Roy Blount, Jr.Besprekingen

Life is too short to slog through all the folksy anecdotes and sports reminiscences and stream-of-consciousness ponderings to get to the nuggets of interesting history and etymology. Maybe someday I'll come back and pick at a word here and there...but I doubt it.

Fun and funny! Lovely photos with delightful annotations! A must for dog lovers! I keep extra copies to give as gifts!

ruminations on words

memories of New Orleans

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1st male 1st "lady" copes with role Funny

It's an excellent photobook with accompanying text which is delightful and thought-provoking.

Made me think (as I often do) about animal ethics and food consumption. But that might just be me being crazy.

Imagine someone deciding to turn a web site into a book. Imagine an incredibly intelligent author just rambling for a while. Imagine having an interest in words and language and still being incredibly annoyed. And then you'll be like me--imagining that I bothered to finish the book.

Blount is balanced between a natural love of his homeland and a self-conscious shame for the crimes of the South. While he resents the assumptions made by Northerners that all Southerners are ignorant racists, he must acknowledge historical realities. Given the miserable record of the US on race relations, genocide of Native peoples and imperialism, those of us born in the north should join Blount in ambivalence about our heritage.

This is a pretty good collection, although I did not find much of it to be very humorous. And Blount plays fast and loose with his definition of Southern. He even includes a selection by Garrison Keillor, who is definitely NOT Southern. And in my opinion, a glaring omission is anything by T. R. Pearson, who is the funniest Southerner, in my book.

I guess when I publish Glade1's Book of Southern Humor, I can do it the way I want.

There were a lot of authors here I haven't read, and some "old time" stuff that brought back memories of my childhood, so overall I enjoyed this book.

(AUDIO) Borrowed this from the library via Libby (as an aside, this is my new favorite audio book app. Very easy to use, like the interface). The subtitle of this book is "Food Songs and Chewy Ruminations". Its a collection of his poetry, essays and his lifelong experiences with food. From is opinions about bourbon, to his and his son's experiences with piranha in South America, to his praise of Pimento Cheese and a bizarre story about the possum fanciers group where he was a judge at a possum show. He also sprinkles in some of the stories he presented in the "Bluff the Listener" segement on NPR's "Wait, Wait... Don't Tell Me", where he is a frequent panelist.

This was a really fun "read", that, while you can get it in book form, its much better if you get it in audio form. Half the charm of this book is listening to Blount's "down home" Southern drawl.

8/10

S: 4/15/18 - 5/5/18 (11 Days)

An extremely discursive discussion of Duck Soup, the most brilliant and subversive Marx Brothers movie, and short enough that you can spend an hour or two watching and reading at the same time. Here it is EIGHTY YEARS later and I still laughed until the tears ran.

Cute poems from the dog's point of view. With adorable dog pictures

Camels Are Easy, Comedy's Hard by Roy Blount Jr. is a collection of writing which includes; essays, poems, short stories, travel writing, reminiscence, sports writing, political discussion, interviews of famous people, and crossword puzzles. I hope I didn't leave anything out. There are 64 pieces in the book; 61 originally appeared in 28 different publications. They range wildly in length from the very short (23 words) to long (10,000 words). Many are recent but a few, as Blount says, "have been acquiring patina for ten to twenty-one years." This is a newly released eBook edition of Camels Are Easy, Comedy's Hard which was originally released in 1991.

As anyone who has ever read Roy Blount Jr. knows, this is a humourous book simply based on Blount's presentation and the way he looks at things. The stories run the gamet from exploring the Amazon to French painting to coon dogs to synchronized swimming meets. The travel writing includes some reflections on camels as well as visits to Dierks, Arkansas; Kampala, Uganda; Atlantic City, New Jersey; Esperanza, and Peru. Famous people written about include Gilda Radner and Jonathan Demme.

For example, Blount says about the Amazon "To tell the truth, when people ask me what the Amazon was like, it is not man-eating fish that spring to mind. It is the mud. Strange gray-green-blue-brown mud." in "Eating out of House and Home" Blount writes: "You know why Manet’s Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe is so sexy, don’t you? Not just because one of the people in it is outdoors naked—I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that half the people in the entire history of French painting are outdoors naked. It’s because she is outdoors naked eating lunch."

