Monday, September 11, 2006

Now We Are 86...

I’m not sophisticated to deliver a clean link for this, but if you like good-natured mediocre BBC radio comedy (hey, don’t we all) pop over to BBC Radio 4 Comedy here and fire up “Nineteen Sixty-Six and All That.” I particularly liked the bit about literature in the 20s—the Irish gave us Joyces’ Ulysses; the French gave us Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, the Americans gave us Eliot’s The Wasteland, and we produced Milne’s Now We Are Six.

1 comment:

The New York Crank said...

Let's be fair to Milne, who at least added a gastronomic touch that beat Joyce and Elliott (but not Proust.)

To wit: Joyce has Bloom using cakes he has purchased to feed gulls over the River Liffey. Yiccch! Baked goods bad enough to trump a carnivore bird.

Elliott asked that haunting question, "Do I dare to each a peach?" Do we dare to give a damn?

Now We Are Six at least pointed out that a king did "like a little bit of butter with my bread." Not a bad idea and certainly better-tsting than that new fad of taking perfectly good bread and dipping it in olive oil in Italian restaurants.

But Proust still takes the cake -- err, the madeleine, which is the best-tasting food reference offered by any of these tolks.

--The New York Crank
TheNewYorkCrank.blogspot.com