“There’s a great power in words, if you don’t hitch too many of them together.“   — Josh Billings

(This guy had to have influenced both Will Rogers and Mark Twain.  If only he had made it to the 20th Century!  I’m pretty sure he’d come up more often, and in more places, than just in the cryptoquote.) —   YUR

Iubiţi pe vrăjmaşii voştri, binecuvântaţi pe cei ce vă blesteamă, faceţi bine celor ce vă urăsc şi rugaţi-vă pentru cei ce vă asupresc şi vă prigonesc.

[Matei 5.44]

Nu există răzbunare mai desăvîrșită decît iertarea.

Josh Billings

Cuvîntul Meu, care iese din gura Mea, nu se întoarce la Mine fara rod

There is no revenge so complete as forgiveness.

Josh Billings (1818 – 1885)

“Consider the postage stamp: its usefulness consists in the ability to stick to one thing until it gets there.”

About Josh Billings

Josh Billings was the pen name of folksy American humorist Henry Wheeler Shaw. He was born in Massachusetts in 1818. After he was thrown out of college for stealing the clapper from the school bell, he roamed far and wide for 26 years before settling down in Poughkeepsie, New York, as an auctioneer. His essays were initially snubbed; he became successful only after he adopted a more eccentric phonetic spelling. He was best known for his annual Old Farmer’s Allminax. He died in 1885.

“I honestly believe it is better to know nothing than to know what ain’t so.“   — Josh Billings

(This exact line of thinking has always kept me from pursuing religious studies.) —   YUR

“There are two things in this life for which we are never fully prepared, and that is twins.“   — Josh Billings

(I bet old Josh wouldn’t be all Aw shucks!  Ain’t that sweet! – like so many of our current brain dead pundits and reporters are – when it comes to the Octomom.  What’s a quaint and clever way to call somebody a parasite???) —   YUR

“It is the little bits of things that fret and worry us; we can dodge an elephant but we can’t dodge a fly.”   —   Josh Billings

(I bet ol’ Josh and Mr. Twain and Will Rogers have welcomed George Carlin into their celestial fraternity.  I know George wasn’t a big believer in the afterlife, but I think they’d all get along like gangbusters.)   —  YUR

“Every man has a right to his opinion, provided it agress with ours.”   —   Josh Billings

This Vitaphone short (circa 1931) is ten minutes long, and viewers who suffer from even mild impatience may want to fast-forward through the hillbilly jokes that take up the first four minutes: the man sitting on a box of eggs because his hen has wandered off, the local constable directing traffic (it’s another man and his cow).  Cinematic vaudeville at its finest and broadest, as those city slickers show how dumb the rubes are.

But things start to get hot when the trio from the local cafe, “Faith, Hope, and Charity,” (who are they, really?) sing a low-down melody, an eccentric dancer capers around the stage on clown shoes.  That would be intermitently hilarious vaudeville, but the jazz content would be low.  However, you can begin to hear Red McKenzie creating wailing phrases behind the dancer, as if he couldn’t contain himself.  Then, after some more labored banter, the trio-that-became-a quartet takes the stage for a ferocious ST. LOUIS BLUES — from left to right, there’s Red (blowing his comb wrapped in newspaper into his hat), Josh Billings whacking a suitcase with whiskbrooms and kicking it for bass-drum accents, Eddie Condon and Jack Bland, playing what appear to be Vega lutes.

Josh Billings, by the way, is credited with one of the great wry aphorisms of the last century.  Someone is supposed to have been complaining about how things were in what would later be called the Great Depression.  “Will it ever get better?” lamented the nameless interlocutor.  Billings said thoughtfully, “Better times are coming . . . now and then.”

The rocking interlude is over too soon, and we descend into a drunken-dog act . . .  I find it weirdly significant that Whitey the dog gets star billing, but no matter.  How else would we have seen the Mound City Blue Blowers?  Thanks to Vitaphone, to Roy Mack, the director, to TCM, to Dailymotion, and others.

And now, ladies and gentlemen . . . !

