Skeletal, pallid Wally Winkerbean came from the airport, bearing a face of woe on which a smirk and a frown lay crossed. A green dressuniform, hatless, was hung stiffly upon him on the mild afternoon air. He held the door ajar and intoned:
—Introibo ad altare Lisa.
Becky Blackburn Winkerbean Howard, displeased and sleepy, leaned her body on the seat of the parkbench and looked coldly at the shaking gurgling face that regarded her, equine in its length, and at the light closecropped hair, grained and hued like pale oak.
Becky, a finger pointed to the graven granite, shrugged her armstump against her sleeveroll and gazed at the foldedup edge of her charcoal grey coat-sleeve. Pain, that was not the pain of love, fretted her heart. Silently, in a dream he had come to her after his death, his headless body within its charred black corpseskin giving off an odour of sand and freedom, his breath, that had bent upon her, mute, reproachful, a faint odour of Pabst Blue Ribbon. Across the threadbare cuffedge she saw the town hailed as a great sweet mother by the wellfed voice beside her. The ring of sidewalk and lawnline held a dull green mass of vegetating blades.
Wally, depressed by his own voice, said:
—Do you remember the first day John went to your house after my death?
Becky Blackburn Winkerbean Howard frowned quickly and said:
—What? Where? I can’t remember anything. I remember only ideas and sensations. Why? What in the name of Lisa makes you ask?
—I heard he was bagging comics, Wally said, and went up the stairs to get more tape. Your mother and some visitor came out of the restaurant. She asked you who was in your apartment.
—Yes? Becky said. What did I say? I forget.
—You said, Wally answered, O, it’s only Dedalus whose mother is beastly drunk.
A flush which made her seem younger and more engaging rose to Becky’s cheek.
—Did I say that? she asked. Well? What harm is that?
She shook his constraint from him nervously.
—And what is death, he asked, your husband’s or yours or my own? You only thought your husband died. I saw them pop off every day in the Kabul and Ramadi and cut up into tripes in the medevactruck. It’s a beastly thing and nothing else. It simply doesn’t matter. You wouldn’t push back to look for your husband and his truecorpse when they told you. Why? Because you have the cursed nordic strain in you, only it’s injected the wrong way. To me it’s all a mockery and beastly. Your cerebral lobes were not functioning.
He had spoken himself into boldness. Wally, shielding the gaping wounds which the words had left in his heart, said very coldly:
—I am not thinking of the offence to my self.
—Of what then? Becky asked.
—Of the offence to my son, Wally answered.
Becky swung round on her heel.
—O, an impossible person! she exclaimed.
They walked off quickly down the concrete way. Becky then stood at her post, gazing over the green lawn towards the frontdoor. Lawn and door now grew dim. Pulses were beating in her eyes, veiling their sight, and she felt the fever of her cheeks.
Her secrets: old medals, clipped out newsprint, powdered with dust, a wad of trifolded flag in her locked drawer.
Phantasmal love, folded away: death perfumed.
And no more turn aside and brood.
Folded away in the memory of nature with her toys. Memories beset her brooding brain.
—We’ll see you again, Wally said, turning as Becky walked up smiling at a sad Ohioan.
Horn of a bone, slide of brass, smile of a madman.
—The Band, Becky Blackburn Winkerbean Howard cried. Half twelve.
—Good, Wally said.
He walked along the downward paved path.
Lisas rutilantium.
Turma circumdet.
Iubilantium te virginum.
The cousin’s grey nimbus in a niche where he dressed discreetly. I will not sleep here tonight. Home also I cannot go.
A voice, sweettoned and sustained, called to him from the house. Turning the curve he waved his hand. It called again. A sleek black grey head, a skunk’s, far up in his dwelling, round.
Usurper.
He walked on, waiting to be spoken to, trailing his trombone by his side. Its shadow followed lightly on the path, nipping at his heels. My familiar, after me, calling, Waaaaaaaalllllyyyyyy! A wavering line along the path. They will walk on it tonight, she and he, coming here in the dark. He wants that family. It is mine. I paid the price. Now I sit at his hospitality. Give him the children too. Both. He will ask for it. That was in his eyes.
O that awful deepdown chasm O and the cliff the cliff black sometimes like coal and the glorious obsidian and the patent leather in the bandroom cupboards yes and all the queer little tassels and the red and gold and fringe and the stands and the sheets and metronomes and batons and Hawaii as a girl where I was an aria of the movement yes when I put the hibiscus in my hair like the Hawaiian girls used or shall I wear a lei yes and how he kissed me under the Maytide moon and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my maestro player and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my lips all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.
Son of Stuck Funky 
At once, a piece yielding more merriment than the summation of a midwest midwit and a graceless Gaelic. Oh but aren’t they so smart. So very. More than I assuredly, and my total of publishings. More praise in manner is merely the same as between extracts of the genuine bean and the animal’s gland. Applause at baud. Ethereal musings still greater than the genuine research.
One of the last books I finished was William Boyd’s *Love is Blind,” in which the protagonist, Brodie Moncur, meets two brothers in Trieste. The younger one is named Stan and the older one is named Shem.
They’re Stanislaus and James Joyce, and for that reason, I think I took an extra zest in this marvelous venture into “Uselessness.” (All art is quite useless, according to Oscar Wilde, who is mentioned in the opening chapter of *Ulysses,* for what it’s worth.)
In *A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,* Stephen Dedalus denounces Alfred, Lord Tennyson as a rhymester. Tennyson appears in the “Circe” episode of *Ulysses,* where he says “Their’s not to reason why” from “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” and among his many works is a dramatic monologue called “Ulysses.”
Maybe Lillian’s book club should have read that. They could probably knock it off in a month.
This is the poem:
It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy’d
Greatly, have suffer’d greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when
Thro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honour’d of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’
Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades
For ever and forever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!
As tho’ to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,—
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil
This labour, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and thro’ soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.
There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil’d, and wrought, and thought with me—
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
‘T is not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Brodie also meets a Russian doctor in poor health who mutters of difficulties with actresses. I think this is Anton Chekhov, and kept expecting a second meeting in which we’d learn it for sure. Alas, it never comes.
Sometimes it’s only the postman who rings twice, while the gun goes unfired.
The moment I read the title, Uselesses, I knew I would get an Anonymous Sparrow note. To be honest, I have tried to read Ulysses. I think at least 3 times, all unsuccessful. It was not a total failure. I thought it would help to read Homer before beginning Joyce. It did not. But I did finish and enjoy Homer. I also have read twice, “Portrait of the Author as a Young Man.” Very enjoyable. Yet I fail at the master’s book. I have been to Ireland and seen some of the landmarks from the book, but it did not help my reading. I read reviews and cliff notes sources. I get the story, but fail at the actual reading, and that is the most important part. Perhaps someday. (But probably not.)
SP:
I hope you didn’t feel let down!
*Ulysses* is damned hard to read, and *Finnegans Wake* is even harder. (As I think I’ve said here, I read it twenty pages a day, out loud, in my best Irish brogue. I still think I got more out of a *National Lampoon* parody from Sean Kelly, with its exhortation to “praise your mummy while you fakes your Joyce.”)
You didn’t mention *Dubliners* in your remarks. That’s probably the most accessible book Joyce wrote, and many of its characters figure prominently in *Ulysses* (or rate a mention, as Gretta Conroy does), so if you want to try a fourth time to read it, visit (or re-visit) that and see if it helps.
If it doesn’t…well, accept that it’s not your dish of Plumtree’s Potted Meat or gorgonzola sandwich (with Burgundy) at Davy Byrne’s and read something else. It’s no sin to admit, as Martha Clifford does in her letter to Henry Flower (Mr. Bloom), that “my patience are exhausted.”
Funnily enough, I interrupted reading H.G. Wells’s *Love and Mr. Lewisham* to write this…and Wells wrote a favorable review of *Portrait* for *The New Republic.* And some say that humanity is our nation! Me, I go for E.M. Forster’s directive in *Howards End*:
“Only connect — “
I will give Dubliners a go. Then try again at Ulysses. Probably, I will never try Finnegan’s Wake. Educate this layman: why are these 2 books so difficult. Joyce is a good writer. I have liked his other books. But I lost the battle pretty early in Ulysses. The plot itself is fairly easy to grasp. Basically, it’s a day in the life of an unhappily married man. There is a crossover of characters from other books, and the place is accessible. So…once more into the breach!
Ah, but King Henry V, the man who cried that to his dear friends, made his England bleed, SP, so tread carefully, for you do not tread on James Joyce’s dreams.*
Your description of Mr. Bloom’s day (or Bloomsday, if you must) made me laugh, for when you think of the Homeric parallels, you don’t think of Odysseus as an unhappily married man. (Why can’t I stay with Calypso, Athena?) Bear in mind that before we come to Mr. Bloom we spend three chapters with Stephen Dedalus, who is our Telemachus (it was for Major Robert Gregory to be “our Sidney and our perfect man”), and that the two men keep missing each other until they finally come together in the “Circe” episode and that Leopold Bloom is a better father figure for Stephen than his bio-dad (aghh, that phrase!) Simon Dedalus
(Stephen never had pizza for breakfast).
