Three More Old Comics

     Now, I have mentioned this is not a food blog, and have repeated that.  Something I have not mentioned is that this is not, technically, a blog dedicated to reviewing vintage smut.  But I have acquired three more comic books of the type I discussed in the space a while back, and I thought I should let you know about them, as most of you (yeah, I see you back there in the corner, leaning forward, eyes aglow.  Stick your tongue back in your mouth.) are not going to be reading these.

     And, anyway, writing book reviews of books which are only eight pages long is a beguiling way to pass the time.

     I do not believe I mentioned in my previous discussion, that these are known as Tijuana Bibles, or simply “dirty little eight-pagers”.  They seem to have originated somewhere around the 1920s, and flourished in the years as cheap duplicating machines were made available.  Although the freer access to naughtiness in the Sixties pruned away a lot of the publishers (who found cheaper ways to make more money as porn progressed) they have never quite disappeared, with artists inspired by them still producing similar works today.

     There is some variety in Tijuana Bibles, but they generally run along certain lines.  You take a celebrity, sometimes two: these are most often popular comic strip characters (fairly easy to copy, as they are already two dimensional) or movie stars, and you then write a story exactly eight cartoon panels long.  This should be as explicit as possible.  Explicitness takes precedence over, say, drawing ability, writing ability, or credibility.

     Take, for example, the title shown at the top of this column.  The anonymous artist has made an attempt, at least, to make the faces in the story KIND OF resemble William Powell and Myrna Loy.  But any Tijuana text worthy of its eight dirty pages knows the faces are not what you want to see.  So in virtually every panel of the story, one or both of the characters are posed so their head is out of sight.  This saves time in drawing so the artist can get bon with the story.  (The word “story” is an exaggeration.  The plot, as often happens, is taken care of in the first panel, where our two protagonists, who appeared as man and wife in the Thin Man movies, announce they’re tired of being married onscreen but never having sex, thanks to the movie oversight board, the Hays Office, run by conservative Postmaster General Will Hays.  The next seven pages are all about what the readers wanted, “readers” being as accurate a term, I suppose, as ”story”.)

     The second volume under consideration here is a little more attentive to the character of its hero, though it does not come right out and mention Jimmy Durante’s name.  (There are Tijuana Bibles which make him Jimmy “Schnozzle” Durante, though the real Durante preferred Schnozzola.)  The plot here may derive from Durante’s stand-up act, which involved long bizarre narratives.  Schnozzle here simply narrates his souvenir album to a visiting damsel, showing some highly unlikely (and even mildly funny) scenes from his amorous past.  These inspire the young lady, and if you think Schnozzle’s nose is not going to come into the story, let me reassure you.  This scene on the cover has nothing to do with the story, but this was common in mainstream comic books and paperbacks of the time, too.

     The cover of the third book also has no relation to the story inside, and it’s a pity, because although it is the best book of the three, the cover is naughtier than this space needs to be.  The star here is a comic strip hero now largely forgotten, Pete the Tramp, part of a general flood of comic strip tramps in the early twentieth century, many following in the footsteps of happy Hooligan.  (The comic tramp is an English staple, too, dating back to Hooligan’s much older cousin, Ally Sloper.)  Comic tramps tended either to be audacious scoundrels or luckless losers.  Pete fell into the second category: every time he thought he was winning, the world would smack him back down.

     This little eight-page story is perfectly true to his character, giving us a wildly unusual story. Pete, amazed, is not only to be offered a good meal, but invited into the house to eat it.  The plot thickens when his hostess opens a door and he spies a young lady disrobing.  By the fourth panel, both women are naked and forcing Pete through a number of sex acts, keeping hi pinned underneath because all Pete wants to do is escape.  He ends the story still hoping to get away, threatened with violence (or a bad pun) if he makes a break for the door.  This is EXACTLY the sort of thing that would have happened to Pete in his real comic strip, had newspapers allowed such bedroom ventures.

     One expects only cookie cutter stories and characters from quickie comics produced for buyers in a day when there was no Interwebs to offer naughty pictures, but even in a mere eight pages, the largely anonymous writers and artists could offer something surprising.  Maybe that’s why the art form, if we may call it that, continues.  These three are, in fact, modern reprints from the 1980s or thereabouts, produced for no purpose of historical research.   So some perv…oh, right.  I just wrote a whole blog about ‘em.  Well, when I do it, it is historical research.

Preview Trailer

     So we have come to the end of the serialization of another one of my bestsellers that no one ever bought, and which has become obsolete in the twenty years or so since I wrote it.  It was an adventure to write Ranunculus to You in the Days when research demanded at least cabfare and a bus token, and it might be fun to do over now that I can look at four times the flower language books via the Interwebs.  But, to revert to vegetable vernacular, I hate to chew my cabbage twice. 

