Laurence Olivier, Quiz Champion?

I haven’t written any clerihews for several months, but one came to me unbidden earlier today. I stumbled across a website whose content was “Trivia about Olivia de Havilland“. Now I don’t know much about the actress Olivia de Havilland — and this post isn’t about her — but I did notice that the word ‘trivia’ could just as easily rhyme with ‘Olivier’ as ‘Olivia’….

The first half of a clerihew was born. But what about the rest?

Laurence Olivier, arguably the finest actor of the 20th century, was married three times to fellow actors — Jill Esmond, Vivien Leigh and Joan Plowright. I realised immediately that ‘Esmond’ was going to be difficult to rhyme. ‘Leigh’ works much better as a rhyme … but clerihews work better when the rhyme is less obvious. That left ‘Plowright’.

This clerihew is about how Olivier’s passion for trivia got short shrift in the Olivier/Plowright household. Even better for the clerihew, both had been honoured for their services to theatre —  Olivier with a peerage in 1970, Plowright with an OBE in 2004.

And here’s the clerihew

Lord Laurence Olivier
Was addicted to trivia.
But his facts, no matter how right,
Never impressed Dame Joan Plowright.

A Grave Matter

When I sat down to write the following clerihew, I thought I had plenty of time to polish it before putting it up here on the blog.  After all, what could the continuing Trump family saga/comedy/farce possibly conjure up in a couple of weeks to upstage it?

[Cue search warrants, claims  of espionage and dirty tricks.]

I’m going to pretend that the last week or so just never happened. OK?

In July this year, Ivana Trump, Donald Trump’s first ex-wife, died after an apparent fall downstairs at her apartment in Manhattan.

Among the outcomes of that event was that Donald Trump’s testimony at a court case in New York was deferred until after Ivana Trump’s funeral and burial.  That cause a big enough stir in the media. And then….

Ivana Trump was buried on a golf course.   Near the first tee of the Trump National Golf Club at Bedminster in New Jersey.  One of Donald Trump’s golf courses.  Setting aside the (to me) bizarre idea of a rich guy burying his ex-wife somewhere on his own golf course, the next rotation of the rumour mill was that Ivana Trump was buried there to reduce the amount of tax incurred by the property.

Now it’s true that the property that contains the Bedminster golf course is also partly zoned as a cemetery and as a farm (both of which do attract tax breaks), but it’s unclear whether that makes a significant difference to the total tax burden.  So my clerihew asks:

R.I.P. Ivana Trump.
She tumbled downstairs with a thump.
Bedminster-buried, will she stay
Reducing taxes in NJ?

A Clerihew (and some Haikus) About Gravity

Recently, a friend reminded me about the ultimate theatrical criticism.

There have been some devastating criticisms over the years. Dorothy Parker wrote some doozies, for example, and my favourite criticism of all time is John Mason Brown’s review of an actor’s portrayal of King Lear in the Shakespeare play of the same name:

“He played the king as if afraid someone else would play the ace.”

But the ultimate criticism happened in 458 BCE, when — according to legend — the playwright Aeschylus was killed when an eagle, mistaking the playwright’s bald head for a rock, dropped a tortoise onto it.

I did write a clerihew about that event a while ago, and here it is:

In his wildest dreams, Aeschylus
Would not assume his death would thrill us.
Though his fancy was quite fertile
He wouldn’t stoop to use a turtle.

Haikus About Gravity

The friend who reminded me about Aeschylus responded to the clerihew above with a haiku on the same subject. (If you can’t recall what haikus are, you can refresh your memory in a recent post.) Here is the haiku:

Do eagles see well?
Legends lie. Heads look like rocks.
Playwright killed by shell.

In turn, that poem made me wonder what other haiku might be written about the mysterious force we call gravity. (See the note at the end of this post.)  And, come on, it has to cover the story of Isaac Newton and the apple, doesn’t it?

Newton is supposed to have come up with his theory of gravity while sitting in the garden of his mother’s house at Woolsthorpe Manor, and watching an apple fall from a tree. So here is my haiku:

A chance encounter
Between Newton and apples
Made Woolsthorpe famous.

Author’s Note:

Yes, I know that Einstein showed us that gravity is not a force, but Newton hadn’t worked that out yet.

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Mill and Bloom?

The Australian Writers’ Centre (AWC) runs a regular competition called Furious Fiction, where members of the general public are challenged to write a story no more than 500 words in length in just over two days, on a theme chosen by the AWC.