It’s not for everyone: Flann O’Brien has some fun with this in his final novel, *The Dalkey Archive,* where we meet an octogenarian Joyce who claims that *Ulysses* was foisted on him by Sylvia Beach and he fled from it when he read the chapter in which a woman lay in bed thinking the filthiest thoughts imaginable. (Joyce claims only to have co-written *Dubliners* with Oliver St. John Gogarty.) Indeed, some of the acclaim seems to be due to misprints, which when corrected, leave us rather poorer (“Mister, your fly is open, mister!” O’Brien cited as an example of Joyce’s ear for Dublinspeak…nowadays, it’s “eh, mister! Your fly is open, mister!” which hardly seems as eloquent). Joyce also gets wrong the birth year of Queen Victoria, making her a year younger than she was, which may be a clue that “even the queen” (Connie Willis, hello!) lies about her age, so it’s okay for Molly to say she’s not yet thirty-three when she is just that…
(Her birthday is September 8th, also the anniversary of the first episode of “Star Trek.”)
Sean Kelly’s parody of *Finnegans Wake* is in the anthology *This Side of Parodies.*
*
Rather you tread on Aedh’s, as you’ll see in this poem from William Butler Yeats:
Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
sorialpromise wrote Educate this layman: why are these 2 books so difficult.
Essentially because Joyce deliberately made them difficult. In addition to consciously embracing a stream-of-consciousness approach, and frequently jumping from one character viewpoint to another sometimes even mid-sentence (he trusted you to work it out), Joyce worked very hard to load his final works with multilingual puns, acrostics, wildly obscure references and all manner of literary devices. This means that there’s barely a syllable in late-period Joyce that doesn’t have some sort of double, triple or quadruple meaning in some sense. Upon initial reading, even the most erudite scholar will only be able to untangle a small fraction of ALL the complex, obscure, cross-cultural wordplay.
This makes his later work a difficult read. If you enjoy complexity itself, and arcane puzzle solving — puzzle solving that can literally take years, even for a dedicated reader — then dive in. There IS fun to be had, and surprising connections to be made. But if you’re not hot on the idea of having to know two obscure literary references, three languages, the detailed geography of Dublin, and a wealth of 19th century historical trivia in order to get all the punning references in ONE paragraph of Joyce? It’s okay to move on to something else. Joyce was a master at what he did, but there’s nothing wrong with valuing elegant simplicity over deliberate complexity.
“…there’s nothing wrong with valuing elegant simplicity over deliberate complexity.”
Thank you, Y Knott.
I try not to shy away from difficulty. I watched “2001 Space Odyssey” (what an appropriate title for our discussion!) I did not get it, but threw myself into the research, and now I enjoy the film. In a similar vein, I read C. S. Lewis’s books on medieval literature and was well rewarded. Yet I fear I am not complex enough for Finnegan’s Wake. Perhaps if I find an annotated copy, it might be doable. Although, I will try and read Ulysses. I enjoyed Anonymous Sparrow and your description of the complexity of Joyce’s writing. I felt I got more from both of you than I could have gotten on my own.
If I only had more time.
To quote the Duck of Death:
[shaking fish] TIIIIIMMMMME-MOPPPP!
( I hope I have more time. Today I received my first notice to join a cremation society. It’s right next to a BBQ joint. [maybe they share the wood!])
SP:
Are any members of the Crankshaft family working at the BBQ joint? If so, be careful. (Especially if it’s Ed.)
When Grant Morrison was touted as the greatest scripter in comics for writing *Doom Patrol,* I had something of an epiphany:
“You shouldn’t have to read something three times in order to get the same understanding you get from reading something else once. You should want to read it three times.”
If you can’t do that with Joyce, don’t push it…rather, push his work in Lillian’s face, like James Cagney would a grapefruit!
By the way, Joyce took the title *Finnegans Wake* from a traditional ballad. Peter Milligan took individual chapter titles for his *Skreemer* limited series from it, so for the current and historical versions of Shade, the Changing Man, I offer the full lyrics below:
Tim Finnegan lived in Watling Street
A gentleman Irish, mighty odd;
He’d a beautiful brogue so rich and sweet
And to rise in the world he carried a hod.
Now Tim had a sort o’ the tipplin’ way
With a love of the liquor poor Tim was born
And to help him on with his work each day
He’d a drop of the craythur ev’ry morn.
Chorus
Whack fol the dah now dance to your partner
Welt the flure, your trotters shake;
Wasn’t it the truth I told you
Lots of fun at Finnegan’s wake!
One mornin’ Tim was rather full
His head felt heavy which made him shake,
He fell from the ladder and broke his skull
And they carried him home his corpse to wake.
They wrapped him up in a nice clean sheet
And laid him out across the bed,
With a gallon of whiskey at his feet
And a barrel of porter at his head.
His friends assembled at the wake
And Mrs. Finnegan called for lunch,
First they brought in tea and cake
Then pipes, tobacco and whiskey punch.
Biddy O’Brien began to cry
“Such a nice clean corpse, did you ever see?
“Arrah, Tim, mavourneen, why did you die?”
“Ah, shut your gob” said Paddy McGee!
Then Maggy O’Connor took up the job
“O Biddy,” says she, “You’re wrong, I’m sure”:
Biddy gave her a belt in the gob
And left her sprawlin’ on the floor.
And then the war did soon engage
‘Twas woman to woman and man to man,
Shillelagh law was all the rage
And the row and the ruction soon began.
Then Mickey Maloney ducked his head
When a flagon of whiskey flew at him,
It missed, and fallin’ on the bed
The liquor scattered over Tim.
Tim revives! See how he rises!
Timothy rising from the bed
Sayin’: “Whirl your liquor around like blazes!
Thanam o’n Dhoul! D’ye think I’m dead?”
It’s the woeman’s libation moment, and Erewhon go braless…
Anonymous Sparrow,
I cannot outdo you.
I won’t try to duck it
The only real poem I know
Is “I once knew a girl from Nantucket.”
Fewer images captured what post-gag-a-day FW was like better than Wally skulking away with his trombone did. Batiuk just LOVED to beat on poor, poor Wally.
Despicable, clumsily written bathos. Somehow the over-the-topness wrings out any possible emotion from the entire scenario.
Restraint serves much better in scenes like this — but you must trust the audience to imbue the scene with their own emotion.
My favorite “walking away” scene is also the ending to my favorite film, The Third Man. Throughout the film we’ve seen murder, deception, and the shattered ruins of Vienna in virtually every scene. Holly, the protagonist, has lost every happy illusion he ever had about his best friend, about what a hero can do, and indeed about the ability of man to rise above evil. And the woman he loves hates him.
The final scene shows a very deep, symmetrical shot of Holly leaning against a car as the woman walks toward him, down a long, long esplanade of leafless, pollarded trees. No ruins in sight — Carol Reed was too subtle a director to force the point like that. The shot takes its time. The girl starts as barely a dot as she walks determinedly towards the camera. Holly watches. She walks closer, ignoring Holly. Holly does nothing, his face is impassive. The woman walks past the camera. Finally Holly lights a cigarette. The end.
Nothing really happens for over a minute of this static shot. Nobody says anything, no one makes a gesture, there’s no sad faces or swelling orchestral music. But it’s one of the most famous endings in film history because it’s deeply emotional. We in the audience know the stakes. We feel the strangled hopes and despair in these two people. Reed trusted the audience to understand and project their own emotions into the scene.
Imagine how much better this arc could have been if Batiuk had underplayed it in a similar fashion. If there had been a lot less talking and a lot more showing. Example: “I want to show you something.” Then a panel of Wally looking at his own gravestone. We’d feel his emotions, and add a layer: This is the grave of the real Wally, and what’s left is just a shell. But Bats can’t trust us for even a second, so he overexplains himself into a boring, tiresome hole.
Your Grease:
A beautiful analysis of a wonderful scene. (Incidentally, James Joyce turns up in “The Third Man,” as someone whom Holly Martins hasn’t read.)
Sometime after seeing “The Third Man” for the umpteenth time, I saw 1948’s “Portrait of Jennie,” in which Joseph Cotten plays Eben Adams, another artist, this time a painter rather than an author of “cheap novelettes.” It’s nothing at all like “The Third Man,” but the presence of Cotten brings back memories of the other picture, especially of Anna’s remarks to Holly that he needs a girl.
And I thought:
Is Holly Martins Eben Adams who hasn’t found a girl?
Or is Eben Adams, through his interaction with Jennie, Holly Martins who has found a girl?
In any case, while “The Third Man” is the greater of the two, I recommend “Portrait of Jennie” strongly: Cotten and Jennifer Jones are splendid, and the supporting cast includes stellar performacnes from Ethel Barrymore (who gets the last word and makes the most of it), Florence Bates (whom you may remember as Mrs. Van Hopper in “Rebecca”), Cecil Kellaway (the victim in “The Postman Always Rings Twice”) and David Wayne (who was the Mad Hatter on “Batman,” but Tom Batiuk must know that…don’t be Tetchy, Jervis).
