Practical Jokes Research Articles

C. M. Haile’s “Pardon Jones” Letters: Old Southwest Humor from Antebellum Louisiana ed. by Ed Piacentino

BOOK REVIEWS C. M. Haile’s “Pardon Jones” Letters: Old Southwest Humor from Antebellum Louisiana. Ed. Ed Piacentino. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2009. xiii, 240 pp. $37.50 cloth. MORE THAN A QUARTER-CENTURY AGO A HANDFUL OF SCHOLARS PUBLICLY argued that the most pressing need for Americanists working in nineteenth-century humor was the availability of accurate and dependable texts. Since much of this writing originated in regional as well as national newspapers, the problem was not an easy one for conscientious editors. Even if issues common to ephemeral publication (dialectal variation or typo?) were never quite settled, we eventually saw reliable editions of many of the Southwestern humorists emerging from the studies of M. Thomas Inge, David Rachels, David C. Estes, Raymond C. Craig, Edwin T. Arnold, and others. That record continues with Ed Piacentino’s impressive edition of the letters to “Pic” (George Wilkins Kendall of the New Orleans Picayune) of “Pardon Jones,” the creation of another northeastern migrant to the Old Southwest, C. M. Haile. In what he rightly calls “a recovery project,” the editor has unearthed sixty-seven letters from 1840 to 1848. Scarcely known alongside more familiar journalistic cousins who specialized in the mock letter (.C. F. M. Noland, W. T. Thompson), Haile follows the generic interest of most of his fellow humorists. Along with references to the Millerites, camp meetings, medical quackery, and political controversies, these letters, pulsating with vernacular exaggeration, feature such topics as hunting trips and animal hoaxes, militia fights, political speechifying, practical jokes, domestic squabbles, and self-inflicted misadventures. As Piacentino argues, however, Haile has his own distinctions. He is the only humorist of his day “to set some of his letters in three separate geographical locales: Louisiana, Massachusetts, and Mexico during the Mexican War.” A serious journalist who covered the early trying-out of the Civil War with the Texas problem, Haile used the “sociocultural milieu” of his fictional comic letters to expand the contours of Old Southwest humor. His “amusing scripts of cross-cultural engagement” during the Mexican War make him unique among his fellow humorists, but some students of culture might find more of interest in the second of those specified 312 Mississippi Quarterly three locales. When Haile sends Pardon and Jerushy back home to Massachusetts, he in effect is returning Southwestern humor to the northeast where, it could be argued, it had begun. On Pardon’s home turf, the seven letters from April to September 1841 are among the liveliest of the lot. Most of the notable characters, even those now living in the heart of Cajun country, are New England rustics, providing rich textual space to Pardon’s family and friends in the Bay State. They include Jerushy, who comes to life when she travels north (she names the old Jones homestead “Shady Grove” because “it sounded genteel.”); Capt. Nathan Potter; Simon Spalding (inept cannon master of the artillery company); Parson Miller (surviving his scolding by a brother of the cloth for getting too celebratory at Potter’s wedding, he becomes chaplain to Pardon’s Mexico Volunteers); Bill Fox (the bewhiskered Boston lawyer who threads his way through the letters as Pardon’s bête noir.); and Pardon’s rambunctious brother Bill (who gets thrown in a British prison for being caught in Queen Victoria’s bedroom). Even at home, however acclimated to Southern climate and culture (casual pejoratives for blacks come easily to his pen), Pardon is quick to suggest how his agricultural fellows in Luzyanny could benefit from his and Capt. Potter’s superior experiences in the colder regions, such as raising chickens and growing melons. And allegiance to his old house remains, despite tensions caused by abolitionists: he identifies himself in his letters to Pic from the war front as “Col. of the Bay State Melishy.” Despite their form, whose permutations of excess persist throughout the century and beyond, many mock letters are rich in realistic notation. Leaking into the fictional foreground of persons and places—vernacular speech, farcical situations, jokers and victims, mangled quotations, and tortured literary “offerings”—are data of immediate historical context: domestic, political, cultural. The primary interest, say, in Pete Whetstone’s letters may be the hunting...

