Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

Give the craziest people you know everything they want and hope they don’t ask for more? Great plan.

“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

I didn’t have alien invasion on my 2023 BINGO card.

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

The revolution will be supervised.

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

White supremacy is terrorism.

Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

You are here: Home / Books / Open Thread: Gorey Fate

Open Thread: Gorey Fate

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I still have my first-run copy of Amphigorey, which marks me as only a second- or third-generation Goreyphile. But I think he’d be perversely tickled at his “new” postmortem celebrity:

… [U]ntil the last few years true Gorey devotees were a secret society, wearing Gorey-philia like a Masonic ring. Now, however, their numbers have swelled. The writer Daniel Handler, better known as Lemony Snicket, said, “When I was first writing ‘A Series of Unfortunate Events,’ I was wandering around everywhere saying, ‘I am a complete rip-off of Edward Gorey,’ and everyone said, ‘Who’s that?’ Now, everyone says, ‘That’s right, you are a complete rip-off of Edward Gorey.’ ”
__
Tim Burton owes an obvious debt to Gorey, as do Rob Reger, creator of the goth gamine Emily the Strange, and Neil Gaiman, the author of the novella “Coraline.” Mr. Gaiman has an original Gorey drawing of “children gathered around a sickbed” hanging on his bedroom wall; he wanted Gorey to illustrate “Coraline,” he said, but he “died the day I finished it.”
__
Gorey illustrations are even becoming voguish as tattoos. Last year the ninth-season “American Idol” finalist Siobhan Magnus had a biceps tattoo of Death playing nanny to a flock of soon-to-be-doomed children, from “The Gashlycrumb Tinies,” Gorey’s grimly funny alphabet book.

Reader Interactions

110Comments

  3. 3.

    Warren Terra

    Also, I’ve never seen a Gorey tattoo (not that I get out much, or look much), but about two years ago a checker at the Cambridgeport Trader Joe’s had the most bitchen Ralph Steadman tattoo covering most of one arm.

  6. 6.

    Parallel 5ths (Jewish Steel)

    My family had the original books that were collected in the various Amphigoreys. I’m sure they helped develop in me an appreciation for the darker things in life.

  8. 8.

    WereBear

    Gorey fan too!

    I though Lemony Snicket rang a bell (kept buying them for my nephew when he got hooked on them years ago.)

  9. 9.

    Jim, Once

    A is for Alice, who fell down the stairs.
    B is for Basil, assaulted by bears.
    C is for Clara, um, done in with an ax…?

  10. 10.

    Seanly

    Not everyone knows about Edward Gorey? I grew up with a bunch of those books. That may explain why some people don’t get my sense of humor.

    Next you’re going to tell me that people don’t give their babies Richard Scarry books anymore.

  13. 13.

    eemom

    omg, I remember the alphabet book from when I was in college. And the story about the “it” that showed up in the people’s house and wouldn’t go away.
    “On Sundays it brooded and lay on the floor
    inconveniently close to the drawing room door.”

    That was like a thousand years ago. That I was in college.

    Lemony Snicket is a most worthy descendant. The Unfortunate Event books freakin RAWK.

  16. 16.

    Jim, Once

    @scav: That’s the one! Does anyone remember the title of the one about the little girl who’s abducted from her auto? The ending is magnificently horrible: “Then they stunned her, and stuffed her inside a kind of a pod, and then it was that Millicent Frastley was sacrificed … to THE INSECT GOD!”

  17. 17.

    Keith

    Heh, I was practically raised on The Gashlycrumb Tinies (I could recite it up until my late teens). My mother was a big fan of both Gorey and uncensored Grimm Brothers and passed that on at an early age.

  19. 19.

    inkadu

    I had an internet tradition questions.

    What is the origin of the snowclone:

    Fucking X, how does it work?

    Commonly seen here in the form of:

    Fucking Congress, how does it work?
    Fucking evolution, how does it work?

    etc.

    Gorey is great. Makes me want to start buying books again.

  22. 22.

    GeoX

    For the record:

    A is for Amy who fell down the stairs
    B is for Basil assaulted by bears
    C is for Clara who wasted away
    D is for Desmond thrown out of a sleigh
    E is for Ernest who choked on a peach
    F is for Fanny done in by a leech
    G is for George smothered under a rug
    H is for Hector done in by a thug
    I is for Ida who drowned in a lake
    J is for James who took lye by mistake
    K is for Kate who was struck with an axe
    L is for Leo who swallowed some tacks
    M is for Maud who was swept out to sea
    N is for Neville who died of ennui
    O is for Olive done in with an awl
    P is for Prue tramped flat in a brawl
    Q is for Quentin who sank in a mire
    R is for Rhoda consumed by a fire
    S is for Susan who perished of fits
    T is for Titus who flew into bits
    U is for Una who slipped down a drain
    V is for Victor squashed under a train
    W is for Winnie embedded in ice
    X is for Xerxes devoured by mice
    Y is for Yorick whose head was bashed in
    Z is for Zillah who drank too much gin

  24. 24.