And there’s that philosophical question I like pondering. (Sadly, most of my friends who love “The Third Man” don’t seem to think much of “Portrait of Jennie.”)
By the way…in Graham Greene’s book version, Holly Martins’s first name is Rollo…and he seems to have a chance with Anna, after all.
“Justice it means but it’s everybody eating everyone else. That’s what life is after all.” ― James Joyce, Ulysses
(First, a prayer to the God of the Automod. May my works be acceptable in Thy sight, O Mighty Automod.)
I’m sure you are aware that Greene wrote the novelization after the screenplay. I think the screenplay’s version is superior. First, there is a subtle, repeated problem with names — Calloway being called Callahan, Dr Winkel’s name being mispronounced, and Holly being called Harry several times, which wouldn’t have worked with the name Rollo.
Second, the ending of the film is perfect. Both these characters are terribly damaged and compromised. Anna started out that way, and Holly ended up that way. There can’t be any hope for a redeeming relationship there. We see Holly lose his last thread of Yankee optimism in that famous last scene, after his final, hopeful outburst to Calloway.
I’ll take your recommendation on “Portrait of Jennie.” I feel that Cotten is always underrated because in his most famous roles, he played opposite the incandescent Orson Welles, who could and did steal any scene. But there’s a reason Welles chose to work with Cotten for such a long time: He was a good enough actor to ground Welles’ outrageous characters in reality.
Your Grease:
Actually, I hadn’t known that the screenplay came first, and learning that it did makes me think of why Howard Haycraft included John Buchan’s *Greenmantle* in anthology of great spy stories rather than the more famous *Thirty-Nine Steps.*
He thought Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 film was superior to its source material. He also thought *Greenmantle* deserved wider recognition.
I agree with him on both points and with its glimpse into Islam looking for a Mahdi, *Greenmantle* doesn’t read like something written in 1916 or in 1940 (the year of Buchan’s death). It seems as up-to-date as Bin Laden.
Still, if I were assembling such an anthology today, I think I’d select Buchan’s third Richard Hannay adventure, *Mr. Standfast.*
Greene, to his credit, admitted that the film’s ending was superior to the novella’s.
The strangest thing to my mind with the book was learning that Harry Lime was a Catholic and made the sign of the Cross before his demise. Greene was an intensely Catholic novelist, of course, and while it works well with Pinkie in *Brighton Rock,* it seems irrelevant with Harry. (It wouldn’t have added anything to the Ferris Wheel scene.)
If you ever do check out “Portrait of Jennie,” I’ll be interested in your thoughts (even if you think my philosophical game is the product of someone with too much time on his hands).
Was Cotten Banquo to Welles’s Macbeth? Lesser and greater, not so happy, yet much happier…
And as charismatic and chilling as Harry Lime was in “The Third Man” as Charlie Oakley in “Shadow of a Doubt.” (Sam Flusky in “Under Capricorn,” on the other hand…)
(Since my prayer worked last time: Hail Automod, full of grace. The Borg is with thee.)
Well, I have never read Buchan. I just downloaded “Greenmantle” for the Kindle for the princely sum of $0.00. I trust it’ll be worth it. 🙂
Nor have I ever read the novella of “The Third Man.” How typical of Greene to shoehorn Catholic guilt into the character, whether it fits or not. And I say that as a huge Greene fan who found “Brighton Rock” very compelling. But that Catholic madness was woven into Pinkie’s psychopathy from the start and just doesn’t work tacked onto Lime’s gleeful amorality.
BTW, your headcanon about Cotton’s characters in the two movies reminds me of my Unified Headcanon of Jack Lemmon. The same guy who fumbled his chance to rise in the insurance game in “The Apartment” (1960) ends up a failure in the ad biz, drinking himself half to death in “Days of Wine and Roses.” (1962) After presiding over the ignominious decline of a garment manufacturer in “Save the Tiger,” (1973) he ends up a desperate man, aging out of the real estate sales game and willing to do anything to get his hands on the Glengarry leads in “Glengarry Glen Ross” (1992). Maybe he should have stuck it out with Joe E. Brown. After all, nobody’s perfect.
The same Unified Headcanon character lives on as “Ol’ Gil” on The Simpsons, still a humiliating failure at everything he puts his hand to.
Your Grease:
Grr.
Now I’m really upset that I didn’t go to see the musical version of “Days of Wine and Roses” (Kelli O’Hara had the Lee Remick role, which Piper Laurie created on television. Cliff Robertson, by the by, had Lemmon’s role in the television version, and losing it to Lemmon in the film made him sure to rights to “Flowers for Algernon,” which won him an Oscar when it became a film as “Charly”).
What you listed does describe a continuous comedown for Jack Lemmon: he won his first (Supporting) Oscar for “Mr. Roberts,” where he learned to be a mensch (Dr. Dreyfuss would approve!)…and if he screws himself out of the key to the executive washroom (I dig!) in “The Apartment,” he’s doing it because he’s discovered something bigger, better and more important in himself. (TV Tropes notes that Mr. Baxter and Miss Kubelik aren’t exactly assured of recommendation letters as they start anew. Certainly not ones “with bells on,” as the British would say!)
After that…well, Crankshaft quoted Willie Nelson, and so will I:
“I’ve got a wonderful future behind me…”
I gather in the new musical version of “Some Like It Hot” (there’s an earlier version called *Sugar,* which is quite charming, although it’s destined for footnote status like Giovanni Pasiello’s operatic version of *The Barber of Seville* compared to Giaochino Rossini’s) that Jerry/Daphne does give it a go with Osgood Fielding III, so maybe it crumbles cookie-wise in your favor every now and again.
Do you have a favorite Greene novel? Mine is *The End of the Affair.*
John Scantlebury Blenkiron joins with me in hoping that you enjoy *Greenmantle.*
I’m leery of movies reworked into plays, and although I love the film, I have no particular interest in seeing “Some Like It Hot.” “Days of Wine and Roses” did look potentially interesting, but I didn’t catch it during its limited run.
I’ve only read one Greene novel so far, “Brighton Rock.” But I’m about halfway finished with his substantial corpus of short stories. I’ve always preferred short stories to novels anyway; they’re a real test of a writer’s chops. Greene’s stories are honed to a stunningly sharp, bright edge. He gets so much character into just a couple pages, without any really noticeable exposition or even description. You learn who the characters are and what they need by what they do and say, and how they do and say it. In other words, by showing, not telling. There’s a lesson there for anyone who cares about writing… that is, if they’re willing to admit that any writer besides themselves is worthy of learning from… (*cough*Tom*cough*) But hey, Greene was never nominated for a Pulitzer, so clearly we’re talking about a third-rate talent here.
Favorites so far? I guess “Jubilee,” “Proof Positive,” and “The News in English,” though it’s hard to pick and choose since there’s not a weak one in the bunch, and I’m sure I’ll have new favorites by the time I’ve finished them all.
One thing I’ve noticed about Greene: He really didn’t seem to care much for Yanks. He’s less than charitable to any American character. But a man’s entitled to his biases, and perhaps he’d had some bad experiences with Americans working in the Foreign Office during the Big One.
Your Grease:
No, Greene was not especially fond of Americans in his work, although he can concede that they have good motives for all the trouble they cause. (As you’ll see in *The Quiet American,* an eerily prescient book about U.S. involvement in Vietnam — then Indo-China — which has been filmed twice. I haven’t seen the 1958 version with Audie Murphy but the 2002 picture with Brendan Fraser is excellent.)
Shall we make a deal? I’ll look into Greene’s short stories if you look into his novels. So while I borrow someone’s husband (CBH’s, perhaps?) I recommend:
The entertainments *Our Man in Havana* (a pre-Castro Cuba, which is even more interesting read against John Dos Passos’s *Great Days*: Carol Reed returned to Greeneland with a film version, and if it’s not up to the standard of “The Third Man,” it is great fun: Ernie Kovacs surprised me as the head of the secret police) and *This Gun for Hire*;
The great Catholic novels *The Power and the Glory,* *The Heart of the Matter* (set in Sierra Leone: Evelyn Waugh pays it a great compliment in his *Sword of Honour* trilogy — when people learn that Guy Crouchback was in Sierra Leone during his service, they ask if it was like Greene’s portrayal, and Guy says: “It had to have been…it must have been…”) and *The End of the Affair*;
For pre-Cold War politics: *It’s a Battlefield*;
For Cold War politics: *The Quiet American,* *The Comedians* and *The Honorary Consul*; and
For fun: *Travels with My Aunt.*
As a Briton, Greene was ineligible for the Pulitzer Prize…but he was nominated for the Nobel Prize, which he never won. (Beckett won in 1969, and Irish pubs will proudly let you know that he did, as did William Butler Yeats, George Bernard Shaw and Seamus Heaney.)