Now Man's Bound to Fail, More

The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths . Produced at a moment when the “put-on” (occupying “a fuzzy territory between simple leg-pulling and elaborate practical joke”) was a fashionable mode of expression, it isn’t hard to imagine why Bruce Nauman’s neon sign, combining beer-light connotations of commercialism with earnest sentiment, might have engendered a skeptical—if not outright cynical—response. 1 As with many of Nauman’s works from the 1960s, The True Artist relies on a semantic confusion produced by the artist’s apparently ironi cal intent, with the statement being both “true and not true at the same time.” 2 (This can be seen even more clearly in a related work that states that “the true artist is an amazing luminous fountain.”) Just as the textual message invites both an embarrassingly romantic and a coolly ironic reading, the sign’s potential mounting on a window offers two modes of viewing the work: one in which the spiraling script is seen frontally, and thus legibly, and one in which the text is viewed from behind, reversed and illegible, thereby suggesting a corresponding visual tension between figuration and abstraction in the work. Nauman’s extensive engagement with the issue of figuration—both in its rhetorical and its morphological manifesta tions—was not simply an exercise in semiotic analysis or postmodern indeterminacy. Acknowledging that the statement conveyed in The True Artist is “a

High Tea at Merlinford: Remembering Lord Berners

When writing of Lord Berners, it is virtually de rigueur to invoke Nancy Mitford’s portrait of him as ‘Lord Merlin’ in her delectable novel, The Pursuit of Love: he was an artist and a musician himself, and the patron of all the young. … Modern music streamed perpetually from [his estate] Merlinford … his astonished neighbors were sometimes invited to attend such puzzlers as Cocteau plays, the opera ‘Mahagonny’, or the latest Dada extravagances from Paris. … As Lord Merlin was a famous practical joker, it was sometimes difficult to know where the jokes ended and culture began. I think that he was not always perfectly certain himself.

Break the silence

FigureHorizontal, or lateral, violence is defined as hostile, aggressive behavior by an individual or group toward another individual or group.1 Bullying, a form of horizontal violence, has a broader definition and may include a wide range of negative and disrespectful behaviors toward others. Whether labeled horizontal violence or bullying, these unacceptable, destructive behaviors are prevalent in many nursing workplace environments. Covert behaviors of hostility include acts of belittling, gossiping, backstabbing, spreading rumors, fault finding, name calling, and character assassination. Other more overt behaviors of aggression in the workplace include being rude, being belligerent, talking in a dismissive tone, criticizing others publicly, and playing practical jokes designed to humiliate others. Physical assault isn't common, but shoving, hitting, or throwing objects may occur. Victims of workplace hostility and aggression often experience low self-esteem and anxiety. High stress levels may lead to sleep disturbances, eating disorders, and impaired personal relationships. Although some nurses silently tolerate a hostile, aggressive environment as the norm, many react to an abusive environment by absenteeism and termination of employment. Fallout from horizontal violence and bullying in the workplace includes the negative impact on effective communication, collaboration, and productivity. Ultimately, a toxic, dysfunctional workplace environment may undermine the delivery of quality, safe patient care. So what can you do to combat these behaviors? Recognize the presence of horizontal violence and bullying in your workplace. Work to create a culture of trust, collaboration, and respect for others in the workplace by actively promoting respectful and supportive relationships. Don't tolerate acts of horizontal violence or bullying in the workplace. Address these behaviors in others promptly and directly and encourage your colleagues to do the same. Enlist the support and assistance of managers in resolving hostility and aggression in your workplace. Promote awareness of and education on horizontal violence and bullying through staff development activities. Support the development of a departmental policy that clearly describes the process of managing horizontal violence and bullying. Horizontal violence and bullying can be stopped by breaking the silence and endorsing a zero tolerance in nursing work environments.

