Fan Mail from some flounder?

As Bullwinkle would ask, of course. Yes indeed, we do get the occasional bit of fan mail, and a review here and there as well.

For example, Maria Lectrix, whose charming podcast (not on iTunes) covering public domain novels, epic poetry, and Catholic religious books, hit the one thousand mark long before we did, wrote this on her web site:

Mr. Ron’s Basement, for those unlucky enough not to know it and fortunate enough to have it all before them, is one of the earliest and best literary podcasts. Its mission is simple: to read forgotten short stories. The Basement is mostly full of funny tales, but there are also a good many serious ones. Occasionally Mr. Ron branches into novels. He adorns each podcast with good public domain or podcast-safe music, and discusses his unknown authors’ biographies. Mostly, though, he appears to have a lot of fun.

Maria Lectrix is not, to be honest, a podcast in what has come to be the full meaning of the word. I use podcasting as a method of distribution, not an artform; what I provide is something like a serialized audiobook service. That’s not a bad thing, but that’s all it is.

Mr. Ron has been creating something quite a bit more artistic, civilized, and difficult.

My thousandth segment was a mere matter of endurance. His thousandth episode will be a milepost of rare beauty and joy. Be sure to be there.

To Mr. Ron’s Basement, and to Mr. Ron! Ars longa!

Maria Lectrix's podcast can be found at http://marialectrix.wordpress.com/.

Pete Anderson, known as Pete Lit, from Chicago, writes fine fiction, and writes about fiction on his blog (http://www.petelit.com/), and has commented on Mister Ron's Basement a couple of times in the past. His comment on The Best of Mister Ron's Basement three CD set was music to my eyes anyway:

I was quite pleased to see that the collection includes Ade's "The Fable of the Author Who Was Sorry for What He Did to Willie", which is quite possibly the most laugh-out-loud-funny story I've ever heard, in terms of both Ade's brilliant writing and Evry's impeccable delivery.

Thanks Pete!

Debby Applegate, Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Most Famous Man in America (a gripping and remarkable book about Henry Ward Beecher -- a must read!) wrote to me:

These people, the forgotten popular writers of the mid-century, were a centerpiece of my Ph.D. dissertation so I am, perhaps, your ideal listener.  It's really neat!  I wish I'd known about this when I was writing the book....

Her web site is located at http://www.themostfamousmaninamerica.com/ 

and you can read a sample chapter of her book there and order one afterwards if you like.

I have received many other emails from both academics and listeners who download the podcasts just to enjoy them. Last month the Basement averaged around 3500 downloads a day, seven days a week. So far this month (it's still early), we're pulling in 4000-5000 downloads a day. Somebody is listening!

Mister Ron's Basement was recently reviewed by Greg and Clea in their podcast about podcasts (and other things) called Upon Further Review. It is episode number 57, and can be found at http://www.furtherreview.net/. They had an interesting take on the Basement, and they do make some valid points. It is true that the Mister Ron web site is something of an unorganized mess, the result of popping one episode after another on the page for over three years. This does indeed make it hard to find things a listener may be looking for without resorting to using a browser's "find" command. Sorry. I would love to fix this up and index everything. One of these days, if I get enough time, I will get around to it.

Meanwhile, my suggestion is for new listeners to just randomly browse around, much as they might glance through a crammed old bookstore, and see what strikes their fancy. If you're looking for, say, stories by Stephen Leacock, you will need to press "Control-F" on a Windows machine or "Command-F" on a Mac and dig up the episodes that way. Chances are good, that most casual listeners will not have heard of most of these authors, so a bit of exploration may be in order.

One thing mentioned in the Upon Further Review podcast that I may take issue with is their claim that most of these authors are not remembered today because they weren't as good as, say Charles Dickens, to use their example. This is hardly the case. In fact, all too many of Dickens's works would be met with total confusion by the average American today, and only the most persistent of academics make the effort to read everything he has written. There is no doubt in my mind that film and television versions of his stories have made it likely that more Americans are familiar with and comprehend the Mr. Magoo cartoon of A Christmas Carol than such dialogue as:

He spoke before the hour bell sounded, which it now did with a deep, dull, hollow, melancholy One. Light flashed up in the room upon the instant, and the curtains of his bed were drawn.

