Best Joke Of The Day -- January 5, 2021

See this note. 

I think it turned out to be a better post than I had expected. 

A reader writes me, under the "best joke" category, full note:

Seeing your blog report of the impending merger reminds me of one of my favorite old jokes.  It was initially reported as an off-the-cuff quip made by a Daimler executive.

The Daimler/Chrysler merger was being reported and an analyst asked "How do you pronounce that?"

The exec said "Daimler.  The 'Chrysler' is silent."

I dropped French in college after the first few weeks. I knew I was not going to do well. The problem: too many letters were silent. Seriously.  

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The Literature Page

The reader who sent me the note above, noted that I said I wrote that earlier note out of boredom. 

The reader also noted:

You mentioned boredom.  "Ennui" is one of my favorite words.

Ennui.

 

Wow. Ennui. Do a google search of "ennui sy" and see if Google doesn't auto-fill the rest with "ennui sylvia plath."

 

Years ago I went through my "Sylvia Plath" phase. One of her most famous poems was titled: Ennui.

 

From March 3, 2017, of the blog: 

The Villanelle

First, this from an earlier post from a different blog:

The villanelle, from Middlebrook's biography of Anne Sexton, p. 80 - 81.

I first encountered the villanelle when I was in my "Sylvia Plath phase." I had another blog then and wrote extensively about Sylvia Plath. Unfortunately I deleted that entire blog and lost all I had on Sylvia. Maybe I will start again someday; here's a nice link regarding Sylvia Plath and villanelles. I'm sure there are many more.

I thought about that after reading Claudia Roth Pierpont's essay on Elizabeth Bishop in the current issue of The New Yorker. Near the end of that long essay:

By October, Alice had delivered the news, and his name was Peter. Bishop went to Florida in December (Alice drove her to the airport) and in mid-January took an overdose of pills with alcohol. Discovered by neighbors, she survived. Being Elizabeth Bishop, she apologized, aghast at having almost caused the kind of pain she’d always known.

Poetry had failed her this time. She’d fought to master the loss, writing seventeen quickly successive drafts of an exactingly structured villanelle, a form with origins in the French Baroque. The result is her most famous poem, a mixture of a higher Dorothy Parker with (in the commanding aside to herself, as she struggles to write) Gerard Manley Hopkins, the neat summing up of a life, titled “One Art.”

The poem is at the link.

Information on the villanelle can be found everywhere; here is one link.

A snippet from my own journal:

July 25, 2008: While reading Sylvia Plath’s Journals I came across “villanelles.” I think I had heard of that term before but now that I saw the word again I was curious what villanelles were. I went to wiki, found a short definition, and in the process of “cutting and pasting” that definition on my “Storytelling” chapter, I noted that I had not completed a sentence regarding a newly discovered poem by Sylvia Plath. 

 I “googled” a phrase from the incomplete sentence which took me directly to solving the nano-mystery: the lost Plathian poem was Ennui which then took me to Blackbird: An Online Journal of Literature and the Arts where I found the background of Ennui.

Blackbird appears to be a free site maintained by the Department of English at the Virginia Commonwealth University. This site apparently owns the copyright or has access to much of Sylvia Plath’s works. The site includes the text of Ennui as well as scanned copies of the original typewritten page of Plath’s.