““Another Form of Her Genius””: Lee Miller in the Kitchen

Lee Miller was a Vogue cover girl in New York in the mid-to-late 1920s. In the early thirties she was Man Ray's muse, student, and lover in Paris, where she also worked as both photographer and model for Paris Vogue, as well as for numerous courtiers, including Patou and Scheperelli. The mid-thirties found her with her own successful photographic studio back in Manhattan. In WWII she served as British Vogue's official war correspondent and was one of the first photographers to enter liberated Dachau and Buchenwald. In 1957 Miller passed the Cordon Bleu course at their Paris school. Generally overlooked, if not overtly dismissed, Lee Miller's gourmet phase in the 1950s and 1960s is discussed in this article as ““another form of her genius.”” Always ahead of her time, Miller was a mezza maven and a tapas enthusiast. The home she shared with her husband, Roland Penrose, in the English countryside was frequently filled with weekend guests drawn from the international modern art world. For many of them she created ““food pictures,”” some inspired by their own works of art. She collected and invented recipes, often based on her extensive travels and sometimes as practical jokes and rebukes.

Édouard Brissaud, neurologue méconnu et comédien dans l’âme

Academy of Medicine, was a distinguished neurologist. He founded the journal Revue Neurologique, and authored a monumental atlas of the human brain and a talented history of popular medical expressions. He was surrounded by a family of artists, musicians and, above all, actors and singers. The best-known were his great-grandfather Jacques-Marie Boutet de Monvel, nicknamed "The Great Monvel ", his great aunt Mademoiselle Mars, and his cousin Marie Dorval--monstres sacrés of the first half of the XIXth century--as well as the Anselme-Baptiste family and the three Nourrit tenors. As a child, Edouard Brissaud frequently took part in family plays. He was spontaneous, facetious, a practical joker and something of a show-off. He wrote a comedy play entitled "Le chèque", in which a medical professor and his student discuss the temporary direction Chair of Nervous System Diseases that Brissaud briefly held between 1893 and 1894, after the death of his mentor Charcot.

The Old Book Switcheroo: Or Anatomy of a Delusion

In this paper, an aging baby boomer "tells all" about his personal experience with some of the "pitfalls of organized religion," as observed from his somewhat unusual perspective as a Jew by birth and a Roman Catholic by choice, and a lifelong Asperger's sufferer, the butt of practical jokes in a variety of juvenile and adult settings. His conclusion, echoing H.L. Mencken's famous statement that "the cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy," is that the best antidote to these "pitfalls" may be found simply in the responsible practice of religion, including both Judaism and Christianity. The author also believes his own survival in life despite some "ogres and tricksters" along the way validates the Jungian philosophy of synchronicity. He believes that the storms of life are best weathered by accepting them as parts of a Merciful Providence's "vast eternal plans" for all His children on Earth.

Fruit for Thought

Fruit for Thought

Humor, Unlaughter, and Boundary Maintenance

Abstract Some joke performances are meant to elicit differential responses-laughter from some, and unlaughter from salient others-and so serve as powerful methods for heightening group boundaries. This article illustrates this thesis by analyzing audience responses to practical jokes and to the Muhammad cartoons that aroused worldwide controversy in 2006. To further make this case, I will delineate a theory of the audience for humor. Such a theory has heretofore been largely missing from both folklore and humor scholarship; instead, the lion’s share of scholarly attention has gone to the performers, with the audience’s role taken for granted. In boundary-heightening humor, the audience response is the subject of special attention, and it is interpreted in terms of contemporary notions about the importance of having a sense of humor and especially of being able to laugh at oneself.

Humor, Unlaughter, and Boundary Maintenance

Some joke performances are meant to elicit differential responses—laughter from some, and unlaughter from salient others—and so serve as powerful methods for heightening group boundaries. This article illustrates this thesis by analyzing audience responses to practical jokes and to the Muhammad cartoons that aroused worldwide controversy in 2006. To further make this case, I will delineate a theory of the audience for humor. Such a theory has heretofore been largely missing from both folklore and humor scholarship; instead, the lion’s share of scholarly attention has gone to the performers, with the audience’s role taken for granted. In boundary-heightening humor, the audience response is the subject of special attention, and it is interpreted in terms of contemporary notions about the importance of having a sense of humor and especially of being able to laugh at oneself.