The curtains of his bed were drawn aside, I tell you, by a hand. Not the curtains at his feet, nor the curtains at his back, but those to which his face was addressed. The curtains of his bed were drawn aside; and Scrooge, starting up into a half-recumbent attitude, found himself face to face with the unearthly visitor who drew them: as close to it as I am now to you, and I am standing in the spirit at your elbow.

It was a strange figure—like a child: yet not so like a child as like an old man, viewed through some supernatural medium, which gave him the appearance of having receded from the view, and being diminished to a child’s proportions. Its hair, which hung about its neck and down its back, was white as if with age; and yet the face had not a wrinkle in it, and the tenderest bloom was on the skin. The arms were very long and muscular; the hands the same, as if its hold were of uncommon strength. Its legs and feet, most delicately formed, were, like those upper members, bare. It wore a tunic of the purest white; and round its waist was bound a lustrous belt, the sheen of which was beautiful. It held a branch of fresh green holly in its hand; and, in singular contradiction of that wintry emblem, had its dress trimmed with summer flowers. But the strangest thing about it was, that from the crown of its head there sprung a bright clear jet of light, by which all this was visible; and which was doubtless the occasion of its using, in its duller moments, a great extinguisher for a cap, which it now held under its arm.

Even this, though, when Scrooge looked at it with increasing steadiness, was not its strangest quality. For as its belt sparkled and glittered now in one part and now in another, and what was light one instant, at another time was dark, so the figure itself fluctuated in its distinctness: being now a thing with one arm, now with one leg, now with twenty legs, now a pair of legs without a head, now a head without a body: of which dissolving parts, no outline would be visible in the dense gloom wherein they melted away. And in the very wonder of this, it would be itself again; distinct and clear as ever.

Still, there is no doubt that some of the language in many of the stories read in the Basement is old-fashioned, but they are, by and large, English. And it should be just as likely to find something funny in Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1846 tale of women cramming below deck on a slow riverboat, or George Ade's turn of the century Fables in Slang, or Stanley Huntley's eminently satirical Salad pieces, as it would be to laugh at Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer, in its original form.

Many of these authors have become forgotten for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes they fall out of fashion and nobody is left alive with a financial interest to bother keeping the works in print. As an example,  even though Stanley Huntley died in 1885, his Spoopendyke stories remained in print and were quite popular until about the time his wife Florence died in 1912. She died childless, and there was nobody to handle the legacy. George Horatio Derby died in 1861, and he never received a dime for the books of his newspaper writings during his lifetime, yet they remained in print continuously to this day! The average reader may not have heard of the guy, but his writing is still funny. 

In 1906, Ellis Parker Butler (whose Perkins of Portland stories could have been written last week, as far as topicality goes), wrote this about Brick Pomeroy, an author we featured in the Basement last week:

"In the field of pure nonsense I know nothing funnier than "Brick" Pomeroy's introduction to his book, 'Nonsense.' It is too long to quote, but the desired effect is gained by keeping up the nonsense at great length." 

So here is the introduction he mentions, from 1868. I think it's a scream:

My father determined to bind me out as an apprentice to a fine old gentleman whose daughter was in love with a young man who lived with his father down the river which in the spring time was so swollen by the rains that it was important not to cross it except in a skiff tied to a buttonwood tree by a chain which cost five dollars at the hardware store on the corner of the street in the village where each Sabbath morning the minister told his many congregation which would have been larger had it not been for the habit so many people had of staying away from all places of good instruction without which not a single person in the village would have been safe for a moment from the members of a band of desperadoes whose retreat was in the bowels of a huge mountain, on whose healthy sides the birds sang all the day long as if to remind the weary passer-by that in all well-regulated families there exists a cause for the effect be it great like the late war which was a fearful struggle on both sides for the original position held by the covered wagon of my father. 

