⌾Curio #38 - P. G. Wodehouse, Hubble & Sérgio Mendes
“This is where we fight,” said Manjeet. He was muscular and stocky with swollen cauliflower ears, a prominent scar on his nose and kind eyes. We were standing next to a large, rectangular sandpit with a carefully manicured and smooth surface. “And that,” he said, pointing down at a grassless dirt field below us, “is where we train. Every morning.”
I was at the Master Chandgiram Akhara, an unassuming compound with high cream-colored walls about ten minutes by tuk-tuk from the Kashmere Gate in northern Delhi. It is one of the premier training centers for aspiring kushti — practitioners of a traditional form of mud wrestling popular in the Indian subcontinent.
I approached the compound tentatively; unsure of the reception I would receive. The tuk-tuk driver had not inspired confidence. “You want to become kushti?” he asked, confused.
“No,” I said. “I just want to watch.”
“Want to watch? You have a friend who is kushti?”
I replied I didn’t.
“So why you want to watch?”
I paused at the entrance and knocked. The heavy door creaked open and I was greeted by the friendly smile of Manjeet…
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If you’d like to read the rest of my latest piece for The Cud, where I write about the day I spent with traditional Indian mud wrestlers on the outskirts of Delhi, you can check it out here.
Thomas Daniell - Jami Masjid, Delhi (1811)
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Welcome back to Curio, the newsletter for curious minds seeking an escape from the noise of the news cycle.
I hope you’re staying well!
Oli
In Praise of P. G. Wodehouse
One of the ways I’ve coped with all the recent craziness has been to dive into the delightfully hilarious world of P.G. Wodehouse (1881 – 1975). Reading a Wodehouse comic novel, with all its charm, silliness and wit, is pure escapism. His loveable characters, genius wordplay and hilarious plots are the ideal antidotes to any seriousness and stress in real life. He’s been cheering people up for well over a century.
His literary output was unbelievable: he wrote up until the day he died and published a total of ninety-six books and over forty plays
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The Master
Wodehouse was not just popular with a mass audience, he was also greatly admired by other writers. Some examples include:
Stephen Fry, author and actor:
“[Wodehouse is] the most industrious, prolific and beneficent author ever to have sat down, scratched his head and banged out a sentence.”
“He taught me something about good nature. It is enough to be benign, to be gentle, to be funny, to be kind.”
Evelyn Waugh, English novelist:
“Mr. Wodehouse’s idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in.”
Douglas Adams, the author of The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy
“What Wodehouse writes is pure word music”
“He is the greatest musician of the English language, and exploring variations of familiar material is what musicians do all day”
Jay McInerney, American novelist:
“I was clinically depressed for most of 1999 and I would turn to Wodehouse, possibly the funniest writer in the English language. It seemed to be more effective at warding off despair than the antidepressants that I was taking.”
Nicholas Barber, journalist:
“Making people happy was Wodehouse’s overriding ambition.”
“With every sparkling joke, every well-meaning and innocent character, every farcical tussle with angry swans and pet Pekingese, every utopian description of a stroll around the grounds of a pal’s stately home or a flutter on the choir boys’ hundred yards handicap at a summer village fete, he wanted to whisk us far away from our worries.”
Instead of going to Oxford for university, his family’s dire financial situation meant Wodehouse had to work at a bank and become, in his own words, “the most inefficient clerk whose trousers ever polished the seat of a high stool.” He channeled his energy into writing in his spare time and eventually earned enough to quit the bank and become a full-time writer
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Names
Wodehouse’s satires are set in grand country houses and gentlemen’s clubs in an idyllic pre-war England. The outlandish names he gives his aristocratic characters are a real highlight. Indeed, one of the many things the late Christopher Hitchens admired in Wodehouse was his “near-faultless ability to come up with names that are at once ludicrous and credible.” Here are some noteworthy examples:
Pongo Twistleton
Claude Cattermole “Catsmeat” Potter-Pirbright
Augustus "Gussie" Fink-Nottle
Hildebrand "Tuppy" Glossop
Sir Roderick Glossop
Cyril "Barmy" Fotheringay-Phipps
D'Arcy "Stilton" Cheesewright
Lord Worplesdon
When asked about how he approached writing Wodehouse responded, “I sit at the typewriter and curse a bit.”