Ragging: Let′s say NO to it

Ragging: Let′s say NO to it

Unknowing Susan Sontag's Regarding : Recutting with Georges Bataille

This essay reviews and challenges Susan Sontag's use and abuse of Georges Bataille in her last book, Regarding the Pain of Others . Sontag takes up Bataille's understanding of and fascination with a group of Chinese torture (or lingchi ) photographs from the beginning of the twentieth century. Her somber reading glosses over Bataille's "anguished gaiety" in the face of these images and his post-Nietzschean tendency to laugh in the face of the impossible. Sontag overlooks Bataille's atheological and iconoclastic approach to these images steeped in transgression and non-knowledge in an attempt to frame his thinking as somehow full of religious meaning and allied to the Christian transmutation of suffering into sacrifice. Bound to a restricted (or Hegeilian) economy that remains servile to knowledge, Sontag's encounter with these images misses the opportunity to acknowledge the sovereign (and comic) operation as "absolute rending" inscribed in an excessive economy without reserve. Unlike Sontag in Regarding , Bataille looks to these deathly images in terms of an ethics of the impossible and risks bringing together non-knowledge, laughter, and tears. The essay concludes with a look at the limits of Sontag's analysis of Jeff Wall's Dead Troops Talk to underscore the profound practical joke that non-knowledge plays on those who would seek to turn death into a pedagogical exercise. The essay also suggests the relevance of Jean-Luc Nancy's thinking about such images (and photography in general) beyond the logic of representation and in terms of exposure (or of being posed in exteriority).

The Melancholy Boy and the Religion of Humor: The Case of S. S. Adams

Drawing on earlier writings (Capps, Men, religion, andmelancholia: James, Otto, Jung, and Erikson, 1997, 2004) in which I argue that male melancholia has its origins in the boy’s emotional separation from his mother at age 3–5 years old, and that the three main forms of male religion—honor, hope, and humor—are responses to this loss, I focus in this article on S. S. Adams, the inventor of several practical jokes, as an illustration of the religion of humor. I suggest that Adams, son of Danish immigrants, coped with his melancholia through the invention of practical jokes, including the Dribble Glass, the Razzberry Cushion, and the Joy Buzzer. I contend that these inventions have similar iconic value in the religion of male melancholia to the prayer cards, rosary beads, and votive candles of traditional Christianity. I also propose that the S. S. Adams Factory in Neptune, NJ, USA may be viewed as a pilgrimage site for devotees of male melancholic religion.

Lots of Fun at "Finnegans Wake": Unravelling Universals (review)