A few months ago, the brief provided was to include these phrases in the story

THICK AS HONEY	SILENT AND STILL	GOLDEN GLOW
HEART-SHAPED	DELICATE PERFUME	SOFT AND DOUGHY
RAZOR-SHARP

At first I was inclined not to take part — in a 500-word story, seven unrelated phrases take up a lot of room.  But then I thought to use those phrases in a series of clerihews….  You can view the completed story below.  I have included some explanatory notes at the end of the post.

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The 2022 International Clerihew Competition

[Voice-Over]

“Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the Radio National coverage of the 2022 International Clerihew Competition, live tonight from the Empire Theatre. I’m your host, Edmund Bentley, and I’ll be describing the action for you this evening.

“The preliminary rounds of the competition were completed earlier today, and the four contestants will present their final performances for the live theatre audience tonight. The winner of tonight’s competition will be judged not only on the quality of their composition — which you’ll hear for yourselves — but also on stagecraft and performance, which I’ll be describing for you.

“A hush has fallen over the audience as the spotlight comes on, its golden glow bathing the stage in light. The first performer, Jeremy Bentham, is stepping up to the microphone. He has chosen as his subject the famous philosopher John Stuart Mill. Jeremy is wearing a suit designed by Ermenegildo Zegna, and he’s making a fine impression. Let’s hear his
performance.”

[FX: Coughing and throat-clearing]

John Stuart Mill,
Quiet and still,
Saw the world through the prism
Of Utilitarianism.

[FX: Scattered applause]
[Voice-Over]

“Well, that one went over better in the earlier rounds. I think the nerves must have got to Jeremy tonight. Next we have the well-known Irish identity, Stephen Dedalus, whose subject is the writing of James Joyce. This was an early favourite with the bookmakers. The atmosphere in the theatre is thick as honey as the audience waits.”

Though Molly Bloom
Likes delicate perfume
She doesn’t love sissies
In James Joyce’s Ulysses

[FX: Cheers and booing]
[Voice-Over]

“It’s clear that this one has had a mixed reaction. Expect some razor-sharp criticism in tomorrow’s media. Our third performer tonight is James Osterberg Jr. with a personal reminiscence on a fellow musician. He has decided to perform bare-chested for some
reason. Here we go.”

[FX: Reluctant Applause]

David Bowie
Felt soft and doughy
When ensconced like a pearl in
His apartment in Berlin.

[FX: Wild cheering from a few people, but silence otherwise]
[Voice-Over]

“Oh, dear. Mr Osterberg has chucked the microphone stand off the stage and run out of the theatre. Luckily we have another microphone. Our final performer gives her name only as Courtney and her costume seems to be very much ‘come as you are’. Let’s hear her out.”

[FX: Polite applause]

When Kurt Cobain
Travelled by plane
He put his socks
In a heart-shaped box.

[FX: Uncertain applause, sounds of conflict in the audience]
[Voice-Over]

“That’s the final performer tonight, ladies and gentlemen, and the judges are now making their official decision. The chairman of the judging panel is approaching the microphone now, and the winner of the 2022 International Clerihew Competition is —”

* * * *

Author’s Notes:

1) The announcer, Edmund Bentley is, of course, named after Edmund Clerihew Bentley, the inventor of the clerihew.

2) Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill are notable British philosophers. Mill was a student of Bentham’s.

3) Stephen Dedalus and Molly Bloom are characters from the works of James Joyce.

4) James Osterberg, Jr is the musician Iggy Pop, who once shared an apartment in Berlin with the musician David Bowie.

5) Courtney Love is also a musician, and was married to her fellow musician Kurt Cobain, who was the lead singer of the band Nirvana.  “Come As You Are”, “I’m On A Plain” and “Heart Shaped Box” are all songs performed by Nirvana.

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Beware Crustaceans!

I’ll get to the clerihew eventually (I promise) but first let me digress about the verse form known as the haiku. I’ve mentioned at least one haiku here before — in my post on Virginia Wolfe and Ernest Hemingway — and in that post I mentioned that the original Japanese haiku form has a large number of constraints that don’t translate well into languages like English.  You can read the difference between the two forms here and here. 

The simplest form of English-language haiku is this: a three-line poem whose first and third lines have FIVE syllables, and whose second line has SEVEN syllables.   That’s it. Some people insist that there should be some kind of reference to a season in there. (My Wolfe/Hemingway haiku does that, for example.)

Recently, I stumbled across an Internet challenge to re-cast the lyrics of a favourite pop song as a haiku, the only constraints being that you can’t mention the name of the band OR the title of the song in the poem.  Here are three haiku that I created, along with a link to the original songs.  I also re-wrote the last haiku as a clerihew; you can see it at the bottom of the page.