    Jim, Once

    @GeoX: Thank you! Reading those makes me feel young again. I can’t believe I used to be able to recite the entire alphabet.

  26. 26.

    scav

    Typical, I can’t immediately find it but I’ve got something of his that opens out like an accordion, so that you can look through it like one of those paper toy stages. Ring any bells?

  35. 35.

    JGabriel

    H is for Hector done in by a thug

    is fairly amusing to those of us who enjoyed The Iliad.

    .

  36. 36.

    scav

    Ditto on Neville but are there any cheers for The Beastly Baby who is at least tied in my pantheon.

  38. 38.

    Cat Lady

    It’s always disconcerting to see the Gorey house in such a cute classic Cape town. It’s like Emily Dickinson’s and Lizzie Borden’s houses – the architecture belies the barely controlled/uncontrolled madness. Must be the long winters here. It’s tried my equanimity for sure.

  39. 39.

    Kirk Spencer

    From a 1996 interview:

    Does it bother you when people lump you together with people who do “horror” like Stephen King or Charles Addams?
    __
    Yes. Only very occasionally do I try to shock in a mild sort of way. I’m very squeamish really. As for Charles Addams, I knew him. We had the same agent. I occasionally would have lunch with him. I was told he envied me because I had a more highbrow reputation than he did. I love Charles Addams’ stuff. I suppose there’s always the possibility somebody will come along and want to do the equivalent of The Addams Family movie with my stuff. Well, I’m not that rich, so I’d probably say, “Go ahead.”

  43. 43.

    Jim, Once

    Madison judge rules that all protesters in rotunda are to be leave or be arrested. Milwaukee police are there, and police are completely surrounding the Statehouse. Will get link.

  48. 48.

    Sebastian Dangerfield

    Gorey tattoos? Why did I never think of that? I am so getting a gigantic Doubtful Guest — complete with his ahead-of-the-hipster-curve Chuck Taylors — covering the length of my left thigh! Lords black ink, plenty painful, but oh so worth it!

  49. 49.

    The Republic of Stupidness

    @fuzed:

    If no one else has said so, yes…

    (Haven’t read all the comments yet…)

    I’d say they were both influenced by Beardsley… too, also…

  50. 50.

    Sarah, Proud and Tall

    You people disgust me. God is watching you as you revel in your hatred of children and your obsession with perversion.

    @Mike Kay (True Grit):

    Closeted homosexual GOP congressman (Trent Franks)

    He is a true American hero.

  52. 52.

    Sarah, Proud and Tall

    And now, apparently, my comment is awaiting moderation, so you people can continue living behind your smokescreen of sin and sodomy.

  53. 53.

    freelancer

    Huckabee goes after Natalie Portman:

    You know Michael, one of the things that’s troubling is that people see a Natalie Portman or some other Hollywood starlet who boasts of, ‘Hey look, you know, we’re having children, we’re not married, but we’re having these children, and they’re doing just fine.’ But there aren’t really a lot of single moms out there who are making millions of dollars every year for being in a movie. And I think it gives a distorted image that yes, not everybody hires nannies, and caretakers, and nurses. Most single moms are very poor, uneducated, can’t get a job, and if it weren’t for government assistance, their kids would be starving to death and never have health care. And that’s the story that we’re not seeing, and it’s unfortunate that we glorify and glamorize the idea of out of children wedlock.

    Erm, She’s engaged, fuckstick. Also, there’s coughBristolcough

  54. 54.

    PurpleGirl

    @freelancer: Gee, didn’t we go through this once before with Murphy Brown (Candace Bergin) and that idiot VP.

    There are lots of single women who decided to have a kid (or kids) without a spouse who are doing just fine because they do have good jobs.

    And yes, Bristol Palin… the junior grifter.

  55. 55.

    Dee Loralei

    Fuck Lawrence O’Donnell has that slimebag WI Rep Senator on for the third day in a row!! I quit O’Donnell! Is Keith back from purgatory yet?????

  56. 56.

    freelancer

    @PurpleGirl:

    The dogwhistle he’s blowing is “Boo Hollywood Elites!”, and the point he makes is a decent one. But if he wants to rail against things that are actually glorifying children out of wedlock (not that there’s anything wrong with that) or more importantly, teen pregnancy, why isn’t he taking a mallet and beating the hell out of MTV for shows like “16 and Pregnant” and “Teen Mom”?

  57. 57.

    Jackie Ogburn

    In high school and college, my parlor trick was reciting The Ghastlycrumb Tinys and various limericks aloud.

  60. 60.

