Laughing For Fifty Years And Still Laughing!

Dear Iravati,
The best sentence in your feedback (my vocabulary is limited) is......
"The beauty of any book is wilful gaps that provoke the imagination of the reader" and I fully agree with it.
Syamala

 

Classics are at least ok even if they are a toilsome read. On the other hand, bulky classics should be burnt in a bonfire because they are too opaque to impart practical wisdom. You need a drill bit to extrude any passing wisdom.

Let's start with Homer who wrote two sagas of courage and honor and couched his war cry in a seafaring shanty.

“Bold was the man, the first who dared to brave,
in fragile bark, the wild perfidious wave.”

Barks and perfidious waves? Seriously? Then came Thomas Fuller who probably had sea sickness and so revised the “bold” motto to “He was a very valiant man who first adventured on eating of oysters”. Later, Jonathan Swift took pity on the common man at such abstruse wisdom and wittily quoted “It was a bold man that first ate on oyster”.

Then comes our thoughtful PG Wodehouse who probably was baffled with the "perfidious" waves, pelagic oysters and thought to himself, why such fixation with bold themes when the world is filled with painfully shy men who dither to propose looking straight into the eye. What was Bertie’s advise to Gussy Fink-Nottle?

"Reflect what proposing means. It means that a decent, self-respecting chap has got to listen to himself saying things which, if spoken on the silver screen, would cause him to dash to the box-office and demand his money back. Let him attempt to do it on orange juice and what ensues? Shame seals his lips."

Those perfidious waves and oysters signifying boldness were dethroned in favor of a silver screen and orange juice to portray the realistic ethos of the world which is not courage but cowardice. Tell me how can those bulky classics ever contend with Wodehousian guidelines that outline how to slyly acquire boldness but not gallantly achieve boldness, by imbibing something stronger than an orange juice.

 

I counted last month how much I blabber to throttle my voice box.

I send out on a average 30 nonsensical emails daily.
Few posts here and there in IL.
Very few comments in whatsapp.
Once in six months dekko in Facebook.

It is heartening to know that you found a sentence quite meaningful in my unhinged blabber. I mean it!

 

Never mind about the past; now, we have got the computer, and youtube with free access to lots of media. In one preface, PGW suggests only a few episodes a day, and not overdose oneself. A clever retired life could be healthy food, some exercise, and a small dose of audio-book, or video-watching with spouse at home. When PGW requires a side dish, one may watch "The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin"... on youtube.
Season1-Episode1 of Jeeves & Wooster:
Season1-Episode1 of The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin:

 

Reggie [Perrin]'s character can come close to anyone who'd spent decades in a bureaucracy. Waiting for retirement while stuck in a job is pretty much like waiting-for-god while stuck in an old people's home.
Jeeve's christian name "Reginald" is what made me think of prescribing Reggie Perrin to you.

And Waiting-for-god is another TV series that came on BBC. Language evolves over the years, and learning new things is the best way to keep dementia away. If you see that you are getting one more item for your bucket list, you are darn right:



Waiting For God: [from Wikipedia] Waiting for God (TV series) - Wikipedia
Set at the fictional Bayview Retirement Home near Bournemouth, the show was based around Diana Trent and her relationship with Tom Ballard, a former accountant with semi-feigned dementia. He has been exiled there for the convenience of his family.

Diana is a cynical, retired photojournalist who has found herself consigned to the retirement home after a career documenting some of the 20th century's most dangerous events has left her single and with no one in her life outside of her niece, and later, her great-niece. Her frustration at the prospect of years of being alternately patronised and ignored at Bayview is soon channelled into attempts to subvert the régime of the retirement home and taunting the staff regarding their flaws and corrupt nature. Though retired, Diana remains connected with several powerful journalists, which she uses to blackmail the board of directors at Bayview (and Bayview manager Harvey Bains) to stay in Bayview despite her anti-social behaviour. Her only known living relatives are her niece Sarah and later, Sarah's daughter Diana. Sarah runs a modelling agency and loves Diana, though Diana is emotionally distant from her niece, going so far as to tell people that her niece runs a prostitution ring and constantly attempts to kill her with poison. As the series progresses, the two become closer after Sarah undergoes a whirlwind courtship and marriage that results in pregnancy; the marriage fails but produces "the Diana of the Future," as the new Great-Aunt Diana blesses the newborn. Just before Baby Diana arrives, the great-aunt-to-be reveals that much of her hostility towards the world stems from the fact that she's infertile; this incapability is one of her very few regrets in life.

Ballard is a kindly but deluded old duffer who frequently lives in a fantasy world following his retirement as an accountant. A widower for at least a decade, his increasingly eccentric behaviour leads his alcoholic and adulterous daughter-in-law Marion and henpecked son Geoffrey to move him into Bayview where he finds himself living next door to Diana. The two form an unlikely partnership and discover that they are able to wreak havoc amongst the younger staff and management in the home in order to create a more tolerable living environment for themselves and their fellow residents. Tom's optimistic, cheery demeanour and unencumbered Anglican Christianity contrast Diana's dark cynicism and avowed atheism, as both attempt to influence the other's world view.

The manager of Bayview is Harvey Bains, who runs the establishment with his assistant, the homely, spinsterish and pious Jane Edwards. Bains is a penny-pinching weasel whose management style involves trying to run the retirement home profitably while keeping the residents (whom he variously dubs "oldies", "inmates", or "units") passive in order to make himself look good before the eyes of the board of directors.

 

Valid point! We should talk about it.

I am happy that you laid such discernment on visual media. Though the incompatibility in the expression of human thought between text and motion art is a given, the ubiquity of the visual media (with arguable fidelity) at least exposes and promotes literary trends readily and has the potential to lure us to engage deeper with the original work if the latter had been deferred.

Well-conceived adaptations should be considered as stimulus to draw readership onto the backgrounded dust jackets buried under contemporary literature. Radio, television and film provide that inducement. I liked your perspective of round-about or staged approach. No layman in their right mind today will pick up unabridged Tolstoy or Stendhal or Trollope and delight at those cantilevered and weighty editions. There is no casual reading of such literary tomes. You have to swim through about hundred pages before you even stumble on a meaningful plot. Television takes the artistic liberty to revise and re-adapt aged content to suit the time-pressed audience and also make it palatable for the ongoing generation with tacit intention to uphold the interest on classics and best-sellers.

Also, audio is an added benefit with broadcast adaptation [note: this is before audio books were a common sight in the market]. If you are confused like I am with the pronunciation of the Prussian, Parisian, Pre-Raphaelite vernacular, then television and film adaptation are definitive guides to the acoustic vocabulary for the research that is put into such rendition. Good pointer!