Who can wonder at the infatuation of the youth when he saw his own true love in the power of the Indian whose scalping-knife hung suspended from a tree over the grave where a small picket fence had been erected by a boy who saw the fire burst forth devouring in an hour the fruit of a lifetime of toil which unrewarded leaves no recompense to strengthen the soul of man as he wars with evils that beset the path which led to the trysting-tree which had by this time been cut down to make room for a large hotel where the sound of revelry by night was heard booming over the still waters of the lake as the moon shone down upon the sailor-boy stood on a burning deck! 

At this moment the breeching gave way and the horse plunged over the precipice, which at this point ran nearly a thousand cubic feet into the cave where the serpent had taken refuge from the coming storm which threatened to burst forth and destroy the entire plan of the temple on which if the workmen had been employed to save the child ere it struck, the bottom of the well down which the bucket descended bringing up the purest ice-water rivalling the alabaster neck of the wounded sufferer whose death happened to plunge the entire city in mourning.

So, yep, they don't write 'em like that anymore. To which I say (and maybe a few thousand other listeners), too bad they don't.

Anyway, thanks for the review, Greg and Clea. I wish you success with your podcast. I found it fun to listen too, and I do appreciate the positive and negative comments you made, and I do urge all my listeners to check out their show. Greg did mention that he might want to get back to commenting about The Basement when he's heard 150 or so episodes. I hope he does get that far.

Of course, comments are always welcome here in the blog, or via email at revry@panix.com.

The Secret of Max Adeler's Name

Regular listeners to Mister Ron's Basement are probably quite familiar now with the humorous stories of Max Adeler, who wrote some of the most outrageously funny stories of all time in the 1870s. Adeler's real name was Charles Heber Clark. In 1995, Professor David Ketterer issued a beautiful book called "Charles Heber Clark; A Family Memoir," containing Clark's autobiography, which he had written for his family between 1906 and 1912, and also included various notes and annotations by Ketterer, as well as a reproduction of of the novelette "Fortunate Island" (which we have read on the Basement). The edition is well worth owning, long out-of-print, and usually costs more on the used market than original 1870s editions of Adeler's books.

When Clark first started writing humor for newspapers, he used the silly punnish pen name of "Quill." Later he adopted a better pen name. In the autobiography, Clark states:

"I wrote under the name of "Max Adeler," which belonged to a character in a little story book I was fond of when I was a boy."

In the footnotes, Ketterer wrote:

"I have not been able to identify the "little story book" containing the "Max Adeler" character."

Well, I found it!

The book is called "Island Home Castaways" by Christopher Romaunt, who was actually James F. Bowman. It was first published in the US in 1852 (right about the time Clark was eleven years old). A British edition of the book can be found on Google Books for free download as a pdf file at  this site.

The raw text that was used in preparation for a Gutenberg edition can be found (at least for a while) at:

http://www.athelstane.co.uk/r_archer/islehome/islehome.htm

Essentially, the story concerns six castaway youths on an island. One of them is named "Max Adeler." Here is a revealing quote from the book:

"That now, is positively diabolical!" exclaimed Max, from his covert among the creepers, where he was completely invisible, except his heels, which were kicking in the air; "I wouldn't have believed, Arthur, that you were such a methodical, cold-blooded creature! I suppose now, that if I had tumbled overboard during that hideous time, and been gulped down by a shark, or if Shakespeare had starved to death, you would have made a regular memorandum of the event, in business-like style, and wound up your watch as usual. I think I see the entry in your pocket-book, thus: '1839, June 3rd-Mem. Max Adeler fell overboard this day, and was devoured by a shark-an amiable and interesting youth, though too much given to levity, and not prepared, I fear, for so unexpected a summons. June 5th-Mem. My worthy and estimable friend, John Browne, late of Glasgow, Scotland, died this day, from lack of necessary food. Threw him overboard. What startling monitions of the uncertainty of life!'"

Clark adopted the name of "an amiable and interesting youth, though too much given to levity."

Additionally, there are many instances of Clark's characters getting shipwrecked or abandoned on an island. I found three or four in "Random Shots," for example, and of course, there is the Professor and his daughter in "Fortunate Island."

