked it. On the other hand, “Crime and Punishment” was horrible, is horrible, and will always be horrible, and I can’t say anything good (or bad) about “Moby Dick” (because I read Cliff’s Notes instead).
I never really understood “The Great Gatsby” in school, but when I found a copy (in English!) in our local library, I decided to give it a second chance. I don’t think I would read it a third time, but I was glad I did read it again: it was much better than I remembered.
Reminds me of something I saw on Facebook this morning:
“I asked the associate at Home Depot if this bug spray was good for wasps. He said, ‘No. It kills them.'”
It might be deadpan humor, but that’s awful hard to convey in a comic strip.
Whenever I say I “need to put gas on the car,” Mrs. Shrug helpfully suggests it would be better *in* the car. But when I say that I “need to put gas in the car,” she comments that it would be best if I put it specifically in the gas tank. So, given that and similar wheezes (some of which I use on her wording in other situtations), I certainly read that as this guy is just being a bit of a deadpan joker, and not a moron.
I loved ULYSSES when I read it in college and recently bought a copy for upcomingre-reading. (And I just finished re-reading MOBY DICK.) On the other hand, never cared strongly one way or another for THE GREAT GATSBY or for Fitzgerald’s work in general.
Would we be having this conversation if it was a typical one-shot panel showing a generic middle-aged clerk making the same remark?
The climax of Moby Dick was incredibly powerful, but it took forever to get there (the wording of this comment wasn’t intentional, but was left in once noticed)
I don’t remember how we got to literature, but I KNOW this group will greatly ‘preciate these (and yes, you could just go to Shakespeare and press forward, except for one between Angelou and Salinger) . . .
ANATOMY OF:
SHAKESPEARE – http://www.sheldoncomics.com/archive/180723.html
MARK TWAIN – http://www.sheldoncomics.com/archive/180725.html
MARY SHELLEY – http://www.sheldoncomics.com/archive/180727.html
SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE – http://www.sheldoncomics.com/archive/180730.html
ISAAC ASIMOV – http://www.sheldoncomics.com/archive/180801.html
EMILY DICKINSON – http://www.sheldoncomics.com/archive/180803.html
HERMAN MELVILLE – http://www.sheldoncomics.com/archive/180806.html
J.R.R. TOLKIEN – http://www.sheldoncomics.com/archive/180808.html
THE BROTHERS GRIMM – http://www.sheldoncomics.com/archive/180810.html
SUN TZU – http://www.sheldoncomics.com/archive/180816.html
FRANK HERBERT – http://www.sheldoncomics.com/archive/180817.html
JANE AUSTEN – http://www.sheldoncomics.com/archive/180820.html
CAROLYN KEENE – http://www.sheldoncomics.com/archive/180822.html
MAYA ANGELOU – http://www.sheldoncomics.com/archive/180824.html
J.D. SALINGER – http://www.sheldoncomics.com/archive/180907.html
I hope Dave Kellett continues these – so many to choose from!
Kilby: The first time I read “The Sound the the Fury,” I couldn’t understand what was happening at all. Then I read some materials explaining what was happening, and then when I reread “The Sound and the Fury,” I actually enjoyed it quite a bit. I realize this isn’t exactly a stunning endorsement of a book, though – generally, if I have to read something else to explain what I’m reading, I just give up on the book. :)
Shrug: “put gas on the car” sounds very odd to me. Is this a regional usage?
I think if you work in retail, you perfect the straight face to use when you say such things. Otherwise you wouldn’t work in retail for long.
How would we have responded had this been done in the ‘Retail’ comic?
“Whenever I say I need to put gas on the car”
Why would you say that? If I heard that I would at least question what exactly you meant.
@ Winter Wallaby – Actually, I found the technical details of the way “The Sound and the Fury” was printed(*) more interesting than the story. Our teacher was kind enough to let us read a set of explanations and an interview between Faulkner and some college students, and it was very gratifying to discover that those (older) students were having as much or more trouble with the book than we were having.