Reviewed by: Lots of Fun at "Finnegans Wake": Unravelling Universals Tim Conley (bio) Lots of Fun at "Finnegans Wake": Unravelling Universals, by Finn Fordham. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. 288 pp. $85.00. "Fun" is a word seldom encountered in the titles of scholarly publishing. Is that because "fun" is thought not to be a selling point? Or is it because the subjects of monographs are decidedly in no way "fun" (yet how diverting it is to conjure up imaginary titles like Fun with the Marquis de Sade and The Soapy Fun of Elizabethan Sanitation)? Or perhaps because the style, manner, and aims of scholarship are themselves so often conceived to be the antithesis of "fun"? Yet the etymology cuts to the quick: the word suggests a "trick, hoax, practical joke," probably from the Middle English verb fon, "to make a fool of."1 Finnegans Wake is, in precisely these subversive and vexing terms, lots of fun, and Finn Fordham's book is a fine example of a reader enjoying it. The book is something of a re-introduction to the Wake (critical caution and the text's own twists and turns make us seem doomed to be always introduced to it) and to Wake studies, too. Fordham begins by outlining what he sees as the seven approaches to the text: structural, narrational, theoretical, inspirational, philological, genetic, and exegetical. And, like Snow White's seven diminutive chaperones, their nominal features are their fortunes. Whether these approaches are entirely distinguishable from one another in practice might be questionable, but Fordham's surveying of the field is both knowledgeable and a valuable way of explaining his own approach. Indeed, approach (or method) is really at the heart of this study. Fordham prefers and performs a blend of the last two approaches: "not what, but how" (6) is precisely his focus. Just as Hans Walter Gabler predicated his editing practice upon the recognition of a "continuous" copy-text,2 so Fordham's reading of Finnegans Wake is not of a single, published, self-contained text but of an evolutionary process marked by notebook entries, drafts, and typescripts. Lots of Fun examines how a few passages from different parts of the Wake (FW 185.27-186.10, 203.17-204.05, 351.36-355.09, 526.20-528.24) came to be as they are, a smart strategy that manages to give the study both breadth and depth, to impart or at least suggest the lay of the land, and to do some rigorous on-site digging. The book's attention to each stage of revision is unique, and the infectious pleasure it takes in Joyce's "transaccidentated" (FW 186.03-04) modus operandi can produce luminescent observations, such as this one on how the inexorable tumbles unto the inevitable: "He had developed [End Page 135] a language that was now controlling itself, and was in the situation of the sorcerer's apprentice, the caretaker of automata that have developed lives of their own" (91). And the sorcerer's apprentice is doing anything but paring his fingernails. Or this: the Wake is "a 'dividual chaos' meaning a chaos that is separable or divisible, capable therefore of rearrangement, reordering into a new form" (47, FW 186.04-05). The weaknesses of exegesis are almost painfully obvious to anyone with any experience with the Wake (the question "might this be…?" can always be met with "it might"), though it could be said that these are also delights, of a kind. Less familiar are the potential problems of genetic readings. Fordham refers to Jean-Michel Rabaté's caution against the "genetic fallacy"3 and adroitly explains that "the notebooks cannot tell you much about the methods of applying the materials within them" (28). Fordham emphasizes revisions and shows in his case studies (if they may so be called, for they are more substantial and more substantially treated than "examples") how fluid intention and form are within such a protracted gestation period. To spin the metaphor another way, there is no single moment of conception for the Wake. Danis Rose's claims that Joyce neglected to integrate certain earlier writings ("he no longer liked them or, perhaps, he...

Pope's First Horatian Imitation? Ben Jonson's Crispinus and the Poisoning of Edmund Curll

Writing to Pope on 30 August 1716, Swift mentions the now notorious incident in which Pope spiked the rogue bookseller Edmund Curll's drink with an emetic: ‘I can hardly believe the relation of his being poisoned, though the Historian pretends to have been an eye-witness’.1. The ‘Historian’ to whom Swift archly refers is the notional author of Pope's famous pamphlet, evidently forwarded to him: A Full and True Account of a Horrid and Barbarous Revenge by Poison, On the Body of Mr. Edmund Curll, Bookseller; With a faithful copy of his Last Will and Testament. Publish'd by an Eye Witness.2. There is perhaps some genuine scepticism in Swift's remark, given his own habit of spoofing Grub-Street horror stories and Pope's evident facility in that guise: Swift's ‘Partridge’ pamphlets of 1708 fed into Pope's own Narrative of Dr John Norris (1713), in which Pope impersonates a quack doctor treating the raving fury of the critic John Dennis.3. The Curll pamphlets are of a piece with these accomplished imitations of wide-eyed credulity. Physical assaults on authors and publishers were not unknown, and Pope's title partly recalls the mock-epic broadsheet issued by the bookseller Abel Roper after he had defeated the writer Tom Brown in a fist-fight in 1700—perhaps another spur to revenge, the author now defeating the bookseller.4. But such a schoolboyish practical joke might have seemed really too ‘low’ for Pope; and ‘revenge by poison’ was normally confined to actual criminal acts and the journalism which Pope's title parodies. Later, Pope would write a pamphlet describing Curll's attempt to convert to Judaism and a disastrously botched circumcision, with no basis in actuality whatever.5.