Pop Songs as Haiku
Dancing at the beach Summertime with sea creatures Beware crustaceans!	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oh5J33KAaqw
New Orleans brothel Ruins many a poor boy. God, I know! I’m one.	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-43lLKaqBQ
Queen Elizabeth Would be a pretty nice girl Seen through wine goggles.	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mh1hKt5kQ_4

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Her Majesty, the Clerihew

Queen Elizabeth the Second…
Awesome girlfriend, you’d reckon.
But you’d need to drink a lot more wine
Before you cross THAT line.

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Selected Clerihews on Smashwords

The Smashwords online publishing site now hosts a slim volume of my selected clerihews called, surprisingly enough, Selected Clerihews.

Most of the clerihews in the book have appeared already in this blog, some have appeared elsewhere, and a few have not been published before at all.  As usual, I have accompanied each clerihew with a brief description of its origin.

You can download the ebook free of charge and, if you don’t yet have an ebook reader installed on your computer or device, you can easily find one online.  Here are one site’s suggestions.

My intentions in publishing Selected Clerihews online were twofold: first, as a dedication to an early reader of my work; and second, as an experiment in the process of ebook publishing—which was surprisingly painless.

Below are a couple of the previously unpublished clerihews in the book.

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THE LADY IN THE LAKE

Veronica Lake (1922–1973) was an American actress best known for her femme fatale roles in film noir movies in the 1940s. Ginger Rogers, a decade older, had her first major role in movies in 1933’s 42nd Street.

 

Film buffs recall Veronica Lake
As a star whose looks were easy to take,
And we understand that some old codgers
Still fondly remember Ginger Rogers.

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JUST DESSERTS

Top Hat is a 1935 musical comedy, in which Fred Astaire sings the song “Top Hat, White Tie, and Tails” that contains the chorus: “I’m putting on my top hat / Tying up my white tie / Brushing off my tails.” The comedy duo The Two Ronnies turned that into a joke about pudding. And now I’ve made it a clerihew.

On opening night, Fred Astaire
Fell on a table of cream-filled éclairs
But got up to dance (proving tough as old nails)
With pudding on his top hat, and pudding on his tails.

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Dory Previn

Dory Previn (née Dorothy Langan), lyricist, singer-songwriter and poet, was born on 22 October 1925 and died on 14 February 2012. According to Wikipedia:

During the late 1950s and 1960s she was a lyricist on songs intended for motion pictures and, with her then husband, André Previn, received several Academy Award nominations. In the 1970s, after their divorce, she released six albums of original songs and an acclaimed live album. Previn’s lyrics from this period are characterized by their originality, irony and honesty in dealing with her troubled personal life as well as more generally about relationships, sexuality, religion and psychology.

One reason given for the direction her post-divorce career was André Previn’s 1968 affair with (and subsequent marriage to) the young actress Mia Farrow, which provided the theme for her song “Beware of Young Girls”; it also provides the rationale for today’s clerihew.

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Swift Justice

I’ve been reading a biography of the collaboration and rivalry of Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, the two most prominent stars of horror movies in the 1930s and 1940s. Their first collaborative effort was in the movie The Black Cat – ostensibly the film of a story by Edgar Allen Poe; however, the real inspiration for the film was the life of Aleister Crowley, the self-confessed “Wickedest Man in the World”.

While doing so, I came across this piece of trivia…

At the same time as The Black Cat was in production, Aleister Crowley went to court in London to sue the artist Nina Hamnett for libel when she called him a black magician in her 1932 book, Laughing Torso. The case was dismissed by the judge, a certain Mr Swift, after the jury decided to stop the  case by unanimously finding a verdict in favour of Miss Hamnett and her publishers. Mr Swift added:

“I have nothing to say to you about the facts except this. I have been forty years engaged in the administration of the law in one capacity or another. I thought that I knew every conceivable form of wickedness. I thought everything which was vicious and bad had been produced at one time or another before me. I have learned in this case that you can always learn something more if you live long enough. Never have I heard such dreadful, horrible, blasphemous, abominable stuff as that which has been produced by the man [Crowley] who describes himself to you as the greatest living poet.”

You can read more about the verdict in this transcript of the Daily Mail article of 14 April 1934. However, the incident prompted me to write the following clerihew.

Author’s Note:
Most people with the surname “Crowley” prefer a pronunciation that rhymes with “foully”.  Aleister Crowley preferred instead to rhyme his name with “unholy”.