     It may worry those of you who follow this column to see us finish off another book, but fear not!  I have numerous books in my portfolio, and, fortunately, at least one more nonfiction bestseller I can serialize before I consider whether or not to resort to printing here some of my novels.  You will have some time to brace yourself before I push you into the fictional worlds of such undiscovered classics as “If Life Isn’t Worth Living, What Is?” or “The Hands of the Hen.”

     The book I will foist on you in the Monday blogs for a while now labors under several handicaps.  I never got as far as acquiring the rights to any photographs involved, for example.  But nowadays we have the Interwebs, and as the book deals with cinema, you can easily rush online and look at the movies I’m discussing, so that lack will not be felt TOO much.  (Some of the movies were easier to buy on videocassette than they are now, for some reason.  Life is like that: when one window opens, another one shuts.)

     Another defect in the book is that I never got around to writing a deep, philosophical examination of the main theme of the book, which is the adaptation of books into movies.  (I was honestly hoping my publisher would hire a Big Name—that is, someone who knows something ABOUT cinema—to write that.)  I will summarize my thoughts on that subject now, just to give you a hint of what is to come.

     I agree with a genius whose name I have unforgivably forgotten, who was asked by a reporter what he thought of what Hollywood had done to his book.  This chap said his book was right over there on the shelf; no one had done anything to it.  There was a movie made with the same title, and some of the book showed up in the film while other parts didn’t, but nobody had done anything to his book.

     The basic fact is that a book is a book and a movie is a movie.  A novelist can make eight months pass in three paragraphs, but you can’t do things so easily on the screen.  (You at least have to fade from a green forest to a snowfall to show it’s winter now; even that takes more time than reading three paragraphs.)  In the films I examined, one which worked very hard to put every word of the text onscreen was among the worst versions available.  A scene that is fun to read may take way too long to watch.  At the same time, scenes of great depth can be shown in a theater which would slow down the book if those nuanced movements of the characters had to be set out in words.

     In short, a story can work in both media, but one needs to understand what works.  If you have seen any really bad movie versions of your favorite books or awful novelizations of your favorite movies, you get this.  That’s about all I have to say about that, which proves there are things you can do quicker in a blog than if a Big Name gets to expound on a subject.

     Another shortcoming of the book is that it deals with, well, a kind of movie a LOT of people don’t like to bother with.  I shall always cherish the remarks of one publisher’s volunteer reader, who wrote “I don’t know why anybody would even read this, much less BUY it!”  I have seen reference books which rate movies give individual movies in this book a top rating, only to leave them out of a wrap-up listing the best films because, well, it’s That Kind of movie, and no one’s going to want to see it anyhow.

     I had great hopes for this book.  I honestly thought it would provide a new way of studying movies, and that other people would take the same idea and, using different movies, do the same sort of thing.  Now the book is obsolete because other movies have come along in the (egad) twenty-four years since I wrote it.  But maybe we can have fun with it starting next week.  If not, I guess there are one or two other things you can look at on the Interwebs.

Passing Note: One of Nine

     We interrupt our regular sequence of columns for a brief personal note.  Yesterday marked the passing of Scottie Lampe, a black cat who served as Alpha in his household for seventeen and a half years, teaching bipeds when cats need to be fed (often), when cats need to be brushed (whenever they feel like it), and how much of the furniture belongs to the humans in the household (none of it.)  One could go on, but we might as well close simply with the observation that it is amazing how short a period of time seventeen and a half years can be.

It’s Not About That

     Despite what a lot of people say, there has always been a line to cross when it came to comedy.  I have heard it said that the twentieth century was a dark age when all things were funny and nothing was too offensive to make a joke about.  A lot of evidence for this comes from the comedy of the late century, when many comics declared straight out that if jokes were not offensive, they couldn’t be considered comedy.  This is all a touch extreme.  The line has always been there: there were jokes you could laugh at when you were among friends that you could not laugh at when out in public.  The line just keeps moving as the world turns around.

     I see this a lot when I go through the comic postcards of our ancestors, and watching that line move is fascinating.  Butt jokes, as we have observed in this space, seem to be perennial, but laxative jokes seem to have largely vanished after mid-century.  Ethnic jokes have wobbled for a long time between a celebration of a group’s unique ways and accents and being cruel mockery of the outsider.  Jokes about sex were generally reserved for private use, but today I spotted a T-shirt in a dining establishment which, though it made me chortle also made me wonder why the manager didn’t ask her to put her jacket back on.

