Striking Similes #1352

Little Blue Book #1354 is called Striking Similes, and I have done my readers the enormous favor of reading through this entire book(let) and culling from it my favorites, which I have categorized as the following:


Similes I just like and hope to use sometime soon:
Near as the bark to the tree
Close as the cu’s in cucumber
Dumb as a senator
Low as a snake’s belt buckle
Useless as whistling psalms to a dead horse
Rotten as the gills of an old mushroom
Miserable as a frost-bitten apple
Wild as a maniac’s dream
Crooked as a snake with colic
Sad as a subpoena
Thin as the girl who swallowed the pit of an olive and was rushed to the maternity hospital
Safe as a stone in a peach
Noisy as a living skeleton having a fit on a hardwood floor
Droll as Eliezer who wrote 300 volumes on sowing cucumbers
Yellow as the jaundice
Black as the inside of a fountain pen
Mouth like a venomous flower
Hair like an exploded can of tomato soup
Breasts like blind faces lifted in prayer
Apparent like a microbe’s eyebrow
Sore as a porcupine with ingrown quills
Sigh like the dying gasp of a siphon bottle
Race like an epileptic dervish
Yawn like a bored tiger
Stumble like a cat shod with walnuts

Similes I don’t quite get & would appreciate someone explaining to me:
Pure as a bishop’s bathroom
Sweet as the head of your cane
Merry as three beans in a blue bladder
Safe as a crow in a gutter
Dead as Chelsea
Obsolete as a Congress shoe
Courageous as the cocks of Tanagra
Dangerous as men milliners
Face like an open letter in a foreign tongue
Stand like Mumphazard who was hanged for saying nothing
Swoon like a couple of billiard balls about to kiss
Wheeze like a calliope with sore tonsils

Dated similes:
Cold as a hot water bottle in the morning
Busy as a one-eared telephone operator


Completely inappropriate/un-PC similes:
Naked as an Indian’s back
Gay as a Negro funeral
Right as the Church of England
Quiet as a woman the first day and a half after she is married
Silent as a Japanese
Calm as a Mandarin
Yellow as a Chinaman
Oriental as a rug

The Emergency Nuptial Flight

After last weekend’s disappointment in the snow department (Washington got tons, we got squat.) it is heartening to see how the predicted “blizzard” of tomorrow is galvanizing our town.
Our town of Hastings on Hudson has declared a snow emergency, and in Ariel Size 18 Bold Font emailed a list of all the streets you cannot park on and reminded business owners to shovel the sidewalks.
The Center for Fiction will be closed tomorrow, and encourages you to read.
Federated Conservationists of Westchester Efficient Energy lecture is rescheduled.
In anticipation of the paper deliverer being unable to deliver our paper tomorrow, the Journal News says it will give us access to their E-Edition. And this is just the beginning.

Meanwhile I fear I may have gone over the edge, Little Blue Book-wise. As some of you may be aware I have been obsessed with the Little Blue Books I discovered in the ancestral basement.

I just took the obsession a step farther. Upon learning of the existence Blue Book #728- Fascinating Facts about Life Among the Bees,* by Vance Randolph and because this precious volume was not among the ones collected by my mystery grandparent, I searched on-line and bought a copy of this blue book for $4.00 (+S&H), which means that I paid 80 x the original price. This is seems ridiculously inflated to me and I assume it does to you as well.

Not only that, but in this otherwise delightful & small book, Vance Randolph perpetrates a myth about the impregnation of the queen. Regarding the nuptial flight he writes:
“Even the pleasures of sex are almost denied the Queen [I love the insertion of almost in there], who often lives and lays eggs for three or four years, but copulates only once. When the queen is about a week old she comes out of the hive for the first time, to engage in her nuptial flight, for there is no sexual intercourse in the hive. After a little coquettish pirouetting about the entrance, she is off like a rocket, followed by every drone within sight, smell or hearing. One of these gallants overtakes her, usually at a great height, and the sexual embrace lasts but a moment. The male is unable to extract his penis from the vagina of the queen, and the entire copulatory apparatus is torn out of his body, dragging with it the other internal organs and killing him immediately. The queen returns to the hive with this whitish mass attached to her abdomen, or to use one of Maeterlinck’s luscious phrases, “She descends…trailing behind her, like an oriflamme, the unfolded entrails of her lover.” The workers pull these organs out of the queen’s body, and her brief love-life – lasting15 or 20 minutes at best – is at an end.”
I could easily be so enamored of Randolph’s prose that I might miss the one error. The queen mates with more than one drone. She mates with as many drones as possible on that nuptial flight, because it is good to vary the hive’s genetic material and because she needs enough spermatozoa to last for all those years of laying up to 2000 eggs a day.
Life Among the Bees came out in 1924, which may explain for this error.