“It is very easy to manage your neighbor’s business, but our own sometimes bothers us.”   —   Josh Billings

I had a conversation last night that reminded me some clarification might be useful. I wrote a post a while back that made passing reference to my struggle with addictive tendencies.

It’s like this. I am wired such that if there is something that brings me pleasure in the moment, from cookies to email and much of the spectrum in between, I am then driven: I want need want more. A little really doesn’t do the trick. One cookie? Please. A single email? Not hardly.

I am a creature of excess. Thankfully for my sanity and overall health, not to mention my role as a functioning member of society, I don’t have much of a taste for intoxicants; on the whole I don’t find being out of control pleasurable.

So at times my pursuit of the stuff of pleasure in my life edges toward uncontrolled, and thus does not bring me happiness. Wisdom lies here: “Do not mistake pleasure for happiness. They are a different breed of dogs.”

Thank god for The Google, so I can properly attribute that to Josh Billings, whom I see also is attributed “About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment.”

Two others that put me in danger of aspirating my lunch, reading as I ate:
* Flattery is like cologne water, to be smelt of, not swallowed.

* It is much easier to repent of sins that we have committed than to repent of those we intend to commit.

And I’ll leave you here, with the taste of great writing and original thinking in your mouth, rather than anything further I might have said re: me.

Besides, I have to go check my email.

Schweigen ist eines
der am schwierigsten zu
widerlegenden Argumente.

(Josh Billings)

To continue with the topic of recitation and education, here is an article by Arthur Burrell, “Recitation: The Children’s Art,” from The Parent’s Review 1 (1890-1): 92-103, edited by Charlotte M. Mason. The article is on a website dedicated to the writings and teaching philosophy and practices of Charlotte Maria Shaw Mason (1842-1923), a British teacher and educational writer. Her works include Home Education (1886), A Liberal Education for All: The Scope of Continuation Schools (1919) and An Essay towards a Philosophy of Education (1923). (For more about Mason, see Barbara Caine, “Mason, Charlotte Maria Shaw (1842–1923),” rev., Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com]).

Burrell’s article starts with a complaint that children are ‘natural’ reciters, but this ability is ruined through bad examples of recitation at school, home and church. In discussing the usefulness of recitation, he offers an interesting description of the exchange between the reciter and his/her audience, and a plea for recitation’s importance for the appreciation of literature:

“So magical is the power of a good reader that he can convey to an audience shades of meaning in his author which he himself does not suspect. Again and again a face in a hall will light up at some touch conveyed by a tone or a glance, and the very speaker will thank his hearers for lessons. As it would be with a picture, if by some unknown mechanism it could absorb the fancies of the faces that read its meaning, so it may be with the owner of a voice. More receptive than the mere canvas, the reciter watches the approving and disapproving glance; he sees the sympathy and he feels the silence; his audience may be receiving a lesson, but they are assuredly giving one.

And if such appreciation can be born when a good reader and a good audience meet, is it not worse than madness for us to look on English literature as mere work for the study, mere dictionary stuff? It was meant to be interpreted by the voice of life; there is only half the passion in the printed page. If there were more good reading round English firesides, do you suppose that the masterpieces of English thought would be studied, as they often are, merely with an eye to the examiners’ certificate?”

Burrell then proceeds to give some practical advice about how to teach a child reading (Burrell uses “recitation” and “reading” interchangeably, suggesting that he regards these activities as one). He begins with an astonishing list of ‘dont’s’:

(1) You are not to allow any imitation of the Stage.
(2) You are not even to encourage exaggeration in voice or gesture.
(3) You are not to allow recitation before a company of admiring friends.
(4) You are not to let a child think that Mark Twain, Artemus Ward, and Josh Billings are the only writers of comedy.
(5) You are not to let your child learn Browning.
(6) You are not to choose tragic or sentimental pieces.
(7) You are not, as a rule, to give lessons in the presence of a third person.
(8) You are not to tell your child that he or she can recite well.

Twain is prohibited because his humour is of “a low class”; Browning because his poetry is “is very rarely intelligible to children, and is nearly always harsh to a musical ear.”

Burrell suggests that parents create their own recitation anthology, because published anthologies are always inadequate, and offers a list of suggested pieces and books.