     Now one thing that has become less publicly funny as time went on is the spanking joke.  Spanking jokes were all around me as a child, featured in children’s comic books, shown off in dozens of cartoons and comic strips.  There are hundreds of postcards on the subject as well.  I think our ancestors regarded being spanked as a child to be so universal that the subject would appeal to a wide audience.

     I have not, so far, discussed the subject here, though I have plenty of material to work with.  It is not only considered offensive, but comes down in some people’s minds as outright pornographic.  I won’t use this space TOO often to critique how other merchants of postcards advertise their wares, but there are those who try to sell these postcards by warning “Child Abuse Postcards” for sale, to let you know they disapprove (but apparently don’t want to die and have these found in their estate.)

     So today I am not going to discuss spanking postcards.  I am going to turn the subject around and discuss the opposite.  Non-spanking postcards are all around us, and it bothers me that some of my competitors do list these as spanking postcards, offensively trying to make a buck on….wait, I’ve done that now and again myself.  Forget that bit.

     Some postcards are simply misfiled because of what they seem at first glance.  The postcard at the top of this column shows an equally common sight of bygone days: a mother fixing the pants her kid just tore sliding on the sidewalk or climbing a tree.  It’s sort of a visual pun: you need to look a second time.

     Similarly, any hand raised near a person’s southern side can mislead the eye (and or an online customer.)  This chap (who was reused for a similar card in which both are wearing swimsuits) is merely waving hello.

     And so is this young lady, despite the fact that her presumed target is bare.  (Babies with bare bottoms were once much more common, though they still appear, sometimes to raised eyebrows.)

     This sort of thing  annoys me, though I have made use of it myself.  There is a difference between a “spanking” and a swat on the rear and then duck for cover, as this chap will have to do.

     This was a wildly popular theme in postcards.

     There is a whole world of postcards inspired by a now nearly forgotten music hall song “My Word, If I Catch You Bending”.  The swift swat is considered in some circles to be peculiarly British humor.

     We, fortunately, had the motto “Do It Now” to take the place of that song.  Note that this sort of humor does not have to be a joke between two different sexes.

     I would like to know how this particular twosome got onto so many different postcards.  Was the same artist involved in all of them?  Why the wishbone?  Why the “Lest We Forget”?  Do you see how much confusion we can get into when we consider the backsides of our ancestors?

     Our ancestors also considered physical altercations between married couples to be funny (especially if the wife was winning.)  Someday, perhaps, we will consider this phenomenon and study the evolution of the rolling pin through the years.  This lady is using a much more easily wielded weapon (can’t quite tell what it is) and I have seen THIS described as a spanking postcard.  Nonsense: she herself would simply call it “hitting” because she doesn’t care where the implement lands.

     And it is the same thing here.  I have seen this advertised as a spanking postcard, but her aim is off for that.  This peeping tom is merely going to be de-peeped about the head and shoulders.

     So there.  I hope you benefited from this discussion of not-at-all-spanking postcards.  You’re welcome.

Ranunculus to You: It Gets Worse

            Any language comes with its punctuation marks, intensifiers, and contractions.  These seek to clarify but often confuse a novice in the new lingo.   The language of flowers is no different. 

The easiest modifier is simple numbers.  To give “one perfect rose”, for example, indicates that you regard the recipient as your very ideal, one among millions as this rose is the one excellent example among many lesser roses.  And to give a whole armful of red roses shows that you are so besotted as to go to considerable expense.  Or that you have just won the Kentucky Derby.

            Floriography, from the very beginning, included systems of modifiers.  Mme. De Latour, and a number of her followers, indicated that you should give your flowers inclined slightly to the right if you want to indicate that the recipient is the subject of the message.  If you want to give the opposite impression, you “reverse it”, though whether this means you incline the flowers to the left or turn them upside-down was never made perfectly clear.

            That simple system was refined on by later floriographers, especially the Lover of Flowers, whose system is the one most commonly reprinted today.  If your bouquet is tied so that it is toward your left, that is, toward your own heart, you are the subject of the message.  Tied to the right, so it inclines toward the recipient’s heart, means you are saying something about the recipient.  Or you can dispense with the knot and tip the flowers a little to the left to refer to yourself and right to indicate the recipient.  Thus, a white lily tipped to your right means “You are all purity and sweetness”, while a white lily tipped to the left means “I am all purity and sweetness”.  Turning the white lily upside-down (or, Lover of Flowers suggests, cutting the top off the plant) means “You are NOT all purity and sweetness”.

            Now let’s assume you are the recipient of a flower.  You have several options in hand.  (Small joke there.  Reduce speed to 25 mph.)