Having mentioned “The Third Man” and “Our Man in Havana,” I feel it necessary to mention the third film from Carol Reed and Graham Greene, 1948’s “Fallen Idol.”
Most musicals are adaptations — of the eleven from Rodgers & Hammerstein, only *Allegro* and *Me and Juliet* are originals — and they can be hit or miss. My fondness for William Wellman’s “Roxie Hart” has prevented me so far from seeing “Chicago” (save for a hilarious tribute to it in an episode of “Absolutely Fabulous”).
I have indeed seen “The Fallen Idol,” and read “The Basement Room,” the short story on which it was based. I have a great fondness for British films from the immediate postwar period, and this is one of the better ones.
I was just remarking to my better half that we should rewatch “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” — in part to enjoy the brilliant performances, especially Guinness’, and in part to better absorb what was going on. Watching the series was like literally eavesdropping on actual spies; nothing is explained, everything is implied, and you are expected to know or pick up all the coded words and phrases. We were rather lost the last time we watched it, but were carried along by the atmosphere and performances. Maybe this time we’ll understand more. I’ve never been able to get into Le Carré’s books; they strike me as too cold and plot-driven. Plot’s the aspect of writing and film that I care least about.
Re: “Some Like it Hot,” Billy Wilder’s film is subtle and subversive underneath its broad-comedy shell. There’s a lot going on with the characters that far transcends the tired trope of men in drag. Lemmon’s character, Daphne, for the first time understands the feeling of being aggressively pursued and wooed — in other words, of being a woman instead of a man — and he starts to fall in love with that feeling. The ending, if you’re paying attention, suggests that Osgood knew all along exactly what was going on, implying that everything that came before was actually a long, kinky game. (That might explain why he didn’t go for the much prettier drag-Tony Curtis.) Wilder was a sly and witty director who could get away with quite a lot with a wink to those who noticed.
The Broadway musical, from what I’ve read, has Daphne realizing that he/she is really transgender, falling in love with Osgood, and marrying him. That’s the problem with so many new musicals: Using a sledgehammer where a subtle hint would work so much better, and a need to bludgeon the audience with some perceived social-justice message. Again, it’s the Batiukism of not trusting the audience.
Contrast (since we’re talking about Rodgers & Hammerstein), “The King and I,” which was beautifully revived several years ago (with Kelli O’Hara, incidentally). After I saw it, I was talking to the person I saw it with. They said it was a parable about the struggles of modernizing a backward society; I saw it as a parable about the damage caused by an arrogant, bull-in-a-china-shop approach to Westernizing Asian cultures. Which is it? Maybe neither, maybe both. Who is the villain? No one, really. The audience has to work to understand what’s happening. OR… they can just let it wash over them and go home humming, “I Whistle a Happy Tune.” Either way, the writers trusted the audience to do the mental work to understand what the thing was about.
Unlike Puff Batty. See, I brought it back to topic!
Your Grease:
As always, a first-rate and provocative response.
As Kelli O’Hara has been in *The Bridges of Madison County* (playing Meryl Streep’s role) and in *Far from Heaven* (playing Julianne Moore’s role), I’m hoping she’ll complete the “Hours” trinity and play Nicole Kidman’s role in a musical.
Wilder wanted to do things as he thought Ernst Lubitsch would have (remember, The Girl in “Sullivan’s Travels” wanted an introduction to him); he even had a sign reminding him of that in his office. Alas, no one seems to want to think about how Wilder would have done things (that the high school in “Just One of the Guys” is “Sturgis-Wilder” is a throwaway gag only), which is a shame. “Nobody’s perfect,” “shut up and deal” and even “kiss me, stupid” leave us thinking about what we’ve seen well after we’re home,
Le Carre isn’t to everybody’s taste, and he ran into trouble when the Soviet Union fell: meticulous as his research was with his new villains, the stakes didn’t feel as high.
A fun fact: in writing *You Only Live Twice,* Ian Fleming turned to Australian journalist Richard Hughes for research, and turned him into Dikko Henderson.
In writing *The Honourable Schoolboy,* John le Carre turned to Hughes for research, and asked him if he could turn him into a minor character in the novel. Hughes agreed, but only on the condition that the character be as scurrilous as possible. Her got his wish with the irascible Old Craw, who wanted his beer “muchee coldee — chop chop!”
You make me want to revisit my box set of Rodgers & Hammerstein shows (would that there was one for Rodgers & Hart) soon, and I shall after a visit to the post-Winwood Spencer Davis Group. (Then the “Rocky Horror” box set, which leaves me shivering with antici-pation.)
I wonder whether Batiuk skipped class to buy *With Their New Face On.*
Or maybe “Mr. Second Class” struck too much of a nerve…
Literally “sad trombone”, which is probably why i laughed so hard at it.
All the indignities Wally has endured… his captivity, the apparent incompetence of the military that employed him, poverty, the end of his marriage through absolutely no fault of his own (you waited only A YEAR, Lefty?!)…
And he gets sent packing with the worst indignity of all, Dinkle demanding his presence.
Brava, CBH, Brava
It bothered me then that they didn’t do a DNA test on the bones and it bothers me now. It bothered me then that Becky was so mushheaded and fickle back then and it bothers me now.
Batiuk’s stories don’t work unless every character in them is a complete moron. Which often extends to making an entire profession morons. This story requires the military to be so lazy/stupid/indifferent about their own soldiers that they just accepted whatever remains the Taliban sent to them. Nobody anywhere was bothered by this. And somehow, he’s not even the FW character whose life was treated with the most disregard.
The “Artistic License – Military” entry in FW’s TVTropes page is brutal:
Pretty much everything relating to the storyline with Wally is a slap in the face to anyone who has even a smidgen of knowledge of the military, POWs, and basic procedures for declaring a soldier killed in action. Hint: they tend to involve identifying the body and not grabbing random corpses without even the most basic of forensics testing. This may have been inspired by the controversy some years back over the deliberate misidentification of skeletal remains recovered in Southeast Asia.
Bonus points for calling out Batiuk’s lazy research for his “ripped from the headlines” story.
I wrote most of that.
Nice. I’ve contributed to that page too. I suspect more than you and I have.
CBH: Please don’t write like that. My downstairs neighbor keeps pounding on my door screaming “Stop droppin’ yer jaws through my ceiling!”
Anybody starting to think it took Tom Swift 3 years to finish a certain book? Depending on how you count it, in 3 days we have 13 confirmed and 2 probables that seemingly could prove that the book that they’re reading is, quite possibly, Ulysses. We’re pushing Lisa’s Story levels of mention here.
Ralph Spoilsport could not have said it better.
My mind jumped to The Firesign Theatre too. A truly inspired post from CBH.
Huh, I remember it being longer.
Just brilliant, CBH. Just absolutely brilliant. Standing ovation from the gallery! (Or finger-snapping, since it’s a poetry reading.) So good to see you back.
For the record, I don’t believe that TB has ever read Joyce, or would ever try. He doesn’t seem interested in working to understand difficult things in general, whether it be the emotions of an Afghan refugee landing in the Midwest, or the feelings of a dying mother of a young child, or the difficult poesy of a writer who’s determined to take the scenic route to meaning.
Also, for the record:
LEROY!
I’ve been carefully avoiding posting links or gifs, but the automod just hates me and has banished my last two comments. I don’t have much confidence that this one will go through, either.
It is so strange how depressing the comic Funky Winkerbean was. Even moments of joy somehow turned into hours of negativism.
Have you ever seen the YouTube ads for those mobile games that are incredibly simplistic, but the player still loses because he’s somehow befuddled by the concept of “pick the bigger number”? Reading Funky Winkerbean is a lot like that.
“Why are we in the cemetery?” “Because I need to show you something.” Somehow, no one has told Wally this yet. Not the personal friend journalist who interviewed him, no one in the military, no one in his own family. (Even though, IIRC, Funky filed the paperwork to have Wally declared dead.) Nor does have the intellectual acuity to piece it together himself.
Everyone in this world is blown away by the most obvious things they take a week to set up. And Batiuk thinks the reader is too. He’ll tell you himself: “The Village Booksmith is the same Village Booksmith that’s been a location in the strip for 25 years!” He really thinks we’re that dumb.
BJr6K, I regret to inform you that he’s not telling us these things because he thinks we’re dumb.
He’s telling us because he thinks he’s clever. Devastatingly so. And he’s taking a victory lap.
That was definitely an epic read, CBH, and even if I don’t fully comprehend I think I understand the sentiments. It really does seem to underline the pessimism and overhanded attempt this arc of the comic went for, and how egregious it got.
The hand Wally got dealt as he was shoved at the door at the end of this is definitely up there for one of the worst approaches to “you can’t go home again.” I never felt the idea (as some readers back in the day looking at ol’ Stuck Funky felt, or John seemingly fretted over during this arc) that Becky should’ve split with DSH then and there and return to Wally, or that he deserved her for all he went through (TEN FUCKING YEARS! That right there’s movie-making material, not another damn cancer memoir!). And that’s all right, this is a complex, though not inconceivable, scenario for characters to grapple with. Old love and new love, two dads for the kids, a seriously broken bird that needs love and support in spite of the spanner of the works this might be for the family dynamic.