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Esprit de Bain

You know the phrase “esprit de l’escalier”?

Literally it means “spirit of the staircase” or “staircase wit”. It was coined by the French philosopher Denis Diderot to describe the situation when you discover the perfect reply only after you have left the party.

Now let another Dennis coin the phrase “esprit de bain” to cover the situation when you compose a clerihew while having a shower. (Yes, I know that the French word for “shower” is “douche”. but somehow the phrase “esprit de douche” doesn’t have that certain je ne sais quoi.)

The two new clerihews below came to my mind unbidden as the water sluiced from the shower head. For your edification, I have included a bit of background material for both verses.

Fidel Castro and Che Guevara

Fidel Castro (1926–2016), Cuban politician and revolutionary, led the guerilla campaign that ousted the dictator Fulgencio Batista from power in Cuba at the end of 1958. Depending on your point of view, Castro was either a revolutionary hero or a revolutionary monster. Certainly, he was a central figure in the Cuban missile crisis, which arguably is the point at which the human species has (so far) most closely approached the brink of nuclear war.

Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, Argentinian revolutionary and physician, first met Fidel Castro in Mexico in 1955, and in 1956 he joined Castro’s revolution in Cuba. Guevara soon rose to prominence among the insurgents, and played a pivotal role in the campaign that deposed the Batista regime. Guevara left Cuba in 1965 to foment revolution abroad, which resulted in his death in Bolivia in 1965.

Author’s Note:

While it is abundantly clear that Fidel Castro and Che Guevara must have shared a meal on more than one occasion, I have no evidence that any of those meals consisted of a dish of spaghetti Carbonara. By a curious coincidence, “Carbonari” is the name given to an informal network of secret revolutionary societies that was active in Italy from about 1800 to 1831. The Italian Carbonari are often cited as the inspiration for many other revolutionary groups.

David Bowie and the Spiders from Mars

David Bowie (1947–2016), musician and actor, was a leading innovator in popular music from the 1960s until his death in early 2016. A feature of Bowie’s career — at least in the early days — was the different persona that he adopted with every new concept he explored. The Independent newspaper identified some of those personas (and album associated with them) as:

• Major Tom (Space Oddity)
• Aladdin Sane (Aladdin Sane)
• Thin White Duke (Young Americans)
• Halloween Jack (Diamond Dogs)

And of course there was Ziggy Stardust.

In 1972, Bowie released his fifth studio album, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, a concept album about a fictitious rock band fronted by the eponymous Ziggy. According to Rolling Stone magazine:

Ziggy [was] an … alien rock star, sent to Earth as a messenger …. [H]umanity was in its final five years of existence, and Ziggy was dispatched to deliver a message of hope: He’s a wild, hedonistic figure (“well-hung and snow-white tan”), but at his core communicates peace and love; he’s the ultimate rock star. And in the end, he is destroyed by his own excesses and by his fans.

David Bowie was often dubbed ‘the coolest man on Earth’. And what could be cooler that drinking champagne with an alien rock band?

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By George!

Every day, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography sends me an e-mail containing an entry from the Dictionary. Recently I received the entry about Phyllis Dixey (1914-1964), the English striptease artiste.

After making her start in the chorus line, Phyllis graduated to a leading role in stage tableaux. These comprised static ensembles of thinly veiled women who recreated scenes from classical art or adopted poses deemed of artistic merit, a requirement needed to evade the government’s theatrical censor. (This situation was depicted in the 2005 movie Mrs Henderson Presents.) These tableaux – and Phyllis’ later fan-dance routine – came to the attention of the censor in the Lord Chamberlain’s office, who said:

“The Lord Chancellor considers that this is carrying stage nudity too far…. The Lord Chancellor desires me to warn you that unless more reasonableness is shown in the inclusion of nudity in your programme he will have no alternative to prohibiting it altogether.”

The name of the theatrical censor was George Titman.

I’m not making this up.

Here are some relevant photos. The first is a publicity photo for Phyllis Dixey. The second is a photo of the real George Titman with the actress Lesley Anne Down, who played Phyllis Dixey in a TV program in 1978.

George Titman (1889-1980) was not only the Secretary of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office during the Dixey era; he was also the Duke of Edinburgh’s Serjeant-at-Arms at the time of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. For those not already snickered out, I can additionally inform you that George Titman was also one of only five people to know the whereabouts of the Crown Jewels during the Second World War.

Later, George’s son, John Titman (1926-2003), also held the posts of Secretary of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office (1978-91) and a Serjeant-at-Arms to the Queen (1982-91).

And so to the clerihew:

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