I've been for a walk

[austin_dern]

Let me just step in belatedly with a couple thoughts about Art Buchwald. Back when I was a much younger version of myself and used the newspaper mostly as a way to read that day's Peanuts and the other non-soap-opera strips, his column was one of the first that I noticed on the editorial page and that caught my eye as having interesting things regularly written in it. Finding stuff that was humorous in what I had always seen as a perfectly grim section was enlightening, and it opened me to the thought that there was the whole newspaper filled with things that I didn't know I'd like to know. (I had read the plain news, but irregularly.) And besides, his explanation of Thanksgiving for a French audience was one of those ``Eureka'' moments of my life, that there was this whole kind of humor that I hadn't ever imagined in the loopy explanations of ordinary things, obviously a genre that I'd take close to my heart.

He didn't stay my favorite humorist forever -- his writing was more often amusing than laugh-out-loud funny and I was probably a bit too young for much of it, and there was this more obviously funny guy writing for the local evening paper. Eventually I discovered Dave Barry, Ian Shoales, S J Perelman, Robert Benchley, and so on, but you don't really forget early models.

Day six of cat-sitting: the older, gray cat stared and meowed at me when I got in, then trotted a few feet out and meowed again. I followed. She jumped onto the back of a recliner and growled. Not purring, although it was a similar rrrr-rrrr-rrrr noise; she never got the hang of purring. I asked, ``Yes?'' and the rowling stopped for that word, but resumed immediately after. I repeated the question, and the rowling stopped for just long enough. I tried meowing back at her, and saying things like ``You wanted my attention, now what?'' and found she stopped rowling just for me to talk. Apparently the grey cat is in simplex mode.

Yesterday we woke up to a light flurry, and the small, white cat ran tome when I woke up, then ran to the back door and meowed out at the snow, like it was my fault or something I could do something about. She was at it for a while before racing around and swatting at the other cat. Also, one of them -- I suspect the white one -- has lifted the shower's drain gate, two days in a row now. I don't know what either hopes to gain from this, other than the simple joy of opening something that had been closed.

Trivia: On 20 January 1863 Abraham Lincoln met with railroad congressmen and lobbyists to decide on the standard gauge for the transcontinental railroad. The next day he announced he favored the five-foot gauge. Source: Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad, David Haward Bain.

Currently Reading: Sir Gregor MacGregor and the Land that Never Was, David Sinclair.

Comments

Hat over heart

[liveavatar.livejournal.com]

Art Buchwald was one of the first modern humorists I read. I'm not sure what "modern" means in this context, really -- maybe someone whose paperbacks began appearing on the newsstands after I was born? ;) When I was a kid that's how I thought of him, because I began reading everything my parents had around all at once, so I read Art Buchwald at the same time as I read Bennett Cerf joke compilations, or Mark Twain, or Robert Benchley. It was clear they each hailed from different generations, even though they were all classified as Funny.

Oddly, I don't remember a "Thanksgiving for the French" column; what sticks in my mind right now, without diving for the Internet or my books, are his trip to Hong Kong and his discussion of the franc-that-was.

Re: Hat over heart

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Modern would be straightforward enough in this context ... people still writing new columns that appear in the paper. At least that worked fine for Art Buchwald and Dave Barry until recently.

I'm not sure that I've read Bennet Cerf except in anthology-type compilations of essays or in quote books. This seems an odd oversight on my part, particularly given his game show heritage.