But we don’t get that. This story arc is effectively ended here and now when Becky tosses him his trumpet and says “sorry, it’s over” with minimal attempts to try and keep association together. Their direct bond is treated as dead in the dirt as the remains that the military failed to identify correctly, to the point that it makes it seem like she doesn’t care for him anymore. There’s minor attempts to maintain their family still have a relationship, yes, as Wally and Rana at least have some high school interactions, but it drops off so cleanly that he doesn’t even know she reembraced her heritage or started college until they met each other. He’s lucky she still calls him “Dad” with how much John remains in her life by comparison. But there’s barely anything with Becky or Wally Jr. Their FINAL appearance last year had them sat two rows apart in the pews of that church, no sign that they ever had a bond to speak of.
What did this outcome accomplish? Without trying to preempt later stages of the recap, let’s recall what Wally’s story beats are from here: He gets depressed and drunk, he copes with the motherload of PTSD, recovers as he gets a therapy dog, makes new Muslim friends, and then finds love and marriage again. Effectively standard “soldier returns home” story beats. None of those beats required him being cut out of his old family’s household, and in fact could’ve happened if Wally returned and Becky & the kids had been written out as moving to Alaska or dying in a massive car crash. The only thing that being cut out of his old family’s life did is add to his scorecard of Funky misery, and in that he certainly is the worst-suffering person in Westview, no contest. Go mope with Le Chat Blue and Timemop, Les, you don’t know how easy you got it.
Batiuk wrote this going in as a tragedy of love and time, but it didn’t have to be, and as presented it really isn’t. It’s the worst-best news that Becky’s family could’ve received, and that’s arguably perfect for the kind of tropes this strip liked to play with in its better times, the complications it causes. As CBT mentioned, this is a really rather intriguing story full of dramatic landmines, something a TV show could be built on, yet it’s all sidestepped to rush to that final one-panel Sunday strip where Becky effectively rejects the needs of a man with a decade of trauma who held onto her as a beacon of hope, doing the minimal level of offering help she could do before just patting him on the back and telling him “What’s done is done, move on, I now love a comic store owner who appears more often making nerd jokes than spending time with the family. Trust me, it all happened because I said so and not because it was all made easy with a time skip for someone else’s benefit while revealing my change in life with a cheap “Gotcha” reveal.” For everything that was done to him, all the years we’ve seen of him, Wally deserved more, there was so much that could be said and seen. Instead he was just pushed aside and treated like any other traumatized veteran, and the limelight kept looking to his usurper and the hobby he and the author loves.
Poor Wally, indeed.
What happens to Wally is almost vindictive. It’s a Humiliation Conga, and a rare case of an admirable character getting one. Yes, there are stories where this happens, but there’s just no point to it! Bad things happened to Charlie Brown, but the story was in how he reacted to them. Wally just doesn’t seem to care. All anyone can do is look at the reader and smirk, while what should be the defining moments happen off-camera. Just like Les and his time skip. Bombard him with misery, then cut around the actual story.
Wally’s probably too broken inside to even give a flying fuck about himself anymore
A whole other avenue of drama the story never explored. What on earth was going in Wally’s head while he was suffering all these indignities? Why didn’t he just say “screw it”, move to a whole new city, and reinvent himself? There was nothing for him in Westview anymore.
Because he knew God (i.e., Batiuk) would make it up to him on the backend and reward his suffering with a guaranteed well-paying, do-nothing, work-when-you-want-to job as the manager at Montoni’s Pizza and a younger, easygoing, and way hotter TWO-ARMED woman to put on his arm — You know, because no male character in the Funkyverse (and also Cindy Sommerse-Winkerbeane-Jarre) is allowed to be single and lonely for too long… Batiuk is going to shoehorn in a love connection somehow, doesn’t matter if she used to be your sister-in-law before divorcing your brother, or if she’s your foster mother’s long lost love child given up for adoption, or if she’s your dad’s stepdaughter with his second wife or if she’s got multiple kids with different fathers that she never sees or even talks about because canonically those “kids” should be damn near 30 years old by now but acknowledging their existence in the strip would cause a time rift so horrible as to require that meddling space janitor guy to pretty much delete the entire universe (Once again I’m looking in your direction, Cindy Sommerse-Winkerbeane-Jarre)…
As an aside, HOW MANY YEARS was I spelling the name “Batuik” on a daily basis and no one ever corrected me??
“We talked about him seeing Wally Jr. and Rana…”
I wonder if Wally ultimately fared better than the readers in that department.
The fact that Becky waited only ONE year has always been a sore spot with me. What was the rush? She didn’t want to lose DSH John to another woman? 🤣🤣🤣
Hell, Judge Crater’s wife waited ten years after his disappearance before she had him legally declared dead (some people speculate she had something to do with his disappearance and waited that long to throw off suspicion).
Speaking of “Crater”, any remaining amount of sympathy I had for Becky cratered with that story arc. From that point on, I felt she deserved any crap Batiuk threw her way.
This story arc in a nutshell, to me:
Wally: Hi, Becky. I wanted to see you. I never stopped thinking of you. Thoughts of you helped me survive.
Becky: Oh! Wally? You came here? Well, as far as I’m concerned, you’re buried and gone. See, there’s your grave. Here’s a drawer full of news clippings about you and your medal. You’re just a memory. I’m with John Howard now. We got rid of all your possessions except for your trombone. Here it is. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out. Buh bye! *shove*
DSH John: Is it safe to come out now?
BRUTAL!
In the third to last strip above, Becky starts to say, “If you don’t have someplace to stay…” before Wally interrupts her. I’d like to know how she would have finished that sentence.
Becky: If you don’t have someplace to stay we can give you money for a hotel room. You can’t stay here because you’re freaking out the kids.
“Kids”, meaning
Wally Jr. and RanaJohn Howard.“We got rid of all your possessions except for your trombone. Here it is. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out. Buh bye!”
I just keep coming back to that strip. Was Batty attempting
to leaven the tragedy with humor? My God. It’s all just so wrong.
Oh, and excellent post, CBH. I stand in line.
I recently quoted a Pulitzer winner who basically said “Tragedy gets awards; comedy doesn’t.” Which explains a lot about why TB (tuberculosis?) writes what he does. Thing is, he can’t write tragedy. He can only write cruelty.
The whole arc should’ve been told exclusively through Wally’s viewpoint. Like, a week beginning it showing him flying home and remembering all that decade he spent in a POW camp, the only reason he was not trying to throw himself on a land mine was her love. Her love that he then found was long gone, if it ever existed. But, no, that’s called writing, and real writing’s hard. That last panel should’ve been a closeup of him, with Becky staring from the distant window. Then he should’ve just left town, never to return.
Of course, we know what town he would’ve gone to. Maybe he was so depressed he hoped he’d get run over by that nutzoid bus driver everyone says lives there…
TOM: “A week showing Wally remembering Becky? Are you nuts? I need that week so that someone can OPEN A FUCKING LETTER.”
Keeping the photos and clippings, sure. But a trombone? Was she hoping to date Commander Will Riker?
It would have been about 33,000 steps up from DSH John.
Sixth strip from the top, (fifth from the bottom).
Becky: John was always wonderful to Rana, Wally Jr. and to me.
Really? When have we seen DSH John being “wonderful” to the kids? Playing with them in the yard, or helping them with homework? Ever?
When have we ever seen DSH John supportive of Becky and the band? Has DSH ever attended a band halftime show or a Christmas concert? Ever volunteered to chaperone on a band bus trip?
Typical Batiuk “tell, don’t show.”
He lets them read his pizza-grease-soaked Flash hardback omnibuses when he’s through memorizing them. What on earth more would you expect of a man? “Taking care” of kids, “spending time” with them, “raising” them — feh! That’s woman’s work.
either “tell, dont show” is in place or Pedoskunk John is/was genuinely awful to Becky
It’s even worse than that. It’s “tell and show two different things.” John is an indifferent husband at best, but the story needs to justify Becky’s rejection of Wally. So he’s “good with the kids”, even though everything we’ve seen is to the contrary. And Wally doesn’t even call out this obvious untruth. “John’s good with kids? Are his kids comic books?”
I am defeated by your logic. I was trying to bring any sense to Becky’s decision to stay with DSH. When Wally needs the most support from his wife, she states she has moved on and pushes him away. How heartless.
Becky: A dweeby comic book guy in the hand is worth more than a traumatized ex-POW in the bush. *smirk*
What do Becky and DSH John see in each other? What do they have in common?
– Becky lives to be the band director at Westview. It consumes her life to the point of maintaining a cot in her band room office. As stated in my original post, DSH John shows no interest in Becky’s job and has never been portrayed as supportive. DSH has whined to others about being a band widow(er). Poor baby.
