More of Aesop's Foibles III: A Modest Contribution to the Decline of Western Civilisation (Volume 3)

Abstract

This third volume of presently six begins again with "A Helpful Guide for Reviewers" that concludes with "Please buy this book! Someone has to pay the therapist's bills!" Ironically, this is the one copy of Rothschild's "Foibles" that I did not have to buy, and the reason was that it was not for sale like the other five. I asked, and he graciously sent it as a gift. The introduction then makes a helpful comment on the method or moment of composition "in which language is compressed against its will into new shapes to perform tasks it was never designed to do. . . . The idea has to be grasped and made concrete before it disappears again, floats away, dissolves, is overlaid by others…." (4). What some would call "pun" becomes a major way of discovering and probing strange truths for Rothschild, whose name is happily misrendered as "Rothschlid" on the cover. Stories here are numbered 201 to 300. The first is a succession of puns between raisin and grape. The former says "You can spend the time as I do, raisin your consciousness. Don't gripe, Grape!" (9). "The Ox and the Ass," Number 242, has fun with a scene of a couple having a child in a stable, with emphasis on the scatological, bloody, and olfactory aspects of the incident, which includes three strangers walking in (88-89). "Prostrate before the Prostate" (135) will have special meaning and all sorts of recognition for senior males. I begin to notice at #275 that the titles in the beginning T of C are not identical with those accompanying the texts themselves. #275 is on defecation and #277 on premature ejaculation. 214 pages.