MISCmedia for 6/22/00
Myles, To Go

YESTERDAY, we began a praiseful discussion of of The Best of Myles, a collection of 1940s newspaper "humor" columns written by the sadly neglected Irish writer Flann O'Brien (1911-66) under his alternate pseudonym Myles na gCopaleen ("Miles of the Little Horses").

Today, some examples of just why O'Brien/Copaleen is so damn great.

• "One thing you'll have to make sure about if you're a father--never permit your son to consort with anybody in the building trade. Take my own boy. I can only conclude that he spends practically all his time in the company of some plasterer because, do you know what it is, that fellow comes home thoroughly plastered every night."

• "My grasp of what he wrote and meant
  Was only five or six %.
  The rest was only words and sound--
  My reference is to Ezra £."

• "Keats was once presented with an Irish terrier, which he humorously named Byrne. One day the beast strayed from the house and failed to return at night. Everybody was distressed, save Keats himself. He reached reflectively for his violin, a fairly passable timber of the Stradivarius reciture, and was soon at work with chin and jaw.

  "Chapman, looking in for an after-supper pipe, was astonished at the poet's composure, and did not hesitate to say so. Keats smiled (in a way that was rather lovely).

  "'And why should I not fiddle,' he asked, 'while Byrne roams?'"

• "Having considered the matter in--of course--all its aspects, I have decided that there is no excuse for poetry. Poetry gives no adequate return in money, is expensive to print by reason of the waste of space occasioned by its form, and nearly always promulgates illusory concepts of life.

  "But a better case for the banning of all poetry is the simple fact that most of it is bad. Nobody is going to manufacture a thousand tons of jam in the expectation that five tons may be eatable.

  "Furthermore, poetry has the effect on the negligible handful who read it of stimulating them to write poetry themselves. One poem, if widely disseminated, will breed perhaps a thousand inferior copies. The same objection cannot be made in the case of painting and sculpture, because these occupations afford employment for artisans who produce the materials.

  "Moreover, poets are usually unpleasant people who are poor and who insist forever on discussing that incredibly boring subject, 'books.'"

• [A supposed entry from an Irish language dictionary, purporting to show the multiple purposes to which the language puts each of its words:]

  "'Cur, g. curtha and cuirthe, m.--act of putting, sending, sowing, raining, discussing, burying, vomiting, hammering into the ground, throwing through the air, rejecting, shooting, the setting or clamp in a rick of turf, selling, addressing, the rows of cast-iron buttons which have been made bright by contact with cliff-faces, the stench of congealing badger's suet, the luminance of glue-lice, a noise made in an empty house by an unauthorised person, a heron's boil, a leprechaun's denture, a sheep-biscuit, the act of inflating hare's offal with a bicycle pump, a leak in a spirit level, the whine of a sewage farm windmill, a corncrake's clapper, the scum on the eye of a senile ram, a dustman's dumpling, a beetle's faggot, the act of loading every rift with ore, a dumb man's curse, a blasket, a 'kur,' a fiddler's act of predicting past events, a wooden coat, a custard-mincer, a blue-bottle's 'farm,' a gravy flask, a timber-mine, a toy craw, a porridge-mill, a fair-day donnybrook with nothing barred, a stoat's stomach-pump, a broken--'

  "But what is the use? One could go on and on without reaching anywhere in particular."

The Copaleen columns also might not reach anywhere in particular. But they provide quite the entertaining and scenic ride.

TOMORROW: The dot-com bubble deflates.

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