All Aboard Science Reader – Honeybees (Grosset & Dunlap, 2003) has no such excuse. In this book for beginning readers, it states: “All the drones fly after her. Only one drone will mate with the queen.” Did the writer want to sanitize the queen bee’s polygamous nuptial flight? Will we care less about honeybees if we know the truth of the queen’s sex-life? Will we like honey more if the queen is monogamous?

* In the Free Catalogue of 1150 Little Blue Books, published by Haldeman-Julius. The minimum order was $1.00; for ¢50 you could order a leather holder.

The Books in the Cellar #3

Of the Little Blue Books, I think I will start with one of the hardest, #477. Not hard because it consists of tedious, tendentious and flaccid prose. Though it is all those and more.
Hard because it raises all sorts of difficult questions and the only people able to answer those questions are either dead or unwilling.
Little Blue Book #477 is The Nonsense called Theosophy, written by Joseph McCabe.
Of all the Little Blue Books in the cellar, this is the only one with a name inscribed: Madeleine de Couville. Madeleine was a maiden aunt (sort of). More accurately, she was my paternal grandmother’s niece, or maybe a half-niece or step-niece (if such a thing exists). Whichever it was, she came from France to spend a summer with my grandparents at some time in the 1930’s, and never went back to live in France again. As far as I know, Aunt Madeleine was devoted to her aunt.
And if her books are any indication, my grandmother was a devoted Theosophist. I seem to have read quite a lot about Theosophy by now, and still I have only the vaguest notion of what it might be. It is a religious, metaphysical, spiritualist philosophy developed by Madame Blavatsky and others around 1875.
I quote from the Encyclopedia Brittanica: “theosophical speculation reveals certain common characteristics. The first of these is an emphasis on mystical experience. Whether ancient or modern, theosophical writers have agreed that a deeper spiritual reality exists and that direct contact may be established with that reality through intuition, meditation, revelation, or some other state transcending normal human consciousness. A second characteristic is an emphasis on esoteric doctrine. A distinction between an inner, or esoteric, teaching and an outer, or exoteric, teaching is commonly accepted, and much attention is devoted to deciphering the meaning concealed in sacred texts. Modern theosophists claim that all the world religions, including Christianity, contain such an inner teaching. A third characteristic is an interest in occult phenomena. Most theosophical speculation reveals a fascination with supernatural or other extraordinary occurrences and with the achievement of higher psychic and spiritual powers. It is held that knowledge of the divine wisdom gives access to the mysteries of nature and humankind's deeper being. A fourth characteristic is a preference for monism—the view that reality is constituted of one principle, such as mind or spirit. Despite a recognition of basic distinctions between the exoteric and esoteric, between the phenomenal world and a higher spiritual reality, and between the human and the divine, which suggests dualism, most theosophically inclined writers have affirmed an underlying, all-encompassing unity that subsumes all differentiation.”

It may help to think of Theosophy has a pre-cursor to much of ‘New Age’ thinking.

Like many new religions, factions split off and the in-fighting could get nasty. In Theosophy, no one was burned at the stake, but feelings did get hurt. One splinter group was led by Annie Besant; and there are several of Anne Besant’s books in the cellar in question. Many of these, according to the name on the flyleaf, belonged to Chester Green in 1926. But they are otherwise filled with notes and marginalia in my grandmother’s tiny and very recognizable script.
Who was Chester Green?
And why, of all the Little Blue Books, did Aunt Madeleine lay claim to the one that aggressively debunks Theosophy in general and Madame Blavatsky in particular?
And what of Joseph McCabe, the writer of: The Nonsense etc? He was a Catholic priest who left the priesthood in 1896 and went on to write numerous Little and Big Blue Books denouncing Catholicism in countless ways, and came to be known as one of the “giants of atheism”.
(Is there something paradoxical about that pairing, or is that just me?)
Have I mentioned that my grandfather (estranged husband to my grandmother, but never divorced on account of being Catholic) frequently entertained priests and was a great friend of the then-prelate of Boston, Cardinal Cushing? They shared a taste for a certain Grouse Whiskey.

Today is the feast of Saint Alexander Akimetes (ca.440) who founded an order of “sleepless’ monks, which seems to me one of the worst ideas ever. In their monastery on the shore of the Euphrates, Alexander divided his monks into 6 choirs so that one choir was always singing the Divine Office, day and night, keeping up the racket.

The Books in the Cellar #2

What do my ancestors and Haile Selassie have in common?
Tiger skin rugs?
The Order of the Condor of the Andes of Bolivia? Commander of the Order of the Shield and Spears of Uganda
Descent from the Queen of Sheba?
Fluency in Amharic?

Wrong on all counts.
Like my paternal grandparents (though I am not clear which one, or even if it was really my maiden aunt who is not technically a relative) Haile Selassie was devoted the Little Blue Books.

