In article ,
Nick writes:
Jerry Friedman writes:

On May 11, 1:46Â*pm, "Django Cat" wrote:
Nick wrote:
the Omrud writes:

Django Cat wrote:
Jerry Friedman wrote:

Speaking of
stickiness, though, may I venture to remind you of the Tar Baby?

Ah. Â*Could be before my time...

BrE folk (apparently including DC) are not in general familiar with
Brer Rabbit and his friends, unless perhaps they are fans of "Sons
of the South". Â*Dad had a book of Brer Rabbit stories which I
suspect he may have got from Warwickshire-based American soldiers
during the war (he also laid his hands on a number of now rare
78s), so I grew up knowing all about the Tar Baby, although it
didn't make an awful lot of sense to me in the English Midlands in
the late 50s.

Whatever you do, don't make me read Uncle Remus. Â*Please don't make me
read Uncle Remus.

And please make me watch the "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah" scene, over and over.

Here you are, then, Nick:

http://tinyurl.com/osdcwj

I can't understand a word of it.

[and]

PS. And I think if I'd been asked to read this stuff in infants school
I'd have wept long and bitter tears.

I have the feeling I read it in a partially devernacularized version.

I read it when young; 10ish perhaps. I do remember finding the
vernacular heavy going, but you do get attuned to that sort of thing.
No worse than I remember Feersum Endjinn being. To quote Wikipedia
quoting it:

Woak up. Got dresd. Had brekfast. Spoke wif Ergates thi ant who sed
itz juss been wurk wurk wurk 4 u lately master Bascule, Y dont u ½ a
holiday? & I agreed & that woz how we decided we otter go 2 c Mr
Zoliparia in thi I-ball ov thi gargoyle Rosbrith.

Lissinen' to me granda' (ay roostic 'oo 'oiled frym

Toice'rst, Sx in the 1890's,) wuz ay touf slowg,

too.



It took me months to figure out the "'OyWee-ens" of which he
spoke in his gutteral drawl were "Hawaiians."

The moral content of the Uncle Remus fables is actually quite
on-the-spot. To this day, Joel Chandler Harris arouses
racial controversy, and yet his Uncle Remus works were about
the endearing (and highly predictable) foibles of ~humanity~,
not race. That's why his characters were creatures rather
than human beans. It kept it generic.

Harris was/is delightfully insidious and yet gently & kindly
obliging to people's sensitivities with his satire.

Now, /that's/ art.


cheers,
Tom


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