P.S. (*) – Which is why I can remember this, but not the story: Faulkner originally wanted the text to appear in four colors, one for each temporal period. The publisher refused (because of printing costs), and they compromised, settling on font changes instead. Unfortunately, instead of using four different type styles (which would have been very difficult at the time), the publisher limited the book to just “Roman” and “Italics“, and the convention was that any style shift meant a temporal scene shift. Therefore, it is impossible to say (just from the font) which time period any section is in, one has to keep track of the sequential changes and pay attention to clues in the text. Even worse, there were a number of mistakes made when the book was set, which resulted in a few time shifts that are not marked by font shifts, and a few superfluous font shifts within a passage that should have been all one time period. Fortunately, these “errata” were included in the notes that we received while we were working through the book. Without those notes it would have been hopeless.
@Brian in StL: ““Whenever I say I need to put gas on the car”
Why would you say that?
****************
To fit in with the other 5,649 hits the phrase gets when googled?
Some therein suggest it’s a Minnesota/North Dakota regionalism. Certainly it seems to me that I’ve heard it that way all of my life. (Mrs. Shrug, mostly an ex-Californian, apparently never had before moving here.)
I hugely profitted by using Stuart Gilbert’s book JAMES JOYCE’S ULYSSES as a companion/cheatsheet when reading ULYSSES itself. This (and similar works emphasizing hidden structures in the novel) have fallen out of favor to more recent critics, but I say pooh to them. I like what I like, and the appeal of seeing ULYSSES through the lens of Gilbert’s ordering reminds me of the pleasures of “solving” the most intriicate of detective stories (or, if you prefer, the world’s first 800-page Sudoku).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert_schema_for_Ulysses
” (Mrs. Shrug, mostly an ex-Californian, apparently never had before moving here.)”
I have *never* heard “Put gas on the car” and I would definitely respond with either genuine puzzlement and confusion or a, entirely deserved in my mind, smart-assed “wouldn’t it be better to put it *in* the car”.
My mother once told a joke about taking expressions literally about a kid who responded to “Be careful how you step in those pies” with… well, my response was why in the heck would anyone say ‘be careful how you do something’ when they mean ‘be careful *not* to do something’. … Hmm, come to think of it shouldn’t my response be why the heck was the mother leaving the pies on the floor?
Kilby: Thanks, that’s really interesting! Given that Faulkner’s original plan was for it to be clear to the reader which time period they were reading, I wonder why he didn’t choose some other mechanism to make it clear, like putting [A], [B], [C], or [D] to mark off each change. Sure, it wouldn’t be as elegant as having four colors, or even four fonts, but if he originally wrote the book intending that we would know what time period was being referred to, taking that out seems like a really big change.
Shrug, thanks for bringing up the Stuart Gilbert. My main problem with him was that I could never remember who was Stuart Gilbert and who was Gilbert Stuart. A book on Ulysses I enjoyed and found very helpful, but not for use in a read-along-with-the-novel way, was Robert Adams https://smile.amazon.com/Surface-Symbol-Consistency-Joyces-Ulysses/dp/0195004671 . Birds nest women run him.
But you know what? While of course it adds something to have the schema and think about the Homeric parallels, and get some help with opaque passages, ultimately those are not really necessary — IF you are prepared to tolerate not making sense of many opaque passages but continuing to read on and gather what is happening and how it all sounds.
@Woozy: “I have *never* heard “Put gas on the car”
You need to hang around with more Minnesotans. It’s O.K.; we don’t bite. (Aside from the mosquitoes, anyway.)
What always puzzled me as a kid was the expression “gas up the car.” Surely when filling a gas tank, the gas is going down, not up?
Kilby says: “I never really understood “The Great Gatsby” in school, but when I found a copy (in English!) in our local library, I decided to give it a second chance. I don’t think I would read it a third time, but I was glad I did read it again: it was much better than I remembered.”
Cartoon on giving an author a second chance:
Eventually I read Gatsby for a class, but in college or in fact grad school. But in high school I did a lot of exploratory reading on my own, and that included a lot of Lost Generation. I wrote a paper for the luminary Wayne C. Booth about some theoretical points about critics delivering evaluations of literature, and made Fitzgerald one of my central cases. My view was that there are reasons for *admiring* Gatsby but the greater novel for sure, for readers, is Tender is the Night.
Andréa – I find it interesting to note which of those Sheldon comics has been purchased and the ones that have not.