            If the giver is expecting you to answer some question or invitation,  you can hand the flower back with your right hand to say “Yes” or with your left hand to say “No”.  If you’d rather keep the flower, some floriographers suggest you touch it to your lips for “Yes” or tear off one petal and drop it to the floor for “No”.

            Sending a message by flower can be altered by how you WEAR the flower.  If you put the flower in your hair, you advocate “Caution” as part of the message.  If you wear it on your chest, or tuck it into your cleavage, you add “Remembrance” or “Friendship” to the message.  But if you place it over your heart, you are seasoning the message with “Love”.  Thus, putting a watermelon in your hair, would be telling your recipient “Beware Bulkiness”.  What it would communicate to everyone else in the room, I hesitate to guess.

            According to the Lover of Flowers, if you wear a rose on the breast over your heart, by taking it from that spot and handing it to someone, you are declaring “fervent or undying love”.  Be warned, though, that the recipient is allowed to “reverse the rose” by handing it back upside-down, as an indication of “disregard and contempt”.

            A special code for rosebuds has been listed under Rosebud in the text.  There was a special code for marigolds as well.  As you no doubt recall, marigolds express sorrow, grief, or pain.  Where you wear one indicates just where your problems lie.  Mme. De Latour came up with this and though the exact translation of her intentions varies from floriographers to floriographers, they more or less agree on the basics.  Wearing the marigold on your head signifies that you are suffering mental anguish (“peine d’esprit”).  If you wear it over your heart, you are suffering from the pangs of love (“peine d’amour”). If you wear it on your breast, you are simply bored (“ennui”).

            How a poor sap is supposed to tell from across the room whether that marigold is over your heart or on your breast, I’m not sure.  Maybe it won’t matter: most people won’t even know it’s a marigold.  (Carole Potter suggests you stick it into your cleavage for “ennui”.  That might help.)

            Some floriographers go all out in explaining how you can combine flowers to create a sentence or whole paragraph.  Much of this you could have come up with on your own: for example, mixing oleander with narcissus can warn “Beware of Egotism” (or, as mentioned, you could wear the narcissus on your head.)  A few floriographers, though, developed special bouquet codes.  These were, by and large, not picked up on by other floriographers.  I thought you ought to know about them, just to make your cultural education complete.

            Captain Frederick Marryat, a popular adventure writer now remembered largely for some good stories of ghosts and werewolves, put together a book called The Floral Telegraph in 1836.  It’s a charming bit of nonsense, with a long fantasy tale about how the goddess Flora (or one of the goddesses Flora, but never mind) appears to a gent in his early sixties and explains, among other things, how she has worked to develop something more efficient than the language of the flowers.  What she came up with is a system in which every flower corresponds to a digit, which can be used in one, two, or three digit numbers corresponding to phrases in three separate vocabularies (you tie a number of knots in the string of the bouquet to show which vocabulary the recipient should check.)  It’s a hopeless sort of system, really, but the story is kind of fun to read.

            George H. O’Neill really went to a lot of trouble to standardize modern flower language.  He produced a brand new system of bouquet messages: not, he said, to detract from the originals but to serve you in case the flowers you needed for a particular message were out of season.  The system leaned heavily on roses, pinks, and other plants any good florist would have on hand year round.  It becomes extremely complicated: you’ll need to consult his book for all the details.  What I liked best was his code for arranging clandestine meetings.  One pink flower in the bouquet meant you were to meet on Sunday, two meant Monday, and so on, while the number of white flowers in the bunch gave the hour you would meet.  Or you could include an envelope of petals: seven and a half, say, for 7:30.  And if you wanted the recipient to phone you, you included a Canterbury Bell.  (No, honest.)

            He was actually following the lead of Henry Phillips, nearly a hundred years earlier.  Henry developed a system for indicating any number from 1 to 1000, using a system of leaflet arrangement.  (Henry seems to have been thinking mainly of artists putting secret meanings in their paintings.)  He also suggested ways to twist tendrils for “a”, “an”, and “the”, and recommended a series of lotus designs to indicate days of the week.

            C.M.Kirtland, or whomever she borrowed her flower language from, had a system more concerned with what was used to tie the bouquet.  A laurel leaf twisted around the flowers meant “I am”, an ivy leaf “I have”, a leaf of Virginia creeper “I offer you”, a sprig of parsley “to win”, and an ivy tendril “my desire”.

            But it was Fulvio Pellgrino Morato, back in 1545, who developed the most elegant system, as follows:

            If the bouquet is tied in a spindle shape with nothing but linen thread, this intensifies the meaning, good or bad.  A bleached string, however, does not affect the meaning.  A black string intensifies all good meanings, and begs the recipient, if there is any doubt about what a specific flower means, to choose the very nicest meaning as the one you intended.  Tying the bouquet with a hair from your head means your body, your heart, and all your goods are at the recipient’s service.  Use caution with this one.