Several years ago I found the stash of the Little Blue Books in the cellar. Because they were small and printed on cheap paper (brittle as dried crab carcasses left behind by the tide) I assumed they were a response to the wartime paper shortage. I was wrong.
The Little Blue Books were the brainchild of Emanuel and Marcet Haldeman-Julius, socialists and publishers in Girard , Kansas, a hotbed of socialist politics in the early 20th century. So much so that in 1904 a progressive editor in Girard commissioned Upton Sinclair to write about the plight of immigrants in Chicago’s meat packing houses. Seven weeks later, he produced The Jungle. (Which I highly recommend; I read it for the first time about 3 years ago, and it seems that not enough - not enough by far - has changed.)
But I digress.
The idea was that the Little Blue Books would be cheap and portable, just the right size for a workingman’s back pocket. To finance his venture, Haldeman-Julius sent a prospectus to his mailing list of subscriber’s to the socialist newspaper, Appeal to Reason, asking for a prepayment of $5.00. This would entitlement the subscriber to 50 Little Blue Books, at 5¢ each.
In this way, he raised $25,0000, which allowed him to start printing 24,000 titles a day in 1919. The series took off, publishing such sure fire winners as:
Eight Humorous Sketches, Mark Twain
Truth, and Seventeen Other Essays, Francis Bacon
The Nonsense Called Theosophy, Joseph McCabe
How to Psycho-Analyze Yourself, Daniel H. Bonus
Then after WWII, J. Edgar Hoover took a look at these inflammatory and rabble rousing pamphlets, and he did Haldeman-Julius the honor of putting him on the FBI’s enemies list. Stores stopped carrying the Little Blue Books. Haldeman-Julius drowned in 1951, and in 1978 the Girard printing press burned to the ground.

On another note, today is the feast the widow, Blessed Jutta of Huy(b 1158. She married unwillingly and then was widowed at the age of 18, while still in the pink of her loveliness. This fact, and the attentions of suitors, so distressed her that she entered a convent, and when this was not austere enough, she had herself walled up in a little room attached to the leper house. There she lived until her death 46 years later. She was also an extraordinary mind reader and prognosticator, but it is not clear how she communicated from her room next to the lepers.

Hagiography was one of the few subjects not delved into by the Little Blue Books. That is where SQD comes in.

The Books in the Cellar #1

In an effort to distract ourselves from the disturbing goings on (middle-of-the-night haranguing phone calls, threatening messages, some coherent and some not) in our otherwise bucolic lives, we present the following.

I think we need more structure around here. Your faithful blogger clearly takes the ‘random’ rubric (see above) a little too seriously. So, in the interests of putting some structure into the coming year’s posts, in addition to bees and saints, I plan to expatiate on some of the literary treasures I have discovered and will surely discover upon the crammed bookshelves of the parental cellar.
These will include, but are most adamantly not limited to: tattered paperback lives of Cleopatra, one by Emil Ludwig, another by Rider Haggard; Just Folks by Edgar Guest; my father’s undergraduate thesis on the Cotton Waste Trade, circa 1946; The World’s Best Jokes, published 1936; Conversational Arabic, 1955; and countless editions of the Little Blue Books.
Most people I know have bookshelves in the usual places: living rooms, libraries, dining rooms, kitchens, linen closets, bathrooms & solaria. In addition to all the aforementioned, the cellar (my mother and I have debated whether hers is a cellar** or a basement*; nothing was resolved; feel free to weigh in) in my parents’ house contains a labyrinth of bookshelves. While my mother may, on a biannual basis, throw or give away torn underwear or broken crockery or a profoundly ugly knickknack, she has never thrown away a book and never will.
Because I have had so much pleasure perusing the treasures of the cellar bookshelves, it would be craven of me to do otherwise than applaud this dictum.
And since before my mother ever entered the abode in question, it was my father’s boyhood home, these cellar bookshelves contain high school texts featuring his mystified annotations as well as more recent (mid 20th century) tomes.

*basement =the floor of a building partly or entirely below ground level.

**cellar = a room below ground level in a house, typically one used for storing wine or coal.

Artifactiana

I have written in these pages before about the strange and wonderful and evocative treasures to be found in the subterranean recesses of the hyper-organized parental home. Often these artifacts will reveal better-forgotten, better-left-in-the-mists-of-time aspects of one's misspent youth. Often they are just weird.
This photo, for instance, provides tangible evidence of the summer when our collective family's brain was taken over by aliens from the Planet Lederhosen. Then why, you may well ask, is my younger self wearing a kimono? I don't know. I actually loved my lederhosen. I thought I was quite fetching in my lederhosen. I couldn't imagine a time in life when I wouldn't want to wear lederhosen. According to my mother, she passionately hated the dirndl she is wearing. More evidence of the alien usurpation.

Other recently unearthed treasures include countless Little Blue Books from the 1920s. I will be studying the absurdities of Christian Science while psycho-analyzing myself. I anticipate that my newly acquired knowledge of palmistry will make me exceptionally popular.