    Fuck U6: A More Accurate Measure of the Total Amount of Duck-Fuckery in the Economy

    Sarah, Plain and Tall: Have you ever considered skull-fucking a duck?

  65. 65.

    Sarah, Proud and Tall

    @Ash Can:

    And don’t let the moderation thing throw you.

    I am surprised that my comment was printed on this web-site. Perhaps this “Anne Laurie” allowed it through so that you could all hear the truth out of the goodness of her heart.

    I prefer to speculate that God touched her for a moment.

    It’s been a little cattywampus today.

    I don’t even know that word. You seem like a nice young person. Please tell me if that word was rude, so I can form appropriate views about you.

  66. 66.

    Sarah, Proud and Tall

    @JGabriel:

    Sarah’s a pseudo-troll

    I am a troll. I troll the backwaters of the internet for fish who want to be caught in the nets of Jesus and be miraculously fed to the multitude.

  67. 67.

    JGabriel

    @Sarah, Proud and Tall:

    I have several ducks on my farm – muscovy ducks, in fact.

    Your ducks are commies? Traitor.

    What’s wrong with a good old-fashioned patriotic American duck, huh?

    .

  70. 70.

    Fuck U6: A More Accurate Measure of the Total Amount of Duck-Fuckery in the Economy

    Sarah, darling, neither of us were made innocent, were we, hmmm?

    I’ll still respect you, and, after all, it is certainly the way of nature, and even though, no, I don’t love you, I do feel an affection for you . . .

  71. 71.

    Ogden Nash

    Nice. The kind of topic that makes me anticipate returning to Balloon Juice everyday.

  72. 72.

    Ash Can

    @Sarah, Proud and Tall: When I was in third grade, a seventh-grader taught that word to me and assured me that it was a very good word. He was laughing as he said so, so it must be a splendid word indeed.

  73. 73.

    JGabriel

    @scav:

    The competent handling of both English and html syntax would suggest a non-authentic status.

    Not to mention the largely correct spelling and use of capital letters.

    .

  74. 74.

    Sarah, Proud and Tall

    @JGabriel:

    Your ducks are commies? Traitor.

    Ducks cannot be communists.

    Even if they were, every now and then I cut the head off one of them, gut them, grind them up and feed them to my grandchildren.

    That sounds like the appropriate punishment for a communist, if you ask me.

  75. 75.

    JGabriel

    Sarah, Proud and Tall:

    I troll the backwaters of the internet for fish who want to be caught in the nets of Jesus and be miraculously fed to the multitude.

    I don’t think you’ll be getting many converts with the enticement of being served as the main course at a cannibal feast. I mean, eww.

    .

  77. 77.

    Sarah, Proud and Tall

    @scav:
    @JGabriel:

    The competent handling of both English and html syntax would suggest a non-authentic status.

    Not to mention the largely correct spelling and use of capital letters.

    I think it’s very rude of you to assume that strong minded old ladies can’t type and spell properly. I was taught to type before either of you were even a little bubble of light floating around heaven with the angels.

    My nephew Charles taught me how to use a computer on an Apple Macintosh II. He’s a nice boy.

  78. 78.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @JGabriel: You don’t know that. I don’t think it has ever been tried, so it is hard to say whether or not it will work.

  80. 80.

    scav

    Only very rude? I must be slipping. Do you grind up your very nice boy and feed him to your ducks in a strong-minded fashion?

  81. 81.

    Warren Terra

    @Sarah, Proud and Tall:

    Ducks cannot be communists.
    __
    Even if they were, every now and then I cut the head off one of them, gut them, grind them up and feed them to my grandchildren.
    __
    That sounds like the appropriate punishment for a communist, if you ask me.

    I am reminded of the splendid story, from the much missed Molly Ivins’s first book, Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She?, available for under $3 used:

    During preparation for the trial Nizer kept pushing Faulk for proof that he’d done something actively anti-communist. It was fine that he was such a patriot he’d enlisted in the merchant marine at the start of World War II, then managed to get a job overseas with the Red Cross, and finally finagled his way into the Army despite being one-eyed. But what had he done against communists? After weeks of listening to Nizer press this issue, Faulk launched into a splendid extemporaneous tale of finding his dear old crippled grandmother one day reading the Daily Worker. No sooner had he said, “But Granny, that’s a communist newspaper!” than the oil lamp in her tar-paper shack tumped over, setting the place ablaze. Faulk grabbed her wheelchair and started toward the porch and safety, but “as I wheeled her out, I looked down and saw that Daily Worker in her lab, realized she was just a communist pawn, and was so filled with loathing I turned her chair and pushed the old lady back into the flames!” Nizer listened to this entire faradiddle without expression, and then snapped, “We can’t use it.”

  82. 82.

    Sarah, Proud and Tall

    @JGabriel:

    Jesus fish-people

    We will all come to the great slaughterhouse in the heavens. Some of us will be joyful before we are eaten by God, while others will scream for mercy but will find none.