            If you wrap the bouquet in green silk, you are reinforcing all the good meanings in the bouquet, declaring all possible bad meanings null and void.  Tan silk does just the opposite, augmenting the nasty messages.  Yellow silk will reinforce good messages, while blue and violet silk leave the messages alone.  Red silk indicates you expect a favorable response.  Flesh-colored silk is less demanding, saying merely that you HOPE for a favorable response.

            This system allows you to send a nice bouquet even if some of the flowers you like have unpleasant meanings.  Morato goes on to mention that since it is not always possible to get silk or string of the proper color, you can tie two knots in each end of the string to tell the recipient that the colors of the string and silk should be ignored in deciphering the message.

            OR you could do as Rob Pulleyn suggests, and write down the message on the card that goes with the bouquet.  Most floriographers would regard this as cheating, but do what you have to do.

                                                ABOUT THE AUTHOR

            Mr. Crawford is older than he used to be.  He has spent his life wondering about things like, say, that filler in the newspaper on Valentine’s Day about flower language, looking them up, and just getting into trouble thereby.  You should see his book on baby names.  Somebody should.  He is related to a number of scientists and nature writers, who rather regard him as the black sheep of the family.  (He need binoculars to tell a cardinal from a carnation.)

            Mr. Crawford does not especially like flowers.  Say it with money.

Volume of Memories II

     I have mentioned before that I own a number of books I have no intention of reading, but preserve because they remind me of the person who passed them to me.  Among the most readable is Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac, which was thrust into my hands by an irritated acquaintance, who said…..

     Well, put that on pause while I introduce you to my friend, another person thoroughly loathed by a number of my other friends.  She was tall, good-natured, and almost utterly without a sense of humor.  She had a sense of fun, but jests eluded her.  A teacher dedicated to students in one of the worst neighborhoods in the city–I heard a tour guide paid by the city tell passengers on a tour bus that “You can hear gunshots here at any time of the day or night.”–she felt that nothing was more dangerous, and yet more curable, than an inability to read.  Over the years, she came up with a number of earth-shaking ideas on how to improve reading among students in underfunded schools.  Among her principles were:

I.Stop Insisting That Reading Is Fun

     That she herself thought reading was fun was irrelevant.  Reading was an essential skill, and should be taught as such.  Sugar-coating the message of “You must do this” with “You will enjoy this” led writers and teachers down fruitless and irrelevant paths.  (It should be noted that she was extremely conservative in politics and religion, and used to take a bus early Sunday so she could attend a Black Baptist church far, far from the cheap hotel where she lived, because all the White Baptist churches seemed to her to be offering an illusion of easy passage to Salvation.  Life had its fun, but you shouldn’t expect it in the things you were required to do.)

II.Stop Wasting Kids’ Time with Inessentials

     She could NOT understand why weeks of useful time were lost teaching children the alphabet when they could have been learning to read.  “You don’t require them to know the names of every part of the engine before you teach them to drive!” she explained.  If you understood the sound made by an F, you didn’t need to know whether it was called f or that tall hook-shaped letter with the line across it.  (In spite of this, she would teach the alphabet, and had harsh words for alphabet books with, say, a Goat and a Giraffe on the same page.  Kids who needed to know what a G was should not be confused—until later—with a word that sounded as if it started with J.)

III.Include Students of Different Abilities

     She wanted all her students to learn; where she taught, fast learners faced obstacles to education, as did slow learners, and average kids in the middle.  But how did you bring the slow kids up to snuff before you bored the quick ones, or made the average ones start laughing at both?  She envisioned textbooks with the same text presented three times on each page: in big type and short words for one set of students, in small print with longer words for the quick ones, and a base text in middle-sized print for the average students.  Obviously, to present the same basic information in three different sizes on the same page meant that the smaller the print used, the more facts you could slide in.  This might, she hoped, tempt the slow kids into reading the average kid’s text, and the average kids up into the quick learner’s world.  Speeding up each child was her aim, wherever they sent her.  (She was a substitute teacher who might be lecturing seven year-olds one day and twelve year-olds the next.  The school system found her a little too weird for a steady job.  Lemme tell you some time about her plan to teach Plato and Aristotle to first graders.)

     She had her hopes and her expectations, but above all, she had her standards.  Things ought to be done the right way, and she was not shy about letting people know this.  Once she accosted a candidate for the State Senate and made sure he took a long article she had written about teaching children to read without the alphabet.  He smiled and put the paper in a pocket, chatting about her theories, and allowing that she made some very good points.  I doubt she thought he would read the paper, but the way he led her to think he might made her believe she had met a Democrat who should actually run for President  Thorough Conservative that she was, she liked the way he handled a random pushy schoolteacher.  (Whether he hung onto her essay so we will see it someday in the Barack Obama Presidential Library, I do not know.  And she did not, alas, live to tell me how she voted that year.)

