Cat and Girl have picked two nice and juicy little literary targets to bedevil!
Or actually, one literary target and one literary-adjacent (and probably apocryphal) anecdote. It’s probably fun, if not precisely funny, that our characters are not directly challenging the truth or the reputed depth of the anecdote, nor directly mocking it, but blithely misunderstanding it and spinning their own absurd background explanations. Which maybe does the job of a take-down without showing attitude!
What do our readers think of these two iconic stories? (Oh, of course first someone must identify them.)
Below the break, some prior responses to one of them! And the quick Snopes link for the fake. (I’m not sure the Page Break tool will work as intended. If not, don’t panic, the additional content is still there and we will just pop it out if needed.) (Update: using the Details tool instead. This seems to work better. But the “Don’t Panic” advice still holds, of course.)
Open for spoiler-ish notes!
The Hemingway authorship of the baby shoes “six-word story” is debunked at Snopes.
Probably the best-known response by an established poet is “Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams” by Kenneth Koch. Here is a personal blog post (responding to a This American Life episode), giving the original, the Koch, and another variation, written by a sixth-grader.
Here from New York Magazine (Intelligencer), an article “This Is Just to Say I Have Written a Blog Post Explaining the Icebox-Plum Meme” , showing a series of responses or variations in the form of Tweets, from when that was a thing.
Comics I Don't Understand 
Okay, just a technical note — yes, the conceal-and-then-reveal tool was working fine, both on WP Reader Mode (my usual platform) and Chrome browser direct on the website.
And I would say I recognized both of the literary shibboleths here, and assumed but had not looked up that the Hemingway attribution was fake. The Cat and Girl seem to have considerably more to say about that one than about the plums, so the CIDU editors’ multiple links of parodies or responses was quite welcome.
What would you do if, hypothetically, only heard of the baby shoes story, but have no clue what the deal about the plums? Asking for a friend..
I’m just now noticing the purple stains all over the bottom three panels. Presumably they are from plum juice.
So before delving into the linked miscellanea, my story: I came across the Carlos William Carlos poem on the subway, one of the city’s successful (I think) efforts to uplift its citizenry by putting some poetry instead of ads in the subway for you to stare at while you ride. The Carlos one was particularly inspired, because it is short and pithy and potentially insipid, and the author has a silly name to boot, so it sticks with you and makes you think — is this art? Does it make you feel? If so, why wouldn’t it be art?† Anyway, so the city having lodged this particular bit of culture into my brain, I was pleased when I could realize that Garrison Keillor was parodying it in some recent piece of his that I read — pleased as punch! Just getting the reference made me feel so smart, it obviated any need to analyze whether it was a good parody, or if the source material merited being parodied — I got the reference! Ha!
†Recently‡ I was working on singing “The Impossible Dream” and was struck by this “is it art” conundrum again, because I could see how the song was basically just inspiring-song-writing-by-numbers, it was deliberately pushing all the buttons in the right order, both sonically and thematically, but yet, just knowing my button were being pressed didn’t stop their being pressed from inspiring the associated emotions within me. Is it art only when it authentically stirs the breast, or is the stirring of the breast the relevant part? And does it stop being art when you become jaded enough to become cynical of the intent of the author, so if you discover that you were deliberately stirred instead of authentically stirred it ceases to be art? There was an anecdote about some writers for That Was the Week That Was being depressed by doing what they called writing jokes by machine, or something like that, because they needed to crank out topical jokes every week, so one week, they’re just like dispassionately putting elements together to write a joke that fits, add politician with a god complex to the thing that happened by alluding to fishes and loaves, and viola, a joke none of them ever laughed at or thought funny or inspired, but that the audience that evening wouldn’t stop laughing at, so they all got very depressed and very drunk.
‡By “recently”, both in the instant and above, I mean anything within the last 10 years, possibly 15, plus an added 3 year slop factor because of the pandemic; I am officially Old. In my callow youth, anything more than six months ago was ancient history and totally irrelevant to anything.
Yeah, the plums poem and variants have been a social media running gag for some time now (especially on Tumblr, where you have the wordcount to do the whole poem in one post).
Cat’s childhood musings do solve the mystery of the plums, at least: one of his childhood raccoon friends has been over.
Ha! I got his name wrong! William Carlos William!
Philistine!
Still wrong! Williams!
Whom did the Philistines look down on?
@ Markus (3) – Not just hypothetically, but in my own real actuality, lack of any “plum” knowledge left me with not even the slightest clue about what was going on in this strip. Even after investigating the sources, it seems like a whole lot of irrelevant non-sequiturs for a simple destruction gag. Perhaps I’m just too old to appreciate Cat & Girl. In the past 2.5 years I’ve only encountered two or three examples that I found even mildly amusing.