The feeling I got when I discovered this was quite strange -- it was like reaching into the mind of someone 150 years ago, and for a few minutes at least, I had the experience of probably being the only person on the planet who knew this (and one of the few that cared).

The way I discovered this is kind of complex, but suffice it to say that a decade ago it would have been almost impossible to do. The power of the internet to find things long dormant and forgotten is amazing. In many ways, I am using twenty-first century technology to open up the lives and thoughts of people from the nineteenth in ways that are new and wonderful.

Your comments are welcome.

Thirty-One Years

Thirty-one years ago today (March 27), for some strange reason I’ll never figure out, Karen said “I Do” and she’s been stuck with me ever since. As I flitter through life, doing strange and quirky things like seven-days-a-week podcasts, she’s the one who keeps me down to earth.

Nevertheless, I simply couldn’t do any of this without her. While she often claims to want routine day-to-day events that she can count on, Karen can display a sense of wonder and exhibit total enthusiasm for driving ten hours to search through 150 year old boxes of Fanny Fern memoribalia, or spending all day at Podcamps in strange cities, or scrounging around antique bookshops in small towns up and down the East Coast, or going to visit Emily Dickinson’s house in the pouring rain, or discovering someplace new and different.

Karen complains that I’m down in the Basement recording until midnight, yet she loves hearing me read fan mail to her. She has her hands full every day teaching eighth graders how to read, and comes home weary and exhausted, but is usually ready to hop up at a moment’s notice if we’ve won movie tickets, or we’re invited to an opening, or a cartoonists’ get-together, or something of that nature.

After all those years there’s plenty that she does that I am not involved in directly on a day-to-day basis, and vice-versa. Nevertheless, I couldn’t do anything I’ve been doing without her. We’re partners, after all. She’s my partner in everything I do, and vice-versa.

Happy Anniversary, Karen! I'm still head over heels in love with you. The best is (hopefully) yet to come...

Old-Time Story Censorship?

On a Comics History email list I am on, there has been discussion on whether  "many academics are intentionally perpetuating racism" or whether "some academics are un-intentionally perpetuating racism," by reprinting and even writing admiringly about some old comics that would be interpreted as racist by today's audiences. This is a difficult subject, because historical accuracy may demand that those hurtful images be included in scholarly studies, but common decency may require that they be left out. Well, this does not just apply to comics scholarship, to be sure.

I posted this message to my email group, and present it here, more or less as it appeared:

When I go through old stories to read in Mister Ron's Basement, there are quite a few that may have seemed harmless a hundred and fifty years ago or so, but I simply can't bring myself to present them. The odd things are stories that inadvertently include hurtful words or expressions that are not crucial to the stories. I myself feel that it really is not academically incorrect to remove or slightly change those references if it manages to bring a forgotten old storyteller to life in modern times.

Examples might include more than one George Ade story where he used the term "c--n songs" to refer to popular music that is not "high-brow." In those cases, I simply call them "songs." Is this academically reprehensible? I don't think so; not if the alternative is to leave otherwise delightful stories dead and forgotten. 

I ran into some particularly difficult times reading stories by William Tappan Thompson, a great southern writer whose tales often featured slaves and black servants referred to with the "N" word. Usually those characters were incidental to the story, so once again, I saw no problem using the term "servant" or something like that. 

If I was reading something like "Huckleberry Finn," or perhaps "The Weeping Time" by Philander Doesticks, where the use of certain words were intrinsic to the story line and the characters were treated with absolute respect, then I would have no problem using those terms.

Do I have the right to make those judgement calls? Well, legally, yes. The stories are in the public domain, and I can do whatever I want with them. Morally and ethically, some might argue that I do not have the right, but to me, the overriding concern is to make these long buried treasures palatable to a modern audience. 

One that same note, I have so far refrained from reading M. Quad's "Lime Kiln Club" stories, and anything by Joel Chandler Harris because they may be misinterpreted. Oddly enough, some of Harris's stories, presented in what he considered "authentic southern Negro speech" at the time were actually derived from Cherokee Indian legends.