  83. 83.

    JGabriel

    Sarah, Proud and Tall:

    I was taught to type before either of you were even a little bubble of light floating around heaven with the angels.

    Not me. Whenever I asked who my poppa was, my momma always told me I was the eternal child of the devil’s demonseed, conceived in the sparkly darkness of hell surrounded by Beelzebub’s minions. Then she’d give me a handful of black jellybeans and tell me to go out and play in the junkyard refrigerators.

    Momma was a pip.

    .

  85. 85.

    Sarah, Proud and Tall

    @scav:

    Do you grind up your very nice boy and feed him to your ducks in a strong-minded fashion?

    No. Charles lives in Seattle now, with his friend Simon. They write every fortnight.

  88. 88.

    kdaug

    @Sarah, Proud and Tall:

    It’s a pity…

    Ah-ha! There’s the tell! It should have said “‘Tis” rather than the devil’s “It’s”.

    Begone, trollop, back to the spinning wheel from whence you came, lest we are forced to put you to the stake!

  89. 89.

    Sarah, Proud and Tall

    @JGabriel:

    Not me. Whenever I asked who my poppa was, my momma always told me I was the eternal child of the devil’s demonseed, conceived in the sparkly darkness of hell surrounded by Beelzebub’s minions. Then she’d give me a handful of black jellybeans and tell me to go out and play in the junkyard refrigerators.

    Your mother sounds like a thoroughly responsible woman, even if she apparently played for “the other side”.

    I used to give Charles the pink jellybeans when he was a child because he hated them most of all. I would say to him “Charles, every joy must be tempered with sorrow.” Now he seems to like the pink jellybeans.

    By the way, I never let him play in abandoned refrigerators because we had servants to clean those sorts of things up.

    You must have been very poor to live near a junkyard.

  93. 93.

    Sarah, Proud and Tall

    @kdaug:

    There’s the tell! It should have said “’Tis” rather than the devil’s “It’s”.

    There is nothing wrong with contractions. I am not one of these people who complains when they write Xmas, and I don’t see why I should not use current idiom when typing.

    I’m not entirely cut off from the world here. I don’t live a life of quiet desperation. I have croquet and lawn bowls. I read newspapers. I have heard of the word “It’s”.

    trollop

    Sodomite.

  95. 95.

    Shoemaker-Levy 9

    [U]ntil the last few years true Gorey devotees were a secret society,

    ???

    Seems like a gross overstatement to me. Or did I imagine thirty years of Masterpiece Mystery? Obviously everybody to the left of Limbaugh is a Gorey devotee, since we watch nothing but PBS.

  96. 96.

    Sarah, Proud and Tall

    @JGabriel:

    I was raised poor in yard, but rich in junk.

    I’m guessing that you were being rude there as well, although I can’t imagine how.

    The filth just spills from the lips of all of you, like blood from the gnashing maw of god, doesn’t it?

  98. 98.

    Sarah, Proud and Tall

    @scav:

    Baal Baal Blacksheep.

    That’s quite clever.

    I hope that comforts you when demons are unpeeling your eyeballs.

  99. 99.

    JGabriel

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    Can I come home for Easter?

    In this family, we don’t celebrate the day the you came back — we celebrate the day they hung you up on a cross. Do you remember nothing of your upbringing? I swear, you’d think I fucking farmed you out to foster parents.

    (pause)

    Oh yeah, heh, I guess I did. Forgot about that.

    Anyway, no. You can come in for Good Friday. When yer 3 days are up, back to Jerusalem you go.

    .

  103. 103.

    asiangrrlMN

    Ah, Edward Gorey. I learned of him from an ex who handed me a book and said he thought I’d like Gorey. He was right about that. He was so, so, so wrong about Pulp Fiction and Titanic.

  106. 106.

    asiangrrlMN

    @cleek: Never saw that. Yes, Pulp Fiction. I knew I wouldn’t like it, and that’s why I hadn’t seen it in the theatres. He found it playing somewhere years after, and he insisted that I would like it. I have never been a typical–well, anything, really.

    @Sarah, Proud and Tall: I like you. You’re funny.

  107. 107.

    Sarah, Proud and Tall

    @asiangrrlMN:

    I quite like you too, young lady, even if you have the same potty mouth as your angry friend. The kind of rage you two have is almost as good as faith.

    You’re like Samuel Bates’ daughter. He’s the town undertaker and she was his youngest. A lovely girl, or at least we thought so.

    However, she ended badly, so that’s probably not a very comforting comparison. Never mix amyl nitrate and electrical cords. That’s the lesson there.

  108. 108.

    Jim, Once

    @asiangrrlMN:

    Wpman here: I despised Reservoir Dogs. You really would like Pulp Fiction, though. Anyone who can wield a chainsaw like you …

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