T P O

T   P   O
The Patient Ox (aka Hénock Gugsa)

G r e e t i n g s !

** TPO **
A personal blog with diverse topicality and multiple interests!


On the menu ... politics, music, poetry, and other good stuff.
There is humor, but there is blunt seriousness here as well!


Parfois, on parle français ici aussi. Je suis un francophile .... Bienvenue à tous!

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Sunday, March 3, 2019

The Wit of Edward Gorey - by TPO


Edward Gorey (1925-2000)
 The wit of Edward Gorey 
by TPO ===> 💙  💙
"The Doubtful Guest" - by Edward Gorey

<< A beautiful example is his early book “The Doubtful Guest” (1957). Here, members of a respectable Victorian family are standing around one night, looking bored, when their doorbell rings. They open the door and find no one. But they scout around the porch, and finally, on the top of an urn at the end of the balustrade, they see something peculiar. It sort of resembles a penguin. On the other hand, it has fur and wears white sneakers. In any case, by the next page it is standing in the family’s foyer with its nose to the wallpaper, looking frightened but insistent, while they huddle in the next room, trying to figure out what to do. By the morning, the creature has made itself at home. An illustration shows us the family at the breakfast table, in their tight-fitting clothes, acting as though everything is perfectly fine, while the Guest, seated among them, and having finished what was on its plate, has begun eating the plate.

The next sixteen pages depict the unfolding of the creature’s unfortunate habits: how it tears chapters out of the family’s books and hides their bath towels and throws their pocket watches into the pond. At the end, we are told that the Guest has been with the family for seventeen years, and seems to have no intention of leaving. In the final drawing, we see the family, now gray-haired, staring at or away from this mysterious being as, still in its Keds, it sits on an elaborately tasselled ottoman, gazing straight ahead. It doesn’t look happy; it doesn’t look unhappy. It is just living its little life, as its hosts ceased to be able to do seventeen years ago. It wanted a home. It got one. >>
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Source: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/edward-goreys-enigmatic-world?


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