On a cartooning note, something similar happened about twenty years ago, when a popular book of old-time cartoons of cats was published, and it featured A. B. Frost's "A Fatal Mistake," the panel showing the black butler being scared with his hair standing on end by the dying cat was left out. Was this proper? Maybe. Although I have an 1888 edition of "Stuff and Nonsense" with that picture and it doesn't seem demeaning to my sensibilities, when the Butler is compared to the other characters.

How do you feel? Am I being "unscholarly"? Your opinions are welcome...

Metta Victoria Victor

Celebrating Women's History Month, we lead off with a short piece by Metta Victoria Victor from her hilarious book "A Good Boy's Diary." We have read from Mrs. Victor's works before, most notably, one of her "Miss Slimmens" stories (Episode #265, January 29, 2006). Eventually, we will serialize "Miss Slimmens' Window," one of the funniest books ever written. It's rough doing her voice though, so it may have to wait a while.

In Kate Sanborn's 1885 book "The Wit of Women" she writes, "Mrs. Metta Victoria Victor, who died recently, has written an immense amount of humorous sketches. Her 'Miss Slimmens,' the boarding-house keeper, is a marked character, and will be remembered by many." 

Mrs. Victor wrote under an assortment of pen names, male and female, as well as her own. The Miss Slimmens books were originally published with the pen name of "Mrs. Mark Peabody." She wrote adventure stories, mysteries, romances, and anything else she could crank out. Her husband, Orville J. Victor, was the General Editor of Beadle and Adams, the major Dime Novel publishing house in the U. S. and England. Perhaps the most significant effort of her career was a novel called "Maum Guinea," a story of slavery that was only surpassed by Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" in stirring up abolitionist feelings. Abe Lincoln was reported to have said, "It is as absorbing as 'Uncle Tom's Cabin.'"

Oddly enough, there is a tenuous connection between Mrs. Victor's novel and the Beecher family. When it was published in England, the book caused quite a stir, and sold tens of thousands of copies there, along with Mr. Victor's "The American Rebellion,. Some facts and Reflections for the Consideration of the British People," which also dealt with the scourge of slavery. When Henry Ward Beecher toured England as an emissary for Lincoln to (successfully) convince the British people not to recognize the Confederacy or to buy cotton from them, he later told Mr. Victor, "My dear fellow, your little book and Mrs. Victor's novel were a telling series of shots in the right spot."

So listen and enjoy Mrs. Victor's funny story, but realize that her humor was a small part of her accomplishments as a highly influential author of her day.

iTunes redux

Well, Apple removed a post I placed last night on their discussions board. It was called "Simply Amazing" and in it I essentially complained about their "selection" process for putting podcasts in the "featured" section of iTunes. I'm sorry I didn't save the post so I could place it here, but it was pretty late at night & I was tired. 

They sent me a charming form letter:

Your post, "Simply Amazing. " was removed from the Apple forums as it does not follow the guidelines specified in our terms of use. These areas are intended to address technical issues about Apple products. Posts that do not conform to the Apple Discussions Use Agreement are inappropriate.

Reasons that your post was removed may include but are not limited to:

-Off topic or non-technical posts

-Non-constructive rants or complaints

Still, it is their business, and if they don't want to host a discussion of how they pick podcasts for their featured spots, that's their privilege. But the plain fact is that while they are including podcast listings on iTunes for "free," they are also reaping the benefit of having lots of free content for users to attract and keep them.

My big complaint is that Mister Ron's Basement has never -- I mean never -- been featured on the iTunes "New and Notable" or even "Featured" menus, either on the front page or in the Comedy category where the Basement resides.

If being the first podcast on iTunes to reach the One Thousand mark isn't notable, then what is? If creating a well researched (and at times exciting, funny, and fascinating) three part three-hour long audio documentary isn't notable, then what is?

I'm certain that currently featured programs such as "Vomitus Prime" "Air Out My Shorts" and "Lucky ***** Radio" (actually featured twice in the same menu!) are obviously outstanding high-class efforts, and that what I need to do is stop producing family-friendly, well researched programs of classic American humor, and dig around in the gutter some more.

