Word: lardners
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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SHUT UP, HE EXPLAINED (277 pp.)-A Ring Lardner Selection edited by Babette Rosmond and Henry Morgan-Scribner...
There were two Ring Lardners that counted-or, at any rate, a plump one and a half. There was the man whose best stories are superb revelations of character, the lord of vernacular, the laureate of dull lives, crass hopes and mean minds. The second Lardner that counted was a fellow of short nights and wild swoops and demented plunges, of parody and nonsense, of non sequiturs that on occasion proved knockout blows. Perhaps the most inspired of these-a daunted parent's reply to a child's bedeviling question-provided the title for Shut Up, He Explained...
...many ways, Shut Up, He Explained is a curious book. For a generation to which Lardner is largely a distant figure of the 1920s (he died in 1933), familiar chiefly through textbooks and a few anthologies, it does not do full justice to the lasting appeal of the great American humorist. Nor is it likely to satisfy the Lardner buff (there are still a great many), who likes to sample his Lardneriana over the wide range offered by a box of Mother's Day chocolates. When Lardner was good, he was very, very good; when...
Tootle & Twang. The publication in the 1920s of such nonsense "plays" as Lardner's Clemo Uti-"The Water Lilies" and I Gaspiri (The Upholsterers) perhaps marked the literary debut of the New Lunacy. Hailed in some quarters as offshoots of Dada and in others as potshots at it, they helped form the Krazy Katechism of the era. With the mere setting of the scene in Clemo Uti-"the Outskirts of a Parchesi Board"-there sounded a note that would tootle and twang and echo from Perelman to Mad Magazine; it was there, too, in the very first lines...
...there were some surprises, particularly the Minnesota Twins and Bolinsky, the Los Angeles Angels' an to Ring Lardner. The Twins mbined solid pitching by Camllo Pas and Jim Lee, fine relleving by Dick gman, and the surprising power of kies Bernie Allen, Don Mincher, and chie Rollins to take seven of eight d move into a virtual tie with Cleve for second place. The Twins will be a pennant contender, but Cal Grimth's sharp off-season dealing will probably bring the Twin Cities their first first-division team this year...