Practical Joking and Cingulate Cortex: A Standardized Low-Resolution Electromagnetic Tomography (sLORETA) Investigation of Practical Joking in the Cerebral Volume

ABSTRACT Background. This study investigated differences between brain regions during the evaluation of self-attitude toward practical joking and the evaluation of practical jokes utilizing standardized low-resolution electromagnetic tomography (sLORETA). Method. Four male and 8 female nonclinical university students (M age = 22.6 years) completed a Likert scale evaluating their perception of pranking behavior (LK) and rated pranks as good or bad (HE) while undergoing electroencephalographic (EEG) recording. The subjective scale and evaluation responses were recorded within the EEG record, extracted, and compared for significance. Results. The sLORETA comparisons show significant differences between the judgments about practical jokes (LK) and the evaluation of practical jokes in written form (HE). The evaluation of practical joking appears to increase activation in the anterior and posterior cingulate gyrus. Both conditions show significant difference as compared to eyes-opened baseline. Conclusions. The...

Shakespeare's practical jokes: an introduction to the comic in his work

There is a mountain of work on Shakespeare's comedies but very little on what, in all the plays, can be described as comic. In this book that topic is approached via a number of practical joke episodes, some of them well known - the deceptions Hal and Poins practice on Falstaff, the tricking of Malvolio or Parolles - the others a little less so (the Induction to The Taming of the Shrew, for example). In order to define more closely the many different kinds of comedy Shakespeare can find in the practical joke, comparisons are made with the use of the beffa in both Boccaccio and later Italian writers, and with similar episodes from the work of Jonson.Frequent references are also made to practical jokes as they occur in later literature or in our current popular culture and, throughout the book, there is a running argument with Freud and Bergson, still always cited (surprisingly enough) as the two chief authorities on the comic. David Ellis is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Kent at Canterbury.

Doctor Faustus and The Devil is an Ass (review)

Doctor Faustus and The Devil is an Ass. Presented by the Left-Handed Theatre Company at the White Bear Theatre, Kennington, London. February 28-March 26, 2006. The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus. Presented by the UNC Charlotte Department of Dance and Theatre at the Anne R. Belk Theater, Robinson Hall for the Performing Arts, University of North Carolina at Charlotte. April 18-22, 2007. Probably, the Faustus theme has always pulled directors in two different directions--psychological realism on the one hand, spectacle on the other--but economic constraints and the focus of most Marlowe criticism usually combine to enforce a small-scale, perhaps allegorical examination of the hero's psychology at the expense of the magic effects that were probably the reason for the play's popularity in its own time. Thus, I knew before I saw it that the double bill of Doctor Faustus and The Devil is an Ass, in the tiny playing space at the back of the White Bear pub in Kennington, south London, would have that done on the cheap look that relegates most revivals of the non-Shakespearean drama to the category of curiosities for eccentric academics. In fact, compared to most revivals, Blanche Mclntyre's production turned out to be surprisingly luxurious. As the program note said, the effect was traditionally theatrical though not period-specific. The set consisted only of stage curtains, a short flight of steps, and a box large enough for characters to hide in, but the company was large enough to let us see all seven of the Deadly Sins at once, and in the Jonson play we got the sense of complexity that results from the presence of so many characters, each with his own agenda, moving around a stage at the same time. It was appropriate that Robert Forknall, excellent in the role of Jonson's gull Fitzdottrel who has a passion for fine clothes, should be credited with the costume designs. In both plays, Lucifer was played by the same actor (Richard Keynes), appearing each time in the same stage location and making use of the deepest register of his voice so as to be immediately recognizable. Otherwise, there was no obviously thematic doubling. The one-hour Faustus retained much of what one remembers about the play: the opening and closing scenes; the Good and Evil Angels; the pact with Mephistophilis; the Seven Deadly Sins; the Helen of Troy scenes, framed by the two appearances of the Old Man; and some brief but funny episodes with Wagner, Robin, and Ralph. In the opening scene, Faustus hardly moved; the books he examines were handed him by the good and evil angels and by mysterious figures behind the curtain, creating the effect of extra hands manipulating him (the program retells the legend that in one performance the actors found one devil too many on stage). The production made the most, or rather the least, of its cramped space. In one scene, Robin entered by squeezing between two steps; the Sins mostly emerged as if from the box. However, the effect of this miniaturization was, as it usually is, to make the whole story a study in futility. The show of the Deadly Sins gave no real pleasure to Faustus, though he tried to talk himself into thinking that it was delightful. There weren't many other opportunities for him to benefit from his bargain, since the big set-pieces at the courts of the Emperor, the Pope, and the Duke were cut, as were the practical jokes that he plays. When Helen passed across the stage, the scholars agreed that she was incomparable, but the old man's horror, and Faustus's wretched state when he reentered after his sexual encounter with the succubus, canceled out their words. Increasingly exhausted and empty as the action proceeded, Richard Keightley's Faustus died alone, with no help from any visible devils. Taken on its own, this production would have come across as a decent rendition of the play for anyone who had never seen it before, but it would have been hard to understand its popularity either in its own time or thereafter. …