P.S. We generally refer to him as “F. Scott Fitzgerald”. Do you know what that “F.” stands for? In full, he was Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald.
Filling UP the gas tank = gas UP the car.
“This round of drinks is on me!”
“Don’t you find it difficult to balance them all?”
Hmmm… I never read the Great Gatsby in high school and somehow I had a completely different idea what it was. I read it about 7 years ago and it was very different than what I thought it’d be. My experience is different then everyone else’s. I didn’t care for it at all.
In J R by William Gaddis there is a guy (one of the teachers or coaches at the Long Island middle school where much of the book is set) who, when someone excuses himself to go to the restroom, will call out after him, “Have one on me!”. Very odd to guess what he means.
Like this?
I have this weird theory that if I need somebody to explain to me why Great Gatsby is… great, then it isn’t.
I finally read it a couple of years ago and came away thinking “So that’s it?”
I commented to Robert some years ago that I had realized that I was not well read. I had not read most of the classics. I know the books. I know the characters. I know the plots. I just have never actually read the books. He wanted to know how I got away with same and still graduated from high school and college without doing so. I don’t know. I just know the books without having read them. I first found this out in sophomore English in high school (we did not have freshmen that was junior high 9th grade) when we were suppose to read Anthony and Cleopatra. I did not read it. I kept raising my hand and answering questions in class. My friend at the time – a future boyfriend before Robert – could not understand how I did it. I just knew the answers.
Robert watched me write a book report in college without reading the book – in this case – read the first chapter, read 3 chapters randomly in the middle. Read the last chapter. Write the book report.
Well, I have recently had my comeuppance. Robert had found me a copy of a book called “Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Four Kings” I am reading it. After reading a chapter (fun reading I actually read the book) I turned back to the front of the book and double checked that it was a US written book (and not British written) and had been a book of the month club book in 1950 (meaning it is for regular people and not scholars) as I had read. I have a fairly good vocabulary, but I think I need a dictionary with me to read this book. I suppose it meets the immediate purpose of reading it – I try to read something philosophical or educational on the Jewish High Holy days to make them different as I do not belong to a synagogue (although I watch services on JBS on cable). Well this book is serving the purpose of making me more humble as I am having so much trouble with the vocabulary. Perhaps if I not jumped over reading all those other books in the past I would not have this problem.
Overall, I agree with CIDU BIll that the majority of books assigned in high school are not such great reading. Hated Gatsby and Moby Dick, didn’t care for Catcher in the Rye. Tolerated Animal Farm, detested Babbit. On the other hand, I was one of the few who liked Great Expectations, and I thought Huckleberry Finn was great. And in 1970 I was introduced to a whole new world when eighth grade literature assigned The Hobbit. Went right down to the public library and checked out the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
So that dress pictured above is a wedding dress? (I had to look it up via Google Reverse-Image Search.) I would have thought it was a cocktail dress.
Rimshot/eyeroll…
Frankly I’m finding the book thread more interesting than the comic itself.
Some years ago I started reading one of the old Icelandic Sagas (this particular one happened to be of a king named Olaf Tryggvason), and it was in the form of a rather fragile large and thick century-old print edition that had been kicking around the house for a long time, apparently without much previous notice by me.
While I generally enjoyed reading it, I found it difficult to keep the momentum going. I never finished it. I still would like to try other Sagas. I suspect it might be the particular translation that I was finding lackluster?
And then there’s the paperback Asimov novel I, Robot that I’ve brought along on two summer vacations now but still haven’t gotten around to starting.
I hear it’s good?
:-)
DanV: I didn’t take Bill to be saying that books assigned in high school are bad, so much as the fact that you’re being forced to read a book can transform an otherwise good book into a bad one. Or perhaps I’m reading my opinion into Bill’s comment, because that’s how I feel. “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter” is one of my favorite books now, but when I was forced to read it in high school, I just had to slog through it. (Some of that may be different life experiences, I dunno.)
Brian Austin: “I, Robot that I . . . still haven’t gotten around to starting.”
OH SWEET JESUS, WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?! READ IT NOW! :)
Mitch4: Getting back to the theme of this blog, I don’t get that Dostoyevsky comic. People do give authors that they didn’t like the first time around a second chance, particularly when the author is supposed to be one of the greats. But why is that funny?
