Posts by Dr. Boli
I SPOKE TO THE WAFFLE.
I spoke to the Waffle. The Waffle said no.
She said it was not in the cards.
She thinks that we oughtn’t to carry on so.
She says there are places one never must go.
She says there is knowledge one never must know.
Our pots would be smashed into shards,
To shards,
Our pots would be smashed into shards.
I spoke to the Pancake. The Pancake said yes.
He thinks we should give it a try.
He says there are things that one never could guess:
That we ought to have more and not settle for less;
That you can’t break an egg without making a mess
And sausages do not apply,
Apply,
And sausages do not apply.
I spoke to the Kettle. The Kettle said, “Why?
Why must you be constantly grey?
Not hot and not cold, and not forward or shy,
And not bright and not dark, and not wet and not dry?
For it once was the dawn, but the evening is nigh,
And now we have wasted the day,
The day,
And now we have wasted the day.”
THE KEY TO MOBY-DICK.
Since Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick came up in the comments under the article on crowd-sourcing a list of the greatest literature at all time, Dr. Boli thought he would give his readers a little help with that famously difficult work.
The book is often dismissed as “boring” by students who have been forced to read it, and then force-fed their professors’ pet theories about the meaning of it. As one woman of Dr. Boli’s acquaintance put it, “It’s a good story if you skip every other chapter.” This perception, Dr. Boli believes, comes from the almost inevitable association of the book with the haze of academic theories that surrounds it when it is encountered in the classroom.
The problem is that the academic theories are all wrong, and they obscure what is truly exciting and revolutionary about the book.
Ask the Internet, “Who is the hero of Moby-Dick?” You will find all manner of discussions about how, although Ishmael is the narrator, Ahab is really the “Shakespearean tragic hero.” These are not, however, the only possibilities. There is indeed a Shakespearean tragic hero at the heart of Moby-Dick; but it is not Ahab, and it is not Ishmael. The tragic hero of Hamlet is Hamlet; the tragic hero of Othello is Othello; and the tragic hero of Moby-Dick is right there in the title.
Now you understand the reason for all those chapters on cetology and whaling lore; why there is a chapter on the meaning of the color white; why the narrative seems to be constantly interrupted by facts about and ruminations on the mysterious world of the briny deep. Herman Melville accomplished the impossible feat of making a non-human character into a Shakespearean tragic hero, and in order to do that, he had to make us see the whale as a person—as an individual with a character and even a tradition of his own. By the time we have read all those chapters that would have been irrelevant if Ahab or Ishmael had been the hero, we know Moby-Dick and Moby-Dick’s world.
Dr. Boli does not know why other critics have ignored this obvious truth. He has a dark suspicion, however, that the clever ones among them know it, but they do not wish to sully their literary treasures by sharing them with the unwashed rabble. As for the rest of the critics, they have probably read only summaries of the book in saddle-stitched paperbacks with yellow striped covers.
FROM THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
HOW TO CROWD-SOURCE A LIST OF THE GREATEST WORKS OF LITERATURE OF ALL TIME.
Boring boring boring boring boring.
—
1. Find a forum where readers discuss the books they have read.
2. Ask the question, “What is the most boring book you have ever read?”
3. Compile a list from the responses.
4. Remove anything from the list more recent than a century old.
5. What remains is as close as you will ever come to an objectively correct list of the greatest works of literature available in the English language (including translations of famous works in other languages).
For examples, see these lists:
The Dullest Books Of All Time
“These are books which deal with a great idea or premise but are extremely boring or badly written.” It includes Don Quixote, The Canterbury Tales, Malory’s Morte D’Arthur, Shakespeare’s Henry V, and Jane Eyre.
What is the dullest book you’ve ever read?
Includes Great Expectations, The Way of All Flesh, The Scarlet Letter, and Anna Karenina.
MOST BORING BOOK EVER!
“These books are really boring!” Includes the King James Bible (a bit unfair counting it all as one book, since that means you have to get through the census records, the genealogies, and the laws about which grasshoppers you can eat), Wuthering Heights, Moby-Dick, Gulliver’s Travels, A Tale of Two Cities, and the Odyssey.
Most Boring Books of All Time
Includes Pride and Prejudice, Moby-Dick (a perennial winner on these lists), War and Peace, the Bible (no version specified), 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Les Misérables, Pilgrim’s Progress, and Robinson Crusoe.
LETTER TO THE EDITOR.
Sir: My daughter Chamaecrista came home from school last week and told me her math teacher said they were going to use Arabic numerals for everything in math class.