I’m at best hit-and-miss for Cat And Girl, but did enjoy this one. For me what’s funny is their repeated misconstruals and farfetched explanations for the baby shoes story. Which is (as I think your post was saying) is maybe more effective than a head-on argument or take-down.
Lark, one Phillistine reportedly looked down on shepherd boy David.
Amen, Kilby (9).
I guess it identifies me as a fogey to say that I took a look at the Williams work and wondered what identifies it as a “poem,” aside from a slew of random line breaks.
After reading the plum poem, I realized that I had seen it before. But, unlike the shoes story, I didn’t recognize it from the description. I did laugh about the shopping in the raccoon section.
larK @ 5: I was always impressed by the fact that the great computer scientist Donald Knuth titled his book “The Art of Computer Programming” and the great composer Paul Hindemith titled his book “The Craft of Musical Composition”. Whether there is “art” in computer programming is debatable, but there certainly is craft required for any art. For sculpture you must know something about weight and loads and structural integrity; for music the timbres, ranges and transpositions of musical instruments; for theater, how to get characters onto and off of the stage.
For musical pressing-the-buttons, I think of Al Jolson. He would stick a little grace-note into the vocal line in such a way that it sounded like a catch in his voice, as if he were suddenly overcome by emotion. Maybe some people think there really was true greatness in his art. I think it was just a trick, like Katie Britt starting to cry in her kitchen as she delivered the GOP response to the State of the Union address.
In both cases it was definitely craftsmanship, but not craftsmanship at the highest level. The highest level of craftsmanship leaves no trace of evidence as to how it was done, just like a high-quality paint job leaves no visible brush marks.
If you’re writing a note, does it really make it better if you write it as a poem? Will all be forgiven?
This is just to say
I didn’t forget about your cat
Or actually I did maybe
But you know how it is
Some friends came over Monday and we went to the game
And then Tuesday I went shopping
Et cetera
Until “Wait, I was supposed to feed her cat”
So I checked in at your apartment
And found him dead
My fault I guess
Sorry
You’re still going to make dinner for me on the 20th, right?
This comic reads like a Zippy the Pinhead.
@ L.F. (16) – I’m not sure the compliment is justified. I don‘t follow it regularly, but when I do run into Zippy strips, I can appreciate the surrealism, and more often than not I like the result. C&G frequently comes off just as two disjointed conversations talking past each other.
P.S. @ MiB – Your comments about “art” and “craft” reminded me of a stupid, short-sighted decision made by the German translators of the original “Star Wars” movie. Their solution was to render the “Force” into German as “die Macht” (literally: “might” or “power”, as in “might makes right”). It would have been much better to use the word “Kraft” (“power”, “craft”, “art”), but once the erroneous translation had been established, no amount of Lucasfilm’s retroactive alteration could fix it.
P.P.S. That synchronization also contain repeated references to “Darth” (and/or “Lord”) “Wader” (distinctly mispronounced by the German speakers), which always makes me think of Anakin going dry fly fishing in a river.
Thanks for providing all that background & satyrical responses on the plum poem. And definitely a thumbs-up on deploying that tool to conceal all that as spoilers!
just like a high-quality paint job leaves no visible brush marks
Which is why you never want to hire an impressionist to paint your living room.
Seems like D Lewis might have been reading the plums poem.
@ Mitch4 28: And I bet she ate the last bandon too.
Ha!
Today’s Tom the Dancing Bug/Super-Fun-Pak Comix has another Hemingway-story allusion.
Oh, cool!
I think I also remember we had a thread on Theseus’ Ship.
Too many steps in making drawings. Use the Frank Cho method!
https://www.instagram.com/p/Ceu_SpKOAca/?hl=en
@ Brian (25) – The most interesting detail in that link was Frank Cho’s comment that he quit syndication over 20 years ago. I then discovered that the entire GoComics archive of Liberty Meadows (which only goes back to 2002) is just a cyclical set of repetitive reruns. I wasn’t able to find the “wiener dog” (from 2001) there, but there were several other “manga drawing” parodies, such as “War Machines”, and “Jen & Brandy”:
@ Mitch (24) – You mentioned the “Ship of Theseus” thread three years ago, but it appears that the post to which you were referring must have been pre-Comicgeddon: none of the search engines that I tried was able to find it.
Probably the one I was thinking of was https://cidu.info/2021/04/30/the-heap/
That should teach me to stay away from Google. I tried it again with DuckDuckGo, and it led directly to “The Heap”.
Liberty Meadows has been in my GoComics lineup for a long time. The reruns are somewhat unusual, as rather than just run the full set from the beginning each cycle, certain arcs will run, then something else start that wasn’t originally in sequence.
Currently the Sunday strips are quite old, from near the beginning. You can tell by Brandy’s “outline”.