You’re correct, WW: I’m of the opinion that high school English teachers can suck very drop of enjoyment out of even the greatest of books.
Years after high school I read and enjoyed Tale of Two Cities. At the time, though, it was my good luck that my cousin had just been forced to read it, and she gave me a good enough summary that I aced the exam.
A 30-question exam on the minutiae of a great work of literature. Seriously, why teach it at all?
But that said, Dan V was correct in my assessment of Lord of the Flies, which nobody but English teachers can tolerate.
My best guess is that he’s giving Dostoyevsky a chance to put him to sleep. Safer than chemicals, and just as effective.
Ah, “Lord of the Flies”, the book with a major plot point that you can start fires with negative diopter lenses. No, I didn’t read it, but I’ve read *about* it.
With admiration for the excellent poker face?
Wow! I received the honor of posting the 10,000th comment (since the reboot) AND this is the first time anyone’s ever acknowledged and responded to one of my comments! Double delight! Too bad the responder only did so because he takes everything literally. Oh well, I’ll take what I can get.
TBS: Here’s a site where everyone can make his/her own fireworks . . .
http://www.maylin.net/Fireworks.html
Brian, the original Asimov “I, Robot” is not really a novel, but a collection of linked and consistent short stories.
There are plenty of good books like that. For probably okay reasons, sometimes they get labelled as a novel, the “chapters” get numbers and lose the titles they had as published stories, and maybe there is some rewriting or added bridge material. But the book’s copyright page may well say what the original publications were.
A really great book with that sort of genesis is Pnin by Nabokov. Some critics are so impressed by the unity and patterning of the book (e.g., the chapters sort of alternate with relatively private and relatively public concerns), that they claim he wrote it as a novel all along, but made sure there was enough closure to each episode that he could sell them as freestanding stories to The New Yorker.
Bill: Personally, I don’t put the blame on anything my English high school teachers did. For me, it was just the fact that I was required to read a book that made it work, rather than enjoyable.
The Bad Seed: Do you seriously mean that no one has ever responded to any of your comments? That seems surprising, and maybe I’m taking you too literally. Anyway, if so, here is a third response.
I saw the Family Guy version of The Great Gatsby, so I’m good.
Sometimes they do “fix-up” novels, where the author uses the original shorts but makes some changes and/or provides linking passages to improve continuity.
Yep. In fact, “I, Robot” is a fix-up novel.
I agree with Winter Wallaby: I’m sure that I’ve replied or commented upon a “bad seed” item at some point or another, but I have no idea how to find it now.
Kilby: You replied to TBS here. So I guess I took their comment too literally?
Anyway, TBS, now you have a bunch of comments in a thread, and a whole discussion just about you! Happy Birthday!
I wish we still had larK’s plug-in that let us search for individual commenters.
Getting back off the subject: I think DanV was exceptionally lucky. When my English teacher assigned us a book by Tolkien, I was really looking forward to it, but soon discovered that his “Sir Gawain & the Green Knight” was an incredibly tedious translation of an ancient English poem into modern English.
One aspect that I still hold against Fitzgerald is that he (supposedly) wrote “Gatsby” with the express intention that it was to become “great literature”. I ran into this pretension again when reading “My Family and Other Animals” by Gerald Durrell, and again when I read his biography. He himself was not the offender, but rather his brother, Lawrence Durrell, who is quoted on more than one occasion as stating that he was working on “great literature”, and complaining about “disturbances” that were keeping him from it. I’ve never been able to find any evidence that would suggest that I would enjoy anything that Lawrence Durrell wrote. I much prefer the unpretentious, and very amusing works by Gerald Durrell.
“I wish we still had larK’s plug-in that let us search for individual commenters.”
Do you mean this one?
http://scrape.nowis.com/CIDU/index.cfm
PRECISELY that one.
It appears to work fine, even though it still has the colors & design of the old site. Perhaps Bill could install a link to it here (or on the “random comments” page)?
Yeah, I still use that. I prefer to search for “everyone” and scroll down to the last followed link the open threads that have been updated since.
So do I.
As do I. Would be helpful if the coloration could be changed slightly so visited links are more prominent :-)
Dave in Boston, there are extensions for browsers that will change the color of links. I use Link Visitor.