Well, I guess the terrorists have won. Good old American numbers were just fine when I was growing up, but I guess now the Islamofascist socialist Nazis on the school board want our kids to learn to hate America and everything it stands for.
Wake up, people! Can’t you see that getting Arabic numerals into our classrooms was just a dry run? If we didn’t object, then those Arabs would come at us with their “algebra” and other unnatural perversions. That’s what happens when you let down your guard for an instant.
Fortunately the school principal is my brother-in-law Alf, so I went straight to him, and he agreed to send that teacher straight to a detention camp in Guantanamo Bay. Of course, after her lawyer got involved, it somehow got changed to early retirement with full pay and a masseur named Bjorn in a beachfront cottage in the U. S. Virgin Islands, but that’s lawyers for you. The important thing was that we showed her the terrorists can’t win. Not while I’m around.
——Sincerely, James XIV, Legitimate King of England of the House of Stuart
FROM THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
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A COMPLETELY SCIENTIFIC INTERNET SURVEY.
You bring up a Web site in your browser, hoping to savor the delectable nuggets of entertainment and information to be found there. The first thing you see is a picture—let us say a picture of an okapi—with two or three paragraphs of information beside it. Your interest is piqued. You have always admired okapis from afar, and have been waiting for an opportunity to be better informed on the subject of okapis. You feel as though a long-vacant space in your mind is filling up, and your deepest longing is about to be satisfied: at last, you will soon be up to date on okapi-related matters—
And then suddenly the picture and text make a mad dash for the left edge of your screen. Before you can catch them, they are gone, and you had not even finished the first paragraph. In their place appears something else—something about new fashions in organic fertilizer or six International Style gas stations to see before you die. What happened to the okapi?
You have encountered that pampered darling of Web designers, the slider. Web designers are in love with the slider. They salivate over sliders the way chocolate addicts salivate over triple chocolate mousse cake. “There is literally no better way to make your website look totally stunning,” says the Web site of a company that sells a slider plugin for WordPress.
But does anyone who is not a Web designer like sliders? Anyone at all? Are there any readers who, coming upon a Web site with a slider on the front page, shout, “Hallelujah! At last, here is information presented in the exact form in which I was hoping to find it!”?
Dr. Boli believes that no one likes sliders as a consumer of information; that they are adored only by what one might call the pushers of information: people and organizations that want to put information out there, without actually thinking through the question of whether it is information anybody wants to pick up once it has been put out there.
But Dr. Boli could be wrong. He has been wrong in the past. He was, for example, wrong about ebooks once; and before that, he recalls having been wrong about something to do with Franklin Pierce, though he cannot recall what it was at the moment.
So he puts this question to the Internet at large. Do any of you reading this right now actually like sliders? Vote by commenting below. Web designers may comment, but they must in fairness identify themselves. This survey will produce data exactly as scientific as those produced by other Internet surveys and quoted by respectable journalists as definitive, so vote as often as you like.
One interesting datum Dr. Boli will mention: the Web site he mentioned earlier, the one hawking a slider plugin for WordPress with the claim that “There is literally no better way to make your website look totally stunning.” does not use sliders.
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GROWING OLD: A GOOD IDEA.
When it comes to growing old, Americans seem to be of two minds. Some simply refuse to admit that they are growing old, or ever will grow old. Others freely admit that they are aging, and insist on telling us how horrible it is to grow old.
Dr. Boli, however, thinks aging is a fine thing, and earnestly recommends it to all his friends. As an expert on growing old, he has compiled a little list of the advantages of advanced age, in the hope that others may be inspired not only to continue the aging process, but to celebrate it as one of life’s pleasures:
You hear the young people say “This country is entering the worst crisis in its history,” and you remember the Saturday Night Massacre, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Pearl Harbor, the Great Depression, the Spanish Flu, the Hayes-Tilden election, the Panic of 1873, the Civil War, the Nullification Crisis, and the Whiskey Rebellion.
Your antiperspirant bill is considerably reduced.
You are not automatically suspected of being a shoplifter if you walk out of a store without buying anything.
You can consider with equanimity the possibility that you might have been wrong about something.
You spend much less of your life thinking about pimples.
You may discover that you actually like broccoli; but if you do not, no one forces you to eat it.
When middle-aged cranks complain about the ridiculous fashions young people are wearing these days, you remember zoot suits, lavender smoking jackets, bustles, and crinolines.
You can force a young person out of a seat on the streetcar with only a withering stare, which is the next best thing to having a death ray.
Your diseases tend to have much more impressive names.
Your opinions are accorded a certain amount of respect, even if you are a demonstrable fool.