the proper exit
The Proper way to Leave a Room
Is not to Plunge it into Gloom;
Just make a joke before you go,
And then escape before they know.
and thus concludes gelett burgess week. thank you for allowing burgess to briefly occupy your hearts and minds.
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from: the burgess nonsense book (1901).
on meeting picasso for the first time
who could’ve predicted in 1910 that pablo picasso would one day be known worldwide as the inspiration for the name of google’s software application which organises digital photos? given time, gelett burgess might’ve figured it all out. here is his introduction of picasso to the world:
It is the most picturesque spot in Paris, where the wide Rue de Ravignan drops down the hill of Montmartre, breaks into a cascade of stairs and spreads out into a small open space with trees. Picasso comes rolling out of the café, wiping his mouth, clad in a blue American sweater, a cap on his head, a smile on his face.
Picasso is a devil. I use the term in the most complimentary sense, for he’s young, fresh, olive-skinned, black eyes and black hair, a Spanish type, with an exuberant, superfluous ounce of blood in him…
Picasso is colossal in his audacity. Picasso is the doubly distilled ultimate. His canvases fairly reek with the insolence of youth; they outrage nature, tradition, decency. They are abominable. You ask him if he uses models, and he turns to you a dancing eye. “Where would I get them?” grins Picasso, as he winks at his ultramarine ogresses.
The terrible pictures loom through the chaos. Monstrous, monolithic women, creatures like Alaskan totem poles, hacked out of solid, brutal colors, frightful, appalling! How little Picasso, with his sense of humor, with his youth and deviltry, seems to glory in his crimes! How he lights up like a torch when he speaks of his work!
I doubt if Picasso ever finishes his paintings. The nightmares are too barbarous to last; to carry out such profanities would be impossible. So we gaze at his pyramidal women, his sub-African caricatures, figures with eyes askew, with contorted legs, and—things unmentionably worse, and patch together whatever idea we may have…
He’s too fascinating as a man to make one want to take him only as an artist. Is he mad, or the rarest of blaguers? Let others consider his murderous canvases in earnest—I want only to see Picasso grin! …Picasso gets drunk on vermillion and cadmium. Absinthe can’t tear hard enough to rouse such phantasmagoria! Only the very joy of life could revel in such brutalities.
excerpted from: “the wild men of paris” by gelett burges in the architectural record (1910).
the wild men of paris
imagine that it is exactly one hundred years ago. there is an unfamiliar stink in the american air that is wafting over the atlantic from its source in montmartre, france. you are gelett burgess and you are the first to get a whiff of georges braque’s hot b.o. as he toils away in his quartier salon. you realise—well after it has already been realised in france but well before anyone else in north america—that a new movement in art is taking place. it is cubism avant la lettre, but now its members are called simply “the incoherents,” the “invertebrates,” and “les fauves” (the wild beasts). you have taken it upon yourself to interview these men and their movement for a piece that will introduce them to america. how do you proceed? if you are indeed gelett burgess, you will do so with a wry smile and a dirty limerick.
If you can imagine what a particularly sanguinary little girl of eight, half-crazed with gin, would do to a whitewashed wall, if left alone with a box of crayons, then you will come near to fancying what most of this work was like. Or you might take a red-hot poker in your left hand, shut your eyes and etch a landscape upon a door. There were no limits to the audacity and the ugliness of the canvasses. Still-life sketches of round, round apples and yellow, yellow oranges, on square, square tables, seen in impossible perspective; landscapes of squirming trees, with blobs of virgin color gone wrong, fierce greens and coruscating yellows, violent purples, sickening reds and shuddering blues.
But the nudes! They looked like flayed Martians, like pathological charts—hideous old women, patched with gruesome hues, lopsided, with arms like the arms of a Swastika, sprawling on vivid backgrounds, or frozen stiffly upright, glaring through misshapen eyes, with noses or fingers missing. They defied anatomy, physiology, almost geometry itself! They could be likened only to the Lady of the Limerick:There was a young girl of Lahore,
The same shape behind as before;
And as no one knew where
To offer a chair,
She had to sit down on the floor!…It had come over me that there was a rationale of ugliness as there was a rationale of beauty; that, perhaps, one was but the negative of the other, an image reversed, which might have its own value and esoteric meaning. Men had painted and carved grim and obscene things when the world was young. Was this revival a sign of some second childhood of the race, or a true rebirth of art?
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excerpted from: “the wild men of paris” by gelett burges in the architectural record (1910).
nonsense is the fourth dimension of literature, duh
happy april fools’ day from gelett burgess and your dear friend raynor effing ganan.