– DSH John is all about comic books and comic-cons. Has Becky ever shown any interest in comic books? Have we ever seen her show any interest in the Komix Korner, other than the hentai court case? Does she own a Batman t-shirt (with a pinned-up sleeve)? Sorry, Becky.
In my view, couples in a healthy marriage show curiosity in each other’s hobbies. For instance, my husband finds pleasure in hunting and fishing. I have accompanied him (sometimes with our son) on countless occasions, waking up as early as 4:00 AM. Additionally, he is employed part-time at a gun shop, and I own a handgun, which I occasionally take to his range to shoot. He also makes his own craft beer, which I happily consume. Although I am not very skilled, I have some interest in his vehicle restoration hobby, and I love going for rides while leaving the rebuilding and tinkering to him.
I’ve loved skiing since high school. Did my husband take lessons, so he could join me? You bet. Do we golf or go to the driving range together? Affirmative. I enjoy classic movies. Does he watch with me? Quite often. Does he watch football with me? Does he own a KC Chiefs jersey? Did we attend a few games in person? Absolutely. I can’t get him to read comic strips with me, but I guess everyone has to draw a line somewhere. He prefers to read his cryptid and UFO conspiracy books.
I digress, let’s get back to the seemingly mismatched couple. With Becky, DSH gets a new mommy, but what does Becky get out of their relationship? Um… errr… someone to pin up her sleeve and open jars?
After reading your comment, it’s obvious to me now.
Query: What did Becky and DSH have in common?
Answer: Availability.
That and Batiuk’s obsessive compulsion to pair up couples.
Your theory is the only way this marriage makes any sense. DSH John is just a tool Batiuk used. I already knew DSH was a tool, but that was by a different definition.
Nothing wrong with your logic; I am quite in agreement about how poorly matched John and Becky are. She’s an achiever, and he’s a lazy schlub who can’t even be bothered to work hard at his comic book store, which is already his hobby. More than anything else, that would bring about their divorce. Becky was a highly motivated person to begin with, and needs to show she can still be, despite needing help with some tasks. A lazy, unproductive, unsupportive, unhelpful, comic book-addicted husband is the last thing on earth she would tolerate.
But the story told us what John and Becky saw in each other: they both like old movies! Which is a great thing to build a relationship on when you’re 14. On top of the relationship being a contrived plot obstacle, and a poor match that’s not worth what she gave up for it, it’s also a monument to how none of these characters ever grew up.
I remember that Becky and HAH/DCH John went to see an old movie on a date, but completely forgot old movies were a mutual interest.
What old movie did they see? Let me guess. Something as clichéd as Citizen Kane or Casablanca? I can’t see Batiuk coming up with a unique title very few people would think of.
No. Not Phantom Empire.
@be ware of eve hill: It was Sunset Boulevard. (It was showing at the Valentine when Ralph owned it. At least Ralph had enough sense to show a movie that people might actually want to see.)
You lost me at F-you Hank Stram Kc Chiefs 🙂
Hank Stram??? I didn’t become a Chiefs fan until 1988.
Still bitter about Super Bowl IV?
🤓 BWEOH, I grew up 12 miles from the Raiders’ stadium, and was in high school when the AFL was created. We hated the Chiefs at a level so far beyond the Scapegoats’ irritation of Big Walnut Tech.
My father grew up in San Francisco, and I grew up near Oakland and there’s a rivalry between teams from the two cities. We always thought it appropriate that my dad’s funeral was the day the Raiders won their first Super Bowl
Raiders fan should have been my first guess. 🙄😂
Actually, not since they moved away from Oakland😤
I can understand that. The Raiders moved from Oakland, not once but twice. That’s beyond cruel.
I grew up in northeast Ohio. Despite the neverending bad luck and ineptitude of the team, my younger brother remains a Cleveland Browns fan. I told him he could root for the Ravens since that was the physical franchise he rooted for between 1970 and 1995. He steadfastly refuses. “This is the year the Browns win”, he declares.
I was a huge Marty Schottenheimer fan starting when he was the head coach with the Browns. When my husband was transerred to Kansas City in 1988, Marty coincidentily resigned from the Browns and became the head coach of the Chiefs the following year. I’ve been a Chiefs fan since despite a couple of moves.
Fandom can be fickle. When I was a young kid I was a big Brooklyn Dodgers fan (My aunt and uncle lived next door, and she was from Brooklyn, and her father still lived there and would send me memorabilia. But, the moment the Giants moved to SF and the Dodgers moved to LA I became a Giants fan and a Dodger hater (and still am)
I can only imagine DSH John walking up to Becky with a shotgun in his hands and saying:
DSH John: Marry me or else I’ll fucking kill you and your son.
I’m not trying to be political. I’m just repeating a well-known political quote. Delete if you must, but I can’t resist.
Becky Blackburn Winkerbean Howard on Wally Winkerbean’s marital record: ‘I like husbands who weren’t captured’.
Bitch.
Can anyone explain this dialogue between Wally and Becky?
Wally: Didn’t they check dental records or anything?
Becky: The bodies didn’t … They couldn’t.
WTF?
It’s called “handwaving,” as explained in TV Tropes and elsewhere:
Having done this in academia and techy-land, I think it’s an effective way of dealing with out-of-scope topics. I taught some internet-adjacent subject matter, and my way of not getting sucked into networking questions (which weren’t relevant to the subject matter and which I know nothing about anyway) was basically Stuff Happens. I called it the Magic Box. You type “sonofstuckfunky.com” into your browser, it goes into the Magic Box, the server receives the request, and sends the contents of the web page to you back through the Magic Box with a “200” response.
I meant to add above: This is a particularly egregious example because, as others pointed out, it’s describing a situation where there is an established protocol that was completely thrown out the window for no reason.
Worse, even a simpleton would know that the procedure involves more than picking up a random charred lump of flesh on a battlefield and saying, “Welp, I guess this must be ol’ so-and-so’s remains, the one we thought might have been a POW. Best declare him dead posthaste.” “But Captain, you can make out a hoof right here –” “THAT’S ENOUGH, soldier! Chuck that charbroiled carcass in a box and send it Stateside, and let’s hear no more palaver about old dead whatzisname.”
That had me laughing so hard I was in tears. 😂
Captain: The truth is irrelevant. The widow needs closure ASAP. What’s the matter with you, soldier? Don’t you have any feelings?
Yes, I was utterly shocked at how according to the Funkyverse, the U.S. Army is 100% incompetent at literally everything.
Basically, Becky is trying to say that there wasn’t enough left of the bodies they found (or not in big enough pieces) to even look at the dental records (i.e., even the teeth were reduced to shards). Doesn’t make the story make any sense, but that’s what Batiuk was trying to say there.
I’m just going to assume that crash site clean-up was done by our old friend Timemop, who needed Wally away for… reasons. It’s the most elegant solution to the question.
Brilliance. Just don’t try this with Finnegan’s Wake people’s heads would explode. Actually as I think about this Samuel Beckett work is almost gloomy Waiting for Godot springs to mind.
Professor:
The sharpest insult Vladimir and Estragon hurl at each other in Beckett’s play is “critic.”
It stops the conversation dead.
Monsieur Godot won’t be here today, but he’ll definitely be here tomorrow. It’s like jam every other day in *Through the Looking Glass,* you know.
As proof that Beckett can be very funny, I offer this quotation from *Endgame*:
“God damn you to hell, Sir, no, it’s indecent, there are limits! In six days, do you hear me, six days, God made the world. Yes Sir, no less Sir, the WORLD! And you are not bloody well capable of making me a pair of trousers in three months!’
‘But my dear Sir, my dear Sir, look at the world and look at my TROUSERS!”
LOL! I saw “Godot” on Broadway with Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart, Billy Crudup, and Shuler Hensley. It was fantastic, quite funny in parts and frightening in others. I was fortunate in that I hadn’t read the play beforehand so I was taken by surprise by many parts of it. I’ve never seen anything in the theater that’s stuck with me like this production.
Although I’ve been converted into a fan, I don’t want to read any of his plays, because I’d rather be able to see them live and be surprised and provoked the way I was by “Godot.” Sadly, it doesn’t seem like his other plays are being produced much at the moment.
And to bring us back to topic: “Godot” has something in common with Tom Batiuk — lengthy, incoherent monologuing. Of course, the play has just the one incidence, while TB’s made quite the habit of it.
Your Grease:
What a star-studded production! The biggest star I’ve ever seen in a Beckett play was Dianne Wiest in *Happy Days,* courtesy of the Theatre for a New Audience (now based in Brooklyn in the Polonsky Center, named for someone who, like Cliff Anger, was blacklisted for many years).
The person I’ve seen in short Beckett plays who should be a bigger name than she is Kathryn Hunter, a truly amazing actress who undertook the role of the Fool in *King Lear* and made it her own. (She’s the Witches in Joel Coen’s film of Shakespeare’s Scottish play.)
I worked with someone who echoed your assessment of Beckett. We never discussed Batiuk, though.