     But, as I was saying, she had her standards and she DID read for fun.  And one day, she brought me a book which was won the Booker Prize.  She had never yet, she told me, read a Booker Prize winning novel she had liked, but this Hotel du Lac was a new low in disappointment.

     :Here,” she said, pushing it into my hands, “You read this and tell me how YOU would have written the ending.”

     I have not done this so far.  But I hang onto the book in recollection of an interesting but misguided soul who thought I could write a better ending than Anita Brookner.

Free Advice Worth Every Penny

     I have been getting a lot of advice lately.  Fortunately, almost all of it is in the form of old postcards, so there is no need for me to make a personal decision on whether it’s good or not.

     Some genius whose name I have forgotten once wrote that all advice is both good and bad: it is useful in some situations but hopelessly harmful in others.

     “So how do you know which advice is which in your situation?” he was asked.

     He smiled upon his listener.  “If you can tell that, you don’t need the advice.”

     Some of the advice I find on elderly postcards strikes me as dubious, though it may work perfectly well for the right person at the right time.  I have been working on the aphorism at the top of this column for quite some time, and I have come out where I went in.  I THINK I know what this postcard is getting at, but I can’t quite figure out the analogy.  I’m thinking of lemons when I should be thinking of the life lesson I’m being offered.

    This advice seems a little disjointed, too, but that’s just because it is based on a play on words about “getting soaked”, which ALMOST works.

     Now, this is fairly obvious, and I value it as a demonstration of the fact that there is no proverb—“All things come to he who waits”—without an equal and opposite proverb.

     It also demonstrates that our ancestors were no strangers to the idea of the go-getter winning out over all opposition.  I am, personally, as ambivalent about this as Helen’s client here.  (You DID get the joke about “Go to Helen Hunt for it”, right?  Just checking.)

     There’s a reason that “Do It Now” is the subject of so many postcards and cartoons through the year.  Here’s another admonition to seize the moment…or something.

     The attitude will get you into trouble nowadays, of course.  To a sales professional, you see, no never means no.  (I have seen sales texts criticized ust for saying that you must never ask a potential customer any question that can be answered with Yes or No, because you can’t give anyone the opportunity to say no.)

     There was also a great belief in the power of positive thinking.  (I am reminded of Thorne Smith’s tale of a businessman whose motto was “Keep smiling and SMILE the Depression away.”  The reason his business did not go under during the Depression, Smith notes, is because he had partners who didn’t smile and worked overtime.)

     So for a lot of our postcard philosophers, it was all about energy, positivity, and efficiency.  This advice beats all the others for sheer efficiency.  Squeeze two lemons with one at one go, I say.

Ranunculus to You, Yarrow to Zucchini, plus Secret Code

YARROW   “War”*

            No, this is not a joke about bows and yarrows.  This plant is also known as Achillea, or Achillea millefolia, or, from that, Common Milfoil.  The millefolia is a reference to a plant with many leaves.  The other part of the name refers to the hero Achilles, who apparently always carried an ointment made of it.  Scottish Highlanders are said to have done the same, and for the same reason: the plant has so many medicinal uses that it is sometimes given the folk-name Nosebleed.  Yarrow has been chewed for toothache, and smeared on the skin to handle other aches and pains.  Besides its use as a military man’s medicine chest, it has been used to flavor beer, tea, and vinegar.  Folkard  notes that it is also a favorite for planting in cemeteries.  Which wraps it all up rather neatly.

YEW   “Sorrow”

            Oh, how I wanted this to mean “My Thoughts Are of Yew”.  I don’t suppose any of you would have believed it, anyhow.

            Yew is a dark, somber tree, another great favorite for graveyard decoration.  Grigson claims that to sleep in its shadow was believed by many to be the express lane to the tomb.

*YUCCA   “Yours Until Death”

                                                                        Z

Zephyr Flower:   see ANEMONE

ZINNIA   “Thoughts of Absent Friends”

            You could say this is a way of letting someone know “Hope I’ll Be Zinnia Soon.”  You COULD say that.

*ZIPTION SPINOSUM   “Be Prudent”

*ZUCCHINI   “Surfeit”

            And that is more than enough.

HOW TO WRITE A BOUQUET

There are, as floriographers from at least Lucy Hooper onward have pointed out, certain drawbacks to flower language.  One’s chats with one’s sweetheart are not limited to spring and summer, and at other times of the year, the plants needed to communicate may be available only at great expense.

