Charlie and The Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl, the inspiration for Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory with Gene Wilder and later on, the motion picture with the outré, controversial Johnny Depp http://realini.blogspot.com/2019/10/charlie-and-chocolate-factory-based-on.html - 8 out of 10

 

Charlie and The Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl, the inspiration for Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory with Gene Wilder and later on, the motion picture with the outré, controversial Johnny Depp http://realini.blogspot.com/2019/10/charlie-and-chocolate-factory-based-on.html

8 out of 10

 

 

The mesmerizing Memoirs http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/12/memoirs-by-kingsley-amis-author-of-take.html of the Magister Ludi Kingsley Amis are cathartic - the reader is enraptured by the magnum opera of this King of Comedy –and they offer insight into some very interesting personalities, men and women of letters, but not only, we read about John Cleese being the most insecure comedian (and Sir Kingsley Amis speculates that maybe there is good reason), the meeting with Peter Sellers, Groucho Marx being the least amusing comic, and so on, the episode with Margaret Thatcher is just one of the multitude of delights, the august Anthony Powell, Evelyn Waugh and other luminaries are in the pages

 

However, there are peculiar, awkward or even outright outrageous appearances, such as Francis Bacon (was he the protagonist, I wonder, and this should normally have to be edited out, deleted, but then who is reading it, so that we pay attention) who came to see the Magister Ludi in Wales, and then showed him some pornographic, gay material (unless, again, I am awfully mistaken, and the memory plays tricks, which is it does these days…what was I talking about anyway) intending to test the waters, maybe…

Speaking of which, there is another (oh, they are so many actually) passage, where the author meets with a foreigner (was he) and the latter is somehow disturbed, unhappy with the language used by some ‘poofters’, and when our Godhead tries to explain, or just indicate that this homophobe is wrong (the intentions are not clear to yours truly, but then the Godhead was such a sage fellow) the fool immediately (or belatedly) considered that Kingsley Amis was just one of them, and thus defending his own

 

Since I mentioned the Godhead and I am clearly not about to write something on the subject of the note (what was it, do you remember) not yet, if ever, let me tell you about another Absolute Giant, the Hermes of literature-(let us just go with that, and praise the ancient Greeks for their decision to enlist quite a number of celestials, so that we could assign in jest Hermes to Anthony Powell, maybe Athena to Flannery O’Connor http://realini.blogspot.com/2014/03/judgment-day-by-flannery-oconnor.html

'The Essence of the All is the Godhead of the True* Anthony Powell says in his glorious, divine A Dance to The Music of Time http://realini.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-kindly-ones-by-anthony-powell.html he may have mentioned to the Godhead of Literature that maybe ‘in vino veritas’, but clearly there is truth in writing, speaking of the idea that writers put the truth in their oeuvres, even if it is not an autobiography, we are dealing with fiction, the author is present on every page, with his experiences…

 

Let us see if we can dignify Roald Dahl with some words, for he has been in the ‘news’ lately –‘Words Including 'Fat,' 'Ugly,' 'Crazy,' Removed From Roald Dahl’s books, says one title, while one from The Guardian spells ‘Roald Dahl’s mean and nasty books don’t deserve all this attention’…Chris Townsend, Anthony Lawton and others weigh in on the decision to edit the author’s books to make them less offensive to a modern audience’ https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/feb/23/roald-dahl-mean-and-nasty-books-dont-deserve-all-this-attention

With the caveat that this is from memory (and let me just do some silly, preposterous mea cuipa, flavored with an attempt to be jestful – if I have read so many books, maybe around 3,000 by now, how could anyone expect me to remember much from one, or any in particular) what I recall is that The Godhead was at a party or event, where Roald Dahl comes in a…helicopter, the mean individual was quite, or very wealthy by now

 

And he tells our King of Comedy that he should write children’s books, because the buggers take them in no matter what, or words to that effect, implying a clear contempt for the readers and a character that was vile (if that is true, and this recollection is not just some made up concoction, misremembered and invented notions mixed together)…Contempt is incidentally one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

The Seven Principles of Making Marriage Work http://realini.blogspot.com/2015/07/the-seven-principles-of-making-marriage.html by John Gottman is a quintessential read, the author is the Ultimate Expert ion relationships, he has an accuracy rate of over ninety percent in his assessments, he is even able to tell what couples stay together and which ones will split when entering a restaurant and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are Contempt, Criticism, Stonewalling and Defensiveness…the latter is a form of criticism

 

To move from one notion to another, and evidently as far away from the loathsome (if this is true) Roald Dahl let us say here that the one some say is the most influential psychologist of our time, Malcolm Gladwell uses the fast and correct  verdict given by John Gottman as evidence in his monumental Blink The Power of Thinking Without Thinking http://realini.blogspot.com/2013/05/blink-power-of-thinking-without.html which argues that in seconds we take decisions, form opinions and experiments prove that the same take that participants in tests have on a two second video, without sound, belongs to students who attend the lectures of the man in the video for a semester – we could not say that two seconds equals some months, but hey, let us think of Albert Einstein “When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute…But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute — and it's longer than any hour…That's relativity…to conclude- is Dahl worth it, lo beseder, if you ask me

 

Now for a question, and invitation – maybe you have a good idea on how we could make more than a million dollars with this http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/02/unique-in-world.html?q=unique+in+the+world – as it is, this is a unique technique, which we could promote, sell, open the Oscars show with or something and then make lots of money together, if you have the how, I have the product, I just do not know how to get the befits from it, other than the exercise per se

 

As for my role in the Revolution that killed Ceausescu, a smaller Mao, there it is http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/03/realini-in-newsweek-participant-in.html