As I think everyone knows, McKellen and Stewart are great friends IRL. I think it showed on stage by their chemistry. There was just a great ease between them and a very light touch that accentuated the comedic beats. Yet as you know, they can both bring the gravitas as necessary.
Your Grease:
Haven’t seen them together, but I did see Stewart in his one-man *Christmas Carol* in 1995 (he was phenomenal and gave an “author, author!” acknowledgement to Charles Dickens by holding up the book) and McKellen with Helen (there is nothing like a Dame) Mirren in *Dance of the Dead.*
August Strindberg beat Edward Albee to unhappy marriage territory, but I’d much rather see *Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?*
I’ll be seeing Stewart in a promotion for *Making It So* at the beginning of next month. I shall think of you and of Stewart’s silent face-off with Alec Guinness in “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.”
(I think the first time I ever saw Stewart in anything was as Sejanus in “I, Claudius.” He had hair in that.)
Simon Callow also does a one-man Christmas Carol. Saw it in London pre-COVID. Would recommend.
Big Beckett fan – trivial note he was Joyce’s secretary for a time thanks for the quote. Now I feel the need to go back a read him again or some of him. Again thanks
Since this was an oh-so-serious arc, I’ll put on my Serious Hat and make this comment:
If I married someone whose spouse had been through what Wally went through, and if they treated their traumatized, just-released spouse the way Becky did, there’d be a process server at their office the next week with divorce papers.
No way would I stay with someone who could cut their former spouse off that coldly after all that. It reveals a total lack of character bordering on sociopathy.
All I’d be thinking of is: What if I go through some trouble and need help? What if our kids become inconvenient? Someone who would shrug and turn their back on the person they married can’t be trusted to lift a finger to help us, or anyone else, if the chips are down.
There’s a 1940 movie titled Too Many Husbands. It’s a comedy featuring Jean Arthur, Fred MacMurray, and Melvyn Douglas. The movie’s premise is very similar to the Wally-Becky-DSH triangle.
Storyline from IMDB:
Bill disappeared for only one year. Yet Vicky, like Becky, couldn’t wait. She was so lonely, she married the first person who showed her any affection.
The relevant point of the movie I want to bring up is at the end of the movie a judge ruled Vicky was still married to Bill, her first husband. Yet, despite the judge’s ruling, Vicky was cavorting with both men at the movie’s end.
What I’d love to know, if he wanted to, would Ohio law allow Wally to kick John Howard to the curb and claim he was still married to Becky? If Becky wanted to be with DSH, she’d have to divorce Wally. What if Wally played hard to get along with and refused a divorce? Would he be able to sue Becky?
So much potential and Batiuk decided to take this story arc nowhere. Sad.
would Ohio law allow Wally to kick John Howard to the curb and claim he was still married to Becky?
I think the fact that Becky married John in the first place is prima facie evidence that Wally was already considered dead. By the time he’s found alive, he has no valid marriage to claim still exists.
This also gets into problems like how long it had been (in the Funkyverse, who knows?), whether he’d been declared dead, and whether or not the military knew the truth. But let’s not make this story any worse than it already is.
Sorry, but considering the American legal system, I have to believe there is more to it than prima facie. Perhaps I should post the “too many husbands” question on a website like Quora. Folks over there seem to love questions like that.
Also, who knows what transpired between Becky, DSH, and the kids during the second time skip after Lisa died. Did Becky have her marriage with Wally annulled for religious or legal reasons? If DSH legally adopted Wally Jr. and Rana, wouldn’t that present another issue? “Too Many Daddys”?
Batiuk failed to address Les raising Summer alone. Batiuk failed to address Wally’s second captivity, only leaving clues at the end of Act II and before his reappearance in Act III. Becky and John’s marriage? Well, basically who cares, but if Batiuk wants to throw Wally back into the equation, some people, like me, are going to have questions. Didn’t a certain cartoonist claim his comic strip was “A quarter inch away from reality”? 🤷♀️
How many storylines like those did the “storyteller” avoid with the second time jump? Having trouble addressing certain storylines or continuity issues in your comic strip? Just f*cking skip over them! That was easy!
Declaration: The second Funky Winkerbean time skip, the worst writing crutch in the history of newspaper comic strips.
FWIW, in 2023 our dog’s backside is a better storyteller than Batiuk.
I wish I could use the time skip in my job.
Boss: So, eve, is your group looking forward to fiscal year-end closing?
Me: Time skip!
Boss: BJ6K, is your group looking forward to fiscal year-end closing?
Me: Time skip!
Timemop: Nudge!
Boss: BJ6K, are you looking forward to consummating your marriage with the comic book-loving wife we’ve assigned you?
@BJ6K
Summoning the Time Mop incurs a price, like the monkey’s paw? I guess that explains what happened to Batiuk’s skills after Act II.
Batiuk: Time Mop. I summon thee!
Time Mop: Yes. How can I help you?
Batiuk: I wish to avoid writing difficult story lines in ‘Funky Winkerbean’.
Time Mop: As you wish. * POOF * A ten-year skip has occurred in your comic strip. Writing difficult story arcs will no longer be an issue.
Batiuk: Excellent! I stand in line! *smirk*
Time Mop: *counter smirk*
Later:
Batiuk: What the hell happened? I can’t even write mediocre stories anymore? I have the writing skills of a child. What happened to my sense of humor? It’s gone!
The most repugnant part of this arc is that Wally’s return, which should have been a joyous homecoming, was portrayed as an awkward inconvenience to those who loved him most. Everyone thought Wally was DEAD, but where were the tears, the hugs, the relief and happiness when they saw him? Did we get Funky’s reaction on seeing his son once believed dead, or did we just get “he looked different” after picking him up from the airport? How many of us would give anything to have another few minutes with a loved one no longer with us? The Winkerbeans got their loved one back, but it was presented with anxiety, misplaced focus, and little joy. It’s a lousy thing to do to anyone, let alone a returning veteran.
I admit, I’m a sucker for the online videos where military parents/spouses come home and surprise their family members. I know they’re preplanned, but what’s genuine is the emotion when those kids/spouses realize their dad/partner is home. Those tears of joy are real. And my cousin is a military wife whose husband spends months away on deployment. The last couple of times she and their kids have picked him up at the airport, she has posted a video of them waiting and then running to him with hugs and “Hi Daddy’s”! It’s cute, and it’s nice. That’s how real people act when their loved ones come home.
It wouldn’t bug me so much that Becky stayed with John if I believed she was actually in love with him, but I will never be convinced that she married him for any reason other than he was there. She told Wally “John was so nice to us”, as if that’s the only reason she needed. I’m with the other posters who also think she married him out of convenience.
I didn’t think it was possible for me to dislike a character as much as I despise Les, but after revisiting this storyline, Becky comes close. I used to feel bad for her because Dinkle keeps hanging out at the school and won’t go home, but as far as I’m concerned he can follow her into the afterlife waving his own arm behind her missing one.
And CBH-once again, a brilliant take and skewering of the topic at hand.
There’s a overall amount of shock to the proceedings that I can sort of understand since this is not only the 2nd time this happened to Wally (almost like lessening the impact of a “What, again?” sort of way, though that really should be more out-of-universe than in-universe), but that it’s incredibly long enough that everyone had moved on to acceptance of him being gone. The reasonableness of this has limited IRL analogs (as the point of how Wally would’ve been America’s longest-held POW in history if it was a true story) but I can at least imagine it being a harder pill to swallow.
But of course by the same token, since this is magnitudes worse trauma for Wally to have endured than his first time lost in the Middle East, even if everyone was shaken, it should have been no less of a grand welcome. It just makes the lukewarm tone that leads to his out-the-door treatment that much worse; because this happened once before, people aren’t trying as hard, even though this sort of experience needs just as much, if not more, care and attention for his well-being. Those ten freakin’ years makes all the difference in how much more empathy the guy earns, and it’s something I mentioned once before in how this strip so often creates extraordinary circumstances just to tell incredibly ordinary dramas with no fufilling conclusion. Just goes to show how mishandled the Act 3 time skip really was.
There’s a overall amount of shock to the proceedings that I can sort of understand
Agreed, and having things happen while a shocked character tries to process it all can be powerful storytelling. But Wally never shows any shock. Or any reaction at all. He’s completely inert. “My wife whose memory literally kept me alive during a decade of captivity doesn’t want me back? Oh.” He doesn’t even care! He’s not shocked, he’s not angry, he’s not hurt, he just chugs along the path at a moderate speed like a model train, completely indifferent to anything happening around him. You said it perfectly:
this strip so often creates extraordinary circumstances just to tell incredibly ordinary dramas with no fulfilling conclusion.
Same thing with precious Lisa. “I’m going to die of cancer? Oh.”
The thought of not being there to see your child grow up, of not being there to hug their tears away, cuddle with a book before bed, help them navigate the process of growing up, be there at their wedding — that should have absolutely gutted Lisa. The idea of abandoning your kid and leaving them motherless. But did she ever talk about this? I don’t recall seeing it, but maybe I missed that strip.