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Quotes
Here is a small sampling of some great lines from Wodehouse. I hope they brighten your day 🙂
“Freddie experienced the sort of abysmal soul-sadness which afflicts one of Tolstoy’s Russian peasants, when, after putting in a heavy day’s work strangling his father, beating his wife, and dropping the baby in the city’s reservoir, he turns to the cupboards, only to find the vodka bottle empty.”
“And she's got brains enough for two, which is the exact quantity the girl who marries you will need.”
“She looked as if she had been poured into her clothes and had forgotten to say ‘when’.”
“He had just about enough intelligence to open his mouth when he wanted to eat, but certainly no more.”
“He had been looking like a dead fish. He now looked like a deader fish, one of last year’s, cast up on some lonely beach and left there at the mercy of the wind and tides.”
“She uttered a sound rather like an elephant taking its foot out of a mud hole in a Burmese teak forest”
“There is only one cure for grey hair. It was invented by a Frenchman. It is called the guillotine.”
“Some minds are like soup in a bad restaurant—better left unstirred.”
“A lifetime of lunches had caused his chest to slip down to the mezzanine floor.”
“Aunt calling to aunt, like mastodons bellowing across the primeval swamp.”
“It was a nasty look. It made me feel as if I were something the dog had brought in and intended to bury later on, when he had time.”
“You’re one of those guys who can make a party just by leaving it. It’s a great gift.”
“There is about him something that seems to soothe and hypnotize. To the best of my knowledge, he has never encountered a charging rhinoceros, but should this contingency occur, I have no doubt that the animal, meeting his eye, would check itself in mid-stride, roll over and lie purring with its legs in the air.”
“As for Gussie Fink-Nottle, many an experienced undertaker would have been deceived by his appearance and started embalming on sight.”
“The voice of Love seemed to call to me, but it was a wrong number.”
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In the early 1990s, Hugh Laurie (Bertie Wooster) and Stephen Fry (Jeeves) released a television series based on Wodehouse’s famous novels. The below scenes showcase moments where Jeeves the butler disapproves of Bertie’s choice of clothes.
“I assumed it had got into your wardrobe by mistake, sir...or else that it'd been placed there by your enemies."
“I will have you know Jeeves that I bought this in Cannes.”
“And wore it, sir?”
“Every night, at the casino. Beautiful women kept trying to catch my eye."
"Presumably they thought you were a waiter, sir."
Hubble Space Telescope
This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of one of humanity’s most remarkable achievements, the Hubble Space Telescope, described by NASA as “the most significant advance in astronomy since Galileo.” Here are some interesting bits of trivia about Hubble:
It’s responsible for the deepest images of the universe ever recorded
The telescope is powerful enough to spot the light of a firefly at a distance of 7,000 miles (11,265 km)
It’s named after astronomer Edwin Hubble
Recent images contain more than five thousand galaxies, some of them as far as 13.2 billion light-years away
Hubble’s photos have helped narrow the date of the Big Bang at somewhere around 13.7 billion years ago
It’s the only telescope designed to be maintained in space by astronauts
Hubble is expected to keep on taking mind-blowing photos for at least another five years
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The extraordinary photos taken by Hubble showcase the awesome majesty of the universe. For instance:
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For the thirtieth anniversary, NASA has launched a feature called: What Did Hubble See On Your Birthday? Below is what mine came up with.
It’s of a “Bubble Nebula”, which is an enormous bubble blown into space by a super-hot, massive star. It’s seven light-years across and located over seven thousand light-years from Earth.
To find out what the Hubble Space Telescope saw on your birthday, click here
Sérgio Mendes
Sérgio Mendes is one of Brazil’s most successful exports, with his exuberant bossa nova music having been played at venues around the world for almost sixty years. This song, Magalenha, is from his album, Brasileiro, which won the 1993 Grammy Award for Best World Music Album. It features the voice of Carlinhos Brown, fun marching band rhythms and catchy call-and-response vocals.
“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”
- Gandhi
Curio is a newsletter for curious minds seeking an escape from the noise of the news cycle. It is put together by Oli Duchesne