Or in "I Model for GQ" he writes"On a scale of the ones to the nines, I am usually dressed to roughly the twos. In order to avoid giving offense at special occasions, I will go as far as the threes or fours. The only reason to move on up to snazzy, however, is to attract business or women. And the type of business or women you attract by dressing snazzy is the type that will expect you to dress snazzy all the time. I wouldn’t want to live like that. Another reason I am not natty is that I like to eat lying down sometimes. I also like to eat sitting up, standing and walking, but let’s face it, you can’t always be sitting up, standing or walking when you eat; sometimes you’re going to be eating lying down. Or at least leaning back. And you spill stuff on your lapels."

How can you not laugh at a man who is that honest?

I particularly enjoyed reading his piece on Gilda Radner, but I could easily list a dozen others (The Amazon (well, all the travel monologues), getting a tan, Jonathan Demme, all the crossword puzzles...

Highly Recommended

Disclosure: My Kindle edition was courtesy of Open Road Media via Netgalley for review purposes.

Excellent photos and essays to learn about Nashville and some of its history.

This author is a funny and clever word-smith. I love the way his mind works!

Read by the author. Very funny, might be good to read in print as well. So much packed in. Great to hear Roy Blount read.

I have heard him frequently on "Wait, Wait, don't tell me". So, I was curious what his writing was like. Funny, well written, but this edition is fairly dated mostly dating from the 80s. So, a few essays about Reagan and other issues at the time. As someone who lived through that time, I could understand and appreciate the references. But to a younger person, I think they might be a little at sea.

A quick read with an author who "gets" New Orleans. Most of the book concerns itself with only The French Quarter, so the title is a little misleading.

I did see one glaring mistake and I'm sure native New Orleanians will find others to quibble about.

The next to the last chapter was more about Blount's friend than New Orleans and should have been excised from the book.

Feet on the Street would have rated a four instead of a three from me IF it had covered more of New Orleans and hadn't had the wasted next to last chapter.

I would have liked this even more had I not been aware of the AMAZING content in Alphabet Juice!

Wonderful fun!

Rule one for writing about comedy should be don't try to be funny.

This is basically a long monologue on Blount's part as he watches Duck Soup and points out things he loves and references and trivia and...eh.

Really, if you want to read about the Marx Brothers, just go for Harpo's autobiography. /has a major weakness for Harpo

This book is scholarly and well researched by a master wordsmith and a devoted word lover, but it sometimes becomes too much in one stretch. Often quoteable.½

Roy Blount , Jr. goes through the alphabet letter by letter, talking about whatever words and phrases happen to catch his attention. He delves into etymologies, comments on usage, shares snippets of writing (his own and others') that he particularly likes or dislikes, makes jokes, and talks a great deal about the sounds of words and his appreciation for the ones that sound somehow appropriate for their meanings or connotations.

I was tremendously enthusiastic about this book at first. I mean, look at the subtitle: "The Energies, Gists, and Spirits of Letters, Words, and Combinations Thereof; Their Roots, Bones, Innards, Piths, Pips, and Secret Parts, Tinctures, Tonics and Essences; With Examples of Their Usage Foul and Savory." How can a language lover resist a description like that? "Wow," I was saying to myself by the time I got through the introduction, "here is someone who indeed knows how to squeeze the juice from language! I can practically taste all those wonderful words on my tongue!" But I quickly started to feel rather disappointed. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's all just a little too random. Or it's due to the fact that Blount's approach feels a bit too fanciful to me at some times and a bit too pedantic at others. Or that he often seems to me to be trying a little too hard to be clever and witty. Maybe it's just that his sense of humor and mine don't entirely line up.

It's not that I didn't find any of it enjoyable. It's sometimes quite funny and sometimes genuinely informative, but it just didn't quite deliver on the concentrated linguistic delight it seemed to promise.½

Three stars for content, one extra for Blount's espièglerie in writing such an idiosyncratic book. No slouch in the word dept, he brushes Chomsky aside, and argues that words in general have a more onomotopaeic quality than the linguists tend to credit them with. He has all kinds of fun chasing down etymologies and occasionally inventing them, rambling on about his favorite words. For Blount is not a theorist of words, but someone who loves words. As he himself notes, this is a sort of dictionary, not meant to be read through, but browsed. And having browsed it unto completion, I am right glad to have done it. Bless your vocabulary, your thinking, your writing, and your funny bone, and read Alphabet Juice.