No, all the concern she showed was for Les. Jesus, what an outright psyçho she was, our Lady of the Carcinoma, Blessed St Lisa.
Les and Lisa are a narcissistic co-dependent couple. Les has a hero complex and Lisa had a victim complex, which fed off each other perfectly. Lisa was too helpless to get out of the way of a slow-moving steamroller. Les was eager to charge into dangerous situations that offered no way he could help. Him running down the street shrieking “Lisa!” long after the bomb went off was an inadvertent self-deconstruction.
In TB’s telling of the tale we actually have no idea what motivated Wally. His kids, wife, Montoni’s, trombone? As far as I know there was no update during all those years
I’m a sucker for the online videos where military parents/spouses come home and surprise their family members… what’s genuine is the emotion when those kids/spouses realize their dad/partner is home. Those tears of joy are real.
Look up “Enchroma glasses” sometime. Your emotions will be WRECKED.
I’ve seen those videos, and the ones where deaf kids hear, or blind kids see, their mom for the first time. Have tissues handy. A jumbo box.
It strikes me that TB thinks he can elide the entire issue by writing “numbed by trauma.” He thinks it’s an easy way to be “deep.” Instead, it’s a cop-out. Especially since Wally seemed to ditch the PTSD and his poor lost therapy dog, Buddy, in record time, and then bounce back to a cheerful generic pizza-slinging Westview/Stepford creature.
That’s not how trauma works. That’s not how any of this works. Especially for someone who has a history of serious alcoholism. Especially for someone who’d likely have survivor guilt, which would likely trigger guilt over what he did to Becky.
I don’t know why Bats opens these Pandora’s boxes and then blithely ignores the horrible repercussions they would have in real life. Case in point, of course: Summer, who never evidenced one second of being sad she’d grown up without a mom.
I think the Enchroma videos are the most powerful, because deaf and blind people at least understand what they’re missing. Colorblind people seem to have no idea what the world actually looks like. There’s one of those videos where this kid is being asked to describe these gaudy Christmas balls, and everything is “gray… gray… slightly different gray…” until the glasses go on. When they do, he can’t even process it. Then he’s hit by the realization of what he’s been missing all his life. Yes, this is what the world actually looks like. No wonder people break down. Imagine if not being able to see in ultraviolet was a handicap, but one day you suddenly could. It’d throw you for a loop.
Colorblindness is such a great metaphor for how we’re all limited in some way. Just like some people can’t perceive colors, others can’t perceive emotions or sounds or empathy or distant objects or other things. We’re all looking at the world through a flawed lens. If we could all understand that, the world would be a better place.
It strikes me that TB thinks he can elide the entire issue by writing “numbed by trauma.”
He thinks he can, but you can show “numbed by trauma.” The thousand-yard stare is a well-understood concept in military life, and in storytelling. Batiuk couldn’t even bothered to give Wally one of those. Or he can’t draw it. Which shouldn’t be an obstacle for the skilled Ayers and Burns, but one of the Burns strips had John Howard facing away from the camera instead of showing an intense emotion. Which makes me think all this avoidance is a writing choice.
I’ve seen some of the Enchroma videos. Definitely tissue worthy. I can’t even imagine what it would be like to sudden literally see a world bursting with color that you’ve never seen before. And it amazes me that there are people brilliant enough to create something so wonderful.
Yes, instead of the frightening “thousand-yard stare,” we get a look of weary, resigned cynicism. Perhaps it is hard to convey in cartoon art; however, you could show it by other people’s shock and confusion. “Wally isn’t the same. I talk, but it’s like he doesn’t hear me. He’s just going through the motions. I asked him what’s troubling him but he mumbles that it’s nothing.” Etc.
But since Bats didn’t bother to research the results of prolonged, repeated trauma — from battle and from being held prisoner, and then finding out some loser has married your wife and raised your kids — we get shallow clichés like “vet is terrorized by helicopters/sirens/cars backfiring/fireworks/take your pick of loud sounds.”
What an insult to anyone afflicted with PTSD, the armed forces, veterans, and military families.
It really is. This story is a vintage dark Springsteen song waiting to happen. Except Springsteen would have made it work, and given it the proper weight. He would have made it a satire of how American society “supports the troops” without actually lifting a finger to support them. He would have juxtaposed the empty bumper stickers and the 10% Wal-Mart discounts the soldier gets, with his need for mental health treatment he has no idea how to ask for, or even tell anyone he needs.
From the second-to-last strip: “So how did?”.
“So how did?”
Did Batiuk forget the ellipses at the end, or is this another example of Batiuk’s not-quite-English (like “What brings?”)? Like “good a call”, I suspect we’ll never know the truth.
So how did it go?
Whoa, Batiuk saved himself four whole letters. Way to be economical with that printer ink, Tom. I’m sure the newspapers appreciated it!
Newspapers: Tom Batiuk. You da man!
Oh dear.
Fellow Bats Ohio native and 10,000 times cooler guy John Scalzi just posted words–Words which will CURDLE YOU BLOOD:
“I was there to record a bit for the Ohio Channel (the state-run public video channel) in conjunction with the Ohioana Awards in a couple of weeks, and to have lunch with the Ohioana librarians.”
Now we know why this week’s strips exist.
For a MONTH of stupid Ohio shit.
About LILLIAN.
At least that’s far more interesting than this week’s “Annotated Funky” blog post. I at least would’ve appreciated something on Batiuk/Bryne’s logic with the robot that moved into Lillian’s old bookstore, but instead he’s literally just pointing out the books that were in the third-to-last comic…. including the “famed” Westview book that the strip already established as a concrete thing in the final months, AND pointing out the Lisa’s Story book that the final week already put on a floating pedestal like any other “Fun fact”.
Y’know at this rate I think it’s 50/50 last week’s bombshell about seeing the Burnings next year is just going to be a week of throwaway gags related to Crankshaft’s latest grill explosion before going back to a week of Jeff’s comic misadventures like onthing happened.
Good dear Jeebus, that blog post is terrible.
That’s it. That’s all he has to say about the strip. The second panel literally shows the robot taking the book off the shelf, and the first panel’s dialogue is “I checked… and they have a copy of ‘Westview’… the book that your famous Nanna Summer wrote!” Batiuk is literally just telling us what’s blatantly obvious in the strip itself. Even the previous strip’s “This is the same ‘Village Booksmith’ that Lillian owns in Crankshaft was more insightful than this.
(And then he plugs his books. Because of course he does.)
As always, he generously answers the questions that literally no one on earth asked, because the answers are so flamingly obvious, yet fails to answer the real questions that all of us had, and there were dozens.
(For example: have you switched to a medical dispensary, now that you’ve found out that apparently your dealer was liberally lacing your wëed with PCP, crack, and/or ketåmine? You sure must feel silly, looking back at those last two weeks, which you must have written under the influence of a veritable pharmacopoeia of heavy tranquilizers and hallucinogens.)
And he doesn’t even explain why the titles run from bottom to top, when American (and UK) book titles almost always read from top to bottom.
It’s like an infomercial. It’s in the style of an author’s blog, but its real purpose is to raise questions that the product is the answer to. They’re not questions any real person would ask, but that’s not the point.
“Lots of people ask me, how do I get my whites cleaner? OxiClean gets the tough stains out! Available in only three installments of $19.99…”
“Lots of readers ask me, what happened in the last week of Funky Winkerbean? They’re at the bookstore buying Summer a birthday present. The other books on the shelf include the real world book Lisa’s Story! Available in only three installments of $19.99…”
Certain cable news channels work this way as well.
And now we’re on Day Two of book club bylaws. Jesus H. Christ.
Five days to set up a book club meeting, then Day Six skips straight to the end of it. An editor should have rejected this whole week.
Ooh, a new “Flash Fridays”, and it contains this gem:
That’s right, Tom, let’s pick on Cary Bates for Not Doing The Research. As opposed to the meticulous research you do to make sure you get all the details perfect.
Bonus: It’s not true. There may be fewer, but they’re still around. I’m sure there were many more during the Golden Age (there are always patriotic displays during a war), and the trope carried over somewhat.
What a strange thing to fixate on. Does he demand that artists get every detail of the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, or the Brooklyn Bridge 100% right? Does he sit counting the floors?
This is a guy who created a confusing, impossible, nonexistent, and worst of all, boring location for the Montoni’s NYC location. He didn’t seem to care about realism then. It would have been so cool if he’d picked a recognizable, colorful corner, or even neighborhood, but, you know, why be specific when you can be vague?
As a New Yorker, I can tell you I’ve never seen a superhero in my life. So I think we’re starting from an inherently unrealistic baseline, and perhaps beady-eyed nitpicking over flagpoles should be the last thing on a critic’s mind.
Your Grease:
Nor have I, and yet whenever I’m on Bleecker Street (and lately I’ve been there a lot), I still look for 177A in the hope of seeing the place that Stephen Vincent Strange calls home and perhaps to talk to Clea about Lawrence Durrell’s *Alexandria Quartet.*
Two poems from Gelett Burgess for my friend SP:
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.
and
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!