Bande dessinée and the Cinematograph: Visual Narrative in 1895

Abstract The Lumiere brothers' L'Arroseur arrose ['The Sprinkler Sprinkled'] of 1895 was probably the first staged fiction film to be shown in public, but also the first cinematic adaptation of a comic strip, previous treatments of the subject including an Imagerie Quantin broadsheet by Hermann Vogel, a cartoon by Christophe in Le Petit Francais Illustre and an illustrated sequence by Uzes in Le Chat Noir. What emerges from direct comparison is an appreciation of the sophisticated narrative devices that French comic illustrators employed by the 1880s, namely a dynamic combination of shot scales, angles and heights that still conforms to the diegetic demands of consistent spatial continuity. In short, these were the techniques that, perversely, would come to be known as 'cinematic'. In the basement of the Grand Cafe in the Boulevard des Capucines, Paris, on 28 December 1895, the Lumiere brothers gave the first commercial public exhibition of their Cinematographe. The twenty-minute programme was a mixed one: ten short films, mostly of documentary or actuality subjects, demonstrating the camera's ability to capture large public scenes and small domestic incidents alike. The audience - which included a deeply affected George Melies - paid a one-franc admission fee, indicating the commercial possibilities of the medium. As an early example of a public exhibition of projected moving pictures, and despite technical improvements, the event used the same fundamental arrangement and apparatus that would become standard throughout the coming century. Perhaps most significantly, the sixth short film on the programme, between Les Forgerons ['The Smiths'] (1895) and Le Repas de bebe ['Baby's Dinner'] (1895), was a simple, 46-second record of a practical joke, popularly called L'Arroseur arrose, widely regarded as one of the earliest staged film narratives and the world's first film comedy.1 Such a litany of 'firsts' doubtless contributes to the simplified teleological view of cinematic history as a single developmental timeline, beginning in Paris in 1895 and concluding as an unbroken thread in today's multiplexes. Yet, as John Fell and others have shown,2 early experiments in film narrative took place, not in a cinematic vacuum, but against a complex and vital background of varied and innovative visual media activity. New curiosities and traditional entertainments jostled against each other for the attention of an increasingly sophisticated and demanding public, and techniques, ideas and subject matter flowed rapidly and freely between the various media. Cinema and popular picture strips in the late nineteenth century, for instance, often featured strikingly similar characters, stories, jokes and narrative developments, were motivated by similar objectives - to hold the audience's attention, to interest and amuse - and were often similarly constrained by limited time or space, whether because of the length of a reel of film or the size of a magazine page. Famously, the Lumieres' first fiction film has a number of more or less well-known antecedents in contemporary bande dessinee, and therefore offers a unique opportunity to compare the treatment of the same material in different visual media in the very period that would mark the emergence of cinema as both an industry and an art form. There were three separate versions of the Lumieres' comedy film: the first shot by Louis Lumiere sometime between 22 March and 10 June 1895; the second between spring 1896 and 1 May 1897; and the third between summer 1896 and May 1897.3 Confusingly, all three versions were listed and sold as film 99 in the Catalogue Lumiere from the first edition of 1897, while a 1993 article by Claude Beylie appears to demonstrate that no Lumiere film was originally titled L'Arroseur arrose.4 Their first 'hosepipe' comedy, included in the 1895 Grand Cafe programme, was entitled Le Jardinier ['The Gardener'], but was swiftly renamed Le Jardinier et le petit espiegle ['The Gardener and the Little Urchin']. …