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from: the burgess nonsense book (1901).
![bring the frowcous
before douglas adams wrote his dictionary of made up words, before anthony burgess invented his nadsat lexicon, a different author named burgess came up with his own dictionary of invented words.
in 1914, our man gelett burgess published burgess unabridged: a new dictionary of words that you have always needed as a way to promote his neologisms. it is from this stupendous volume that we get this week’s f-words [spoilers: none of his invented f-words seem to have enjoyed the same staying power as blurb and bromide (but we can change that!)]
Fidgeltick · 1. Any food requiring painstaking and ill requited effort. 2. A taciturn person from whom it is hard to get information
Flooijab · To make a sarcastic comment in a feminine manner
Frime · One who always does the right thing at the right time
Frowk · An action considered to be about half wrong
Frowcous · Nice but naughty, or considered so; piquantly provocative
Fud · In a state of déshabille or confusion
burgess bonus: burgess proceeds—in a way that only burgess can—to illustrate his words with both fanciful line drawings and clever quatrains. here is his flooijab poem:
You think they talk of men and mice, Of operas and cabs; Ah no! Beneath those phrases nice, They’re shooting flooijabs. No man can know—but women may Interpret women’s smiles—It’s what they mean—not what they say, That stings in women’s wiles.](http://26.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l07jtyQHrY1qzrip0o1_400.png)
bring the frowcous
before douglas adams wrote his dictionary of made up words, before anthony burgess invented his nadsat lexicon, a different author named burgess came up with his own dictionary of invented words.
in 1914, our man gelett burgess published burgess unabridged: a new dictionary of words that you have always needed as a way to promote his neologisms. it is from this stupendous volume that we get this week’s f-words [spoilers: none of his invented f-words seem to have enjoyed the same staying power as blurb and bromide (but we can change that!)]
burgess bonus: burgess proceeds—in a way that only burgess can—to illustrate his words with both fanciful line drawings and clever quatrains. here is his flooijab poem:
You think they talk of men and mice,
Of operas and cabs;
Ah no! Beneath those phrases nice,
They’re shooting flooijabs.
No man can know—but women may
Interpret women’s smiles—
It’s what they mean—not what they say,
That stings in women’s wiles.
in his treatise on bromides, burgess lists 47 trite remarks used by the narrow-minded. he says:
It is not merely because this remark is trite; it is because that, with the Bromide, the remark is inevitable. One expects it from him, and one is never disappointed. And, moreover, it is always offered by the Bromide as a fresh, new, apt and rather clever thing to say. He really believes, no doubt, that it is original—it is, at any rate, neat, as he indicates by his evident expectation of applause.
he calls these phrases bromidioms. perhaps the single shiniest bromidiom of our time is <ahem> “that’s what she said.” here are a few from burgess’ time. it’s a gas to see how little things have changed in the intervening one hundred years:
bromenclature
before broseph stalin, broman polanski, and other such portmanbros, there were bromides.
burgess wrote an entire mock-philosophical tract on how all people were easily divided into two fundamental groups or families that he labeled the bromides and the sulphites. “the revelation,” he writes “was apodictic, convincing; it made life a different thing; it made society almost plausible.”
The Bromide does his thinking by sydicate. He follows the main-traveled roads, he goes with the crowd. In a word, they all think and talk alike—one may predicate their opinion upon any given subject. They follow custom and costume, they obey the Law of Averages. They have their hair cut every month and their minds keep regular office-hours. Their habits of thought are all readymade, proper, sober, befitting the Average Man. They worship dogma. The Bromide conforms to everything sanctioned by the majority, and may be depended upon to be trite, banal and arbitrary.
The Bromide has no surprises for you. When you see one enter a room, you must reconcile yourself to the inevitable. No hope for flashes of original thought, no illuminating, newer point of view, no flashes of fancy—the steady glow of bromidic conversation and action is all one can hope for. He may be wise and good, he may be loved and respected—but he lives inland; he puts not forth to sea.
A Sulphite is a person who does his own thinking, he is a person who has surprises up his sleeve. He is explosive. One can never foresee what he will do, except that it will be a direct and spontaneous manifestation of his own personality. The Bromide we have always with us, predicating the obvious. The Sulphite appears uncalled.