And the excuse I have heard some people give -- that I need to have more "subscribers" (I currently average about three thousand downloads a day and a tad under a hundred subscribers) to get listed -- simply doesn't hold water, as iTunes often highly promotes podcasts that have just been created by major corporations or often something that just strikes their fancy, even though they haven't been around long enough to have any subscribers at all.

Well, that's my rant for today. I do remember that I did end my post by stating that other podcasters should not be discouraged by iTunes' policies. The rewards of podcasting are in the act of creation itself, or as somebody we know once said, "The Journey is the Reward."

Rarities

Searching deeper and deeper into the realms of early American humor has uncovered the existence of relics that I dream of encountering in one form or another. Some of these I have actually gotten my grubby little hands on; other relics sit and sit in my ebay search list, waiting for somebody to uncover them in their attic and get listed.

A prime example is the St. Jacobs Oil Family Calendar for 1883, and possibly 1884. The 1883 edition, according to reviews I have read in period newspapers, contains at least one Spoopendyke story written especially for the publication by Stanley Huntley, as well as other pieces created for it by the nation's leading humorists of the time. I  did actually buy a copy of the 1885 edition (from a book dealer -- not on ebay), from which I read a handful of Bill Nye stories on the Basement. Stanley Huntley's name is listed in the front of the booklet as a contributor, but for the life of me, I can't figure out what he wrote for it. It is possible that he helped edit the Calendar, as he is the only contributor who is credited with being an editor of any sort.

The 1884 edition of the Calendar is a complete mystery to me. Back in the 1880s, the St. Jacobs Oil company of Baltimore gave away millions of these things, either by mail or via participating pharmacies. I have discovered that there are at least a few people out there who collect St. Jacobs Oil bottles, postcards, advertisements, and other ephemera. But so far,  I still haven't encountered either the 1883 or 1884 edition.

A couple of other Stanley Huntley treasures that have eluded me include copies of the New York children's newspaper that featured the serialized story "Daddy Hoppler." Huntley wrote the first couple of chapters of this story, then went to sea for his health for a few months. His wife Florence continued and finished the tale under his name, because she needed the money, and the editors were none the wiser. Unfortunately, I have no idea what the name of the children's periodical is, and cannot find a clue to where this story might be found. The other rarity that has so far been beyond my reach is his science fiction story, A Trip to the South Pole, which was collected in the 1973 book At the Mountains of Murkiness and Other Parodies, edited by George Locke. The book claims the story was originally published back in 1899, fourteen years after Huntley died, so it may be something that Florence dug out of his papers and published somewhere to raise money, or it may have been reprinted in 1899 from someplace else, or may have been by someone else named Stanley Huntley! In any event, I have found copies of this book on some dealers lists for outrageous amounts of money, so I will probably have to wait a long time to see it.

Another Huntley rarity, of course, would be the many issues of Drake's Travellers' Magazine (yes, that is how it is spelled) that Huntley edited and wrote many humorous pieces for. I have one issue, and it was a fluke finding it. I am always looking for more. 

There are rarities by other authors that I am always looking for. I do need to find a few holes in my Philander Doesticks (Mortimer Thomson) collection, especially his early newspaper pieces that were not reprinted in books. David L. Roath, author of The Five Love Adventures of Solomon Slug, apparently edited a humor periodical in the 1850s called Roath's Monthly Magazine. Boy, would I love to find some of those!

There's a wealth of writing (not in books) by James M. Bailey, Fanny Fern, M. Quad, and Max Adeler that are in (so far) undigitized newspapers. These things are high up on my want list. And speaking of Max Adeler, I have read that Charles Heber Clark adopted that pen name based on a character in a story he read as a child, but no one has ever encountered that story, and it remains a mystery.

As more and more old paper gets digitized, more of these important parts of our humorous heritage will become available to future generations. Let us hope that this happens a lot more than it has so far, because all too much of it disintegrates and vanishes every day.