Preface

Preface Michael C. Jordan Birds and bird songs inhabit the edges of the troubled contemporary world evoked vividly by Andrew O'Hagan's recent novel, Be Near Me (2006).1 The Scottish island Ailsa Craig, referred to in the novel as a bird sanctuary and as a "golden spot on the Irish Sea" (93), is the setting in the novel in which the narrator presents an avid account of his Catholic faith. The island provides a haven of beauty in a novel set primarily in harsh urban conditions. Late in the novel the narrator, a Scottish Catholic priest, attends a concert performance of Olivier Messiaen's brilliant composition Oiseaux exotiques, and describes the work as "a wild aviary of earthly things struggling to wing the imaginary sky," and observes that "birds were the first musicians" (245). In a contrasting image, the odor of a dead bird thrown into the back seat of a car as a disgusting practical joke suggests the stench of cultural decay that haunts the world of the novel. O'Hagan exhibits a world suffering from cultural deformation and therefore incapable of resonating fully with the beauty offered by nature and art; but nevertheless it is a world in which divine love hovers as an offer and a promise in the atmosphere. Be Near Me is a daring novel in the subject matter it addresses. The narrator is a Roman Catholic priest named David Anderton, born in Scotland with a Benedictine education at Ampleforth in Yorkshire before studying at Oxford and Rome, who at the age of [End Page 5] fifty-six is assigned to a parish on the coast of Scotland not far from Glasgow. Fr. Anderton (through what he acknowledges as weakness of judgment) becomes friends with a group of young people and, in an extreme climate that draws together a number of sources of resentment against the priest, is accused of sexually abusing a teenage boy. Without denying the troubling reality of abuse as a contemporary issue, O'Hagan nonetheless chooses to examine thoughtfully in this fictional situation the sources of hatred toward the priest that are evident throughout Fr. Anderton's parish and the human flaws in his complex inner life that provided material for this hatred to seize upon. Love seems everywhere distorted, attenuated, and uprooted in this world, and the focus of the novel is upon a deformed cultural world that seems in many ways to be inhospitable to faith but in which the deepest human longings are nevertheless for love and faith—a world in which people are quietly "looking for faith in the cold night air," (305) quoting from the final page of the novel. Two poems referred to in the novel together powerfully suggest the themes illuminated by O'Hagan. During the trial of the priest, his friend and housekeeper Mrs. Poole dares to quote the "Ayrshire wisdom" of poet Robert Burns preceding her testimony as a witness, referring to his "Address to the Unco Guid" and commenting that the poem is "about the Rigid Righteous and the Rigid Wise" (267), terms used by Burns in the poem. The judge probably knows the poem, having described himself as "Chairman of the North Ayrshire Association of Burns Clubs" (267), and he seems to recognize the aptness of the words as characterizing the self-righteousness of the priest's accusers. Mrs. Poole insists upon the point: "The whole world is full of them now. These people running through the streets haven't a line of poetry between them and yet they would seek to destroy this man" (267). In various discussions among characters in the novel, Mrs. Poole's statement that the world is full of self-righteous people receives substantiation through references to attitudes in the United States and Great Britain toward Iraq, in references to various forms of terrorism, and through references to intolerance [End Page 6] toward Muslims among some of the young people in Fr. Anderton's parish. The novel is intent upon showing the deep cultural flaws that seem to be caused by intellectual deficiencies, artistic indifference, and insufficient contact with love as the heart of faith, and O'Hagan's depiction of contemporary cultural...