An easy way around this is to use the secret code method.  In a written bouquet, the flowers need to exist only on paper.  Let’s say an average citizen—call him Dilford—has had a fight with his one and only, Daisy Jo Pennies, and wants to make up.  But it’s February 15, so he assembles his bouquet on paper, and sends her this message.  These books frequently had an index by meaning, so, leafing (sorry) through such a book, Dilford selects words to express himself which can be encoded into a message of contrition, and pleads for mercy.

Oh, my raven-haired ROSE:

The BROKEN STRAW between us will always be one of my ADONIS.  But I know you have too much GERANIUM to let you remain angry with me.  ZINNIA makes me realize our FIG was a temporary result of foolish ROCKET.  Our ROSE is too strong to fall victim to MUSHROOM.  Our HAZEL may make people laugh at my COLUMBINE, but I don’t care.  I must see you again, PETUNIA.

                                                            Sending you SWEET BASIL,

                                                            Dilford Dolfus.

See how romantic that is?  It takes some thought, since there are not all that many verbs available in flower language.  The recipient can decode the message by reversing the process: looking up the meaning for each flower used, to translate the letter as:

Oh, my raven-haired love:

The break-up between us will always be one of my sorrowful memories.  But I know you have too much gentility to let you remain angry with me.  Thoughts of my absent friend make me realize our argument was a temporary result of foolish rivalry.  Our love is too strong to fall victim to suspicion.  Our reconciliation may make people laugh at my folly, but I don’t care.  I must see you again, your presence soothes me.

                                                            Sending you good wishes,

                                                            Dilford Dolfus.

Oh, there is just one other thing.  The recipient of the bouquet should have a really good flower language book (this one, for example, just to choose something handy), or, at the very least, THE SAME ONE YOU ARE USING.  If Daisy Jo Pennies went to the library and checked out the first floriography she finds, perhaps one of the most popular in American libraries today, Dilford’s message would come out like this:

Oh, my raven-haired love:

            The break-up between us will always be one of my recollections of life’s pleasures.  But I know you have too much folly to let you remain angry with me.  Thoughts of absent friends makes me realize our wisdom was a temporary result of foolish lust and vanity.  Our love is too strong to fall victim to wisdom and integrity.  Our reconciliation may make people laugh at my cuckoldry, but I don’t care.  I must see you again; I am furious.

                                                                                    Sending you poverty and hate,

                                                                                    Dilford Dolfus.

            Don’t let this happen to you.  Buy a copy of THIS flower language book for everyone on your mailing list.

(Next week: It Gets Worse)

Regional Joke Quiz

     Not too long ago, we discussed the principle that the Scots are one of the few ethnic groups left which allowed, and sometimes encouraged, ethnic jokes about themselves.  The Scottish joke may ot have the currency that once it did, but it is still out there, doing its work with a minimum of fuss.

     It was brought home to me, as I was leafing through some of the thousands of postcards I have for sale at popular prices (okay, not so popular if I still have the postcards) that I had ignored another ethnic figure which also alternates between pride and exasperation at jokes.  This would be the Texan.  This transcends mere local rivalries like the jokes Iowans tell about Nebraskans (1. What do you call it when you see twelve tractors parked outside a Nebraska McDonald’s?) or that violinists tell about viola players (2. What’s the difference between a dead violinist by the highway and a dead viola player by the highway?)  Books of jokes about Texans were once bestsellers the length and breadth of this nation, because everyone knew ALL about Texans.  Texans were cowboys turned oil millionaires who bragged about Texas.

     The phenomenon of the Texas joke was always present in American humor, but became a national mania in 1959.  The admission of Alaska as the 49th state meant that after more than a century, Alaska was no longer the largest state in the union.  This spawned entirely new jokes like the one (3.)about the Texan who denied Alaska should be counted as a large state.  “Alaska wouldn’t be bigger than a Texas T-bone steak if you (          )_.”

     4. This provoked a response from the Alaskans, who told about the Texan who was so huge that when he died, they couldn’t find a casket to bury him in until the undertaker took a (          ).

     5. Even before that, though, people remarked many times about the Texans who bragged about the glories of their state.  They told of the Texan who declined to be impressed by a farmer in Iowa who was proud of owning a 26,000 acre farm.  “Why, that’s the size of a Texas backyard garden!” said the Texan.  “Why, if I got in my Mercedes at the front gate of my farm at dawn, I couldn’t get to the far end of my spread by sundown!”

     “I know what you mean,” said the Iowa farmer.  “I (          ).”