But you must not jump to the conclusion that all Sulphites are agreeable company. This is no classification as of desirable and undesirable people. The Sulphite, from his very nature, must continually surprise you by an unexpected course of action. He must explode. You never know what he will say or do. He is always sulphitic, but as often impossible. He will not bore you, but he may shock you. You find yourself watching him to see what is coming next, and it may be a subtle jest, a paradox, or an atrocious violation of etiquette.
burgess spends fifty more pages expounding upon corollaries and classifying various historical figures and vegetables as sulphites or bromides. it turns out that hamlet and garlic are sulphites and polonius and cabbage are bromides.
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excerpts from: are you a bromide?: or, the sulphitic theory expounded and exemplified by gelett burgess (1907).
this is the ninth post in the audio books out of context series. i cannot reveal where it is from or who it is by, BUT you should keep in mind that this week is gelett burgess week and this is an audio clip from one of gelett burgess’ mystery stories entitled, “the assasin’s club” (1912) by gelett burgess. here is a picture of the scene to help give some context (the passage is read by some dope from librivox).
a wanker named pierce was the first person to identify the contextless audio from the last installment of this series. it was taken from boys without fathers (2010) by my homey, riaz moola. riaz was kind enough to select and record this (now contexted) audio clip exclusively for all of you. i am deeply appreciative and were i a cyberbabe, i would toss my cyberpanties at him.
posts in this series publish themselves every (π²√5)² hours. the next post is scheduled for release on april 10th, 2010 at 2:41 am. by that time, i expect to have hit the big time with a ponzi scheme that i have decided to invest in very late in its growth curve.
goops
in addition to his purple cow poem, gelett burgess is chiefly remembered nowadays for his goops books. goops were bald, boneless, childlike gremlins that wore edwardian garb and were rude to adults. the goops were a kind of anti-hero meant to show children the repercussions of being naughty and disrespectful, but really they were basically my role models.
the above image is taken from his book, goops and how to be them (1900). the concept proved so successful that burgess followed it with a dozen more books all taking place in his goopsiverse. the franchise itself is still in print and it even has—gasp—a twitter feed.
gelett burgess week
i failed to mention during yesterday’s post on x-animals that this week is gelett burgess week at the ragbag. why does gelett burgess week coincide with passover? only my jyotishi knows, but what i can tell you is who mr. burgess was and why it is that i think i can wring a week’s worth of posts from his exploits.
Gelett Burgess was born Jan. 30, 1866, in Boston, MA. He made an early mark on the world by carving his initials, in the form of a monogram based on the Phoenician alphabet, near the top of every church steeple in the city. At 15, he took advantage of a practice of The Boston Transcript, of printing hard-to-find poems for readers who ask for them, by having a friend write and ask them to locate one of Burgess’s own writings. When the paper couldn’t find the work, Burgess graciously supplied a copy—and that’s how he first got into print.
He served as instructor in topographical drawing at the University of California at Berkeley until an unfortunate incident in 1894, involving the deliberate toppling of a temperance statue that he considered an eyesore. Tho the landscape’s rearrangement was alleged (by Burgess) to have been cheered by students, the school’s administration took a dimmer view, and he abruptly found himself unemployed. That’s when he veered onto the career path that led to lasting fame. He later referred to his Berkeley period as one of “unseemly dignity”.
In 1895, he became founding editor of The Lark, a San Francisco-based magazine devoted to humorous poetry—which, in the 1890s, meant a healthy dollop of nonsense. He contributed a steady stream of quatrains in that genre, all accompanied by his uniquely-styled cartoons, and most of which had rhyming titles. It was at The Lark that he penned his famous purple cow poem: “I never saw a purple cow, I never hope to see one; But I can tell you, anyhow, I’d rather see than be one.” (In later years, growing tired of hearing a recital of that quatrain practically every time he met someone for the first time, he composed a sequel: “Ah, yes! I wrote ‘The Purple Cow’ — I’m sorry, now, I wrote it! But I can tell you anyhow, I’ll kill you if you quote it!”)
Burgess continued writing and illustrating books with his beauty queen wife (and author in her own right) Estelle Loomis for the rest of his long life. He also wrote short stories in the mystery genre, introduced America to the cubism movement, coined the word blurb (when he attributed the effusively complimentary jacket copy of one of his books to a Miss Belinda Blurb), and founded the San Francisco Boys Club—the first of its kind in America. He kicked the bucket in 1951.
if you are a hater of art hijinx, nonsense versification, idiosyncratic cartoonery, humorisms of all manner, poetastering, and/or cautionary tales for wayward children, you would do best to abstain from visiting this internet domain for the next few days.
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source: excerpted from toonopedia
