(Enthusiasm, whatever they may say, is never actually “contagious.” Eloquence about an enthusiasm alone is.) Her enthusiasm can become a velvet rope separating us from her subject, more than an invitation to the dance. She takes Lear’s greatness for granted, piling on limericks and sketch drawings as though we, too, had known them since infancy. When it comes to Lear, Uglow’s disability, if there is one, is that she is such an enthusiast that her enthusiasm crowds out, a little, her urge to explication. It’s an account of the intermingling of art and science in the circle around Joseph Priestley and the young Erasmus Darwin at the dawn of the industrial revolution in the Midlands, and the book revealed a kind of mini-Enlightenment centered in Birmingham. Uglow is a matchless popular historian of the British nineteenth century her 2002 book, “ The Lunar Men,” is among the best social histories of British life to have appeared in the past twenty or so years. Lear: A Life of Art and Nonsense” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). No one would seem better qualified to write a biography of Lear than Jenny Uglow, and now she has, with “ Mr. Lear has a certain amount of nursery nationalism about him if you read him when you’re a small child, as more Brits seem to than Americans, he becomes, as W. H. But his work seems so self-enclosed and self-evident that championing him has felt unnecessary, even impudent. And no history of the limerick, or of light verse, can escape his imposing presence. His classic love ballad, “The Owl and the Pussycat,” was voted the most popular British childhood poem in 2014, and has been set to music by everyone from Stravinsky to Laurie Anderson. About Lear less has been written, perhaps because there does not seem as much to say. Of the two great makers of nonsense, Carroll rightly has received more attention, because of his twists and quirks, because of his photography and the ghost of pedophilia falsely supposed to cling to his obsessions. Like the porn, it was amazingly generative, so that most works of Dada and Surrealism bear the marks of mid-Victorian Englishness, descending from Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, as much as modern erotica takes on those nineteenth-century disguises. All that sense, decorum, and propriety produced the first fully achieved literature of nonsense. The Victorians, famously puritanical, are also famous for providing the template of modern pornography-the words “Victorian classic” on a paperback have long meant a dirty book-while on the other side of that earnest, progressive Victorian rationality are the mad leaps of Victorian irrationality. Funny Nonsense Meme Be Friend With Stupid People Feel Like Genius All The Time Pictureįunny Nonsense Meme Awake Before America Britain Filtering Australia's Nonsense Without Fuss Pictureįunny Nonsense Meme Goats Are Like Mushrooms If You Shoot A Duck I Am Scared Of Toasters Pictureįunny Nonsense Meme Has Anyone Really Been Far Even As Decided To Use Even Go Want To Do Look More Like Photoįunny Nonsense Meme Human Nature Summed Up In One Pictureįunny Nonsense Meme I Am Wishing You A Happy Birthday Way Before It Becomes Mainstream Pictureįunny Nonsense Meme I Have Had It Up To Here With Your Otter Nonsense Pictureįunny Nonsense Meme Nobody Gives A Fuck Believe It Pictureįunny Nonsense Meme This Is The Stupidest Meme I Have Ever Seen Pictureįunny Nonsense Meme When You Try To Do The Harlem Shake.Cultures, like caterpillars, crawl forward in contradictions, drawing back and then suddenly springing forward.
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