      6. And in my day, we learned in school about the Texas tourist visiting Massachusetts who kept telling the tour guides about the glories of his home state.  “We’ve got real heroes down there,” he told anyone within earshot.  “There was Sam Houston, who would’ve whipped Santa Ana’s army single-handed if he hadn’t decided to share the glory with some of his army, and Jim Bowie, who cut so many enemies with that knife of his they naturally had to name it for him, and….”

     “There were plenty of heroes in Massachusetts, too,” the tour guide broke in.  “There was Paul Revere and….”

     “Paul Revere?” roared the Texan.  “You mean that guy who (          )”

     Thank you for a chance to revisit a few jovial ethnic slurs and a chance to revisit as well the joke quizzes of old.  Following are, if you needed them, some ANSWERS.

     A1. Prom night

     A2. The violinist was hit on his way to a job

     A3. Left it in the sun and let it melt

     A4. Stuck a pin in him and let the hot air out  (Points to those of you who know the enema version, and shame on you)

     A5. had a car like that once, myself

     A6. Ran for help?

Volume of Memories

     I own books I will never read.  Part of this is just depressing statistical certainty.  I have plans to get around to some, but as I am always being told I am not allowed to live forever, the moment will never.  There are others which I keep around as reference volumes: you don’t read those: you read bits of them.

     But there are books I give storage space to though I have no intention of ever opening the covers.  These have certain associations with the world that was, and I value them for the memories the sight recalls.  This is against the modern rules, of course.  More than one tidy-minded individual has told me that if I have to look at a physical object to call up a memory, then the memory is not important.  I do not remember the names of these people.  I do not keep their books around.

     Today’s example is a hardbound volume of magazines from the late nineteenth century.  I have nothing at all against Scribner’s Magazine: like any other bound periodicals, it contains any number of rabbit holes down which I might cheerfully wander: travel articles, essays on history (some of which was current events in 1891), and short stories which millions of people read at the time (and never since.)  But the pages are discolored and slightly odorous, so the temptation to peruse them is slight.

     The person who gave me this book was a warm, spontaneous, impulsive soul who loved black and white movies, British fiction, and Dixieland.  She had an intuitive understanding of what was good and true and beautiful, but sabotaged her career and life by ignoring this.  Every time she knew she was being really clever, she was taking aim to shoot herself in the foot.  Over the years, she brought me books she knew would make her fortune: things she found around the house or bought at unbelievable bargains from people who didn’t know what they had.  On this occasion, she handed me a plastic bag containing a volume of Scribner’s she had found at home.  I sighed to myself, thinking how I could break it to her that this was not a million-dollar book, and reached into the bag.

     “Don’t do that,” she said.  “You don’t want to breathe in the mold!”

     “Um,” I countered.  “And you think this is worth money because…..”

     “Look at the bookplate!” she told me.

     I thought about explaining I couldn’t do that without opening the bag, but it was a busy Saturday and I didn’t want to spend a lot of extra time on this.  I opened the musty volume to find it had once belonged to none other than someone I’d never heard of.  But she was eager to explain.  The book had belonged to the father of one of her own father’s old tennis partners.

     See, her childhood weas spent in one of those worlds where you can’t walk six blocks without running into a celebrity.  Her mother played bridge with the mother of a legendary screenwriter, and she herself went to summer camp with a dreamy boy who paid her no notice and grew up to be an internationally-known newspaper columnist.  And her father played tennis with one of the most notorious murderers of the twentieth century.

     “Someone will pay a bundle for that,” she confided.  “They just did another documentary on him.”

     She never had a plan which would make her less than a million dollars, and I could not promise her that.  But she had at least given me some reason a person MIGHT actually pay money for a moldy volume that was otherwise not in the least bit rare or collectible.  I took the plastic bag and its contents home with me.

      Once upon a time, I would cheerfully have offered this for sale, just telling her story, but I thought I would just hunt up the gentleman on the bookplate.  That’s where things went wrong.  My impression of Richard Loeb (murderer of Bobby Franks and the brains of Leopold and Loeb)  was that he was the sort of chap who would not go out of his way to accommodate an inferior.  And, indeed, he disobligingly refused to have any relatives with the name on the bookplate, much less a father of that name.

     I can’t for the life of me remember actually telling my go-getter buddy any of this.  At the time, she was busy with plans for a syndicated radio show about jazz which would net her five or six million a year, sending out compact discs of sample shows, which she had safeguarded with written and technological warnings not to release or steal the material on the discs.  She knew how the world worked, and was cunning enough to head off miscreants by this means.

     This book does not bring back things like dates or times.  So I do not know if she handed it to me before or after she discovered that one of the technical tricks she used resulted in dozens of station managers and radio executives sample CDs which were perfectly blank.

     (P.S. She made as much on her radio show as on her volume of Scribner’s.)