Funniest Complaint Ever

[nancylebov]

This is a Selected Shorts show, an NPR program of short fiction read by actors. It's usually ok, but this one has an extensive intro by Art Spiegalman about Milt Gross, one of the weirdest writers ever to be popular, and an extended complaint by Dalton Trumbo about an unsatisfactory hotel which sends an obnoxious letter--it's the funniest thing I've heard in a long time. There's also an undistinguished Borges story which I suspect was chosen to fill out the hour.

Here's where you can listen to it. I don't know how long it will be available and I couldn't find a link about how to find out whether the show is available on your local station.

Milt Gross, “De Smot Billy-Gut,” read by Isaiah Sheffer
From: Dunk Esk!! (Grossett and Dunlap) (out of print)
Dalton Trumbo, “To William Hunt, the Franklin Hotel, Rochester, Minnesota” read by James Naughton
Collected in: Additional Dialogue: Letters of Dalton Trumbo 1942-1962, edited by Helen Manfull (M. Evans and Company, Inc.)
Jorge Luis Borges, “Dreamtigers,” translated from the Spanish by Andrew Hurley, read by Isaiah Sheffer
From: Collected Fictions (Penguin)

Comments

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

Milt Gross, besides being a popular cartoonist (who also worked in animation some), had an interesting split life as an author.

On one hand, he was a writer whose impenetrable dialect usage shades some writing that would probably be funny without it, but we'll never know.

On the other hand, he penned "He Done Her Wrong," a novel told [almost] entirely in pictures, with the caveat that a couple of times he uses signs in the pictures to drive a punchline, and on one occasion he cheats with a rebus. I was lucky enough to pick up a paperback reprint in the 70s; it's been reissued more recently by Fantagraphics.

[batwrangler.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

[shagbark.livejournal.com]

There is no such thing as an undistinguished Borges story!

It is distinguished at least in having been written by Borges.

Humph.

Borges and language

[(Anonymous)]

Don't forget though, that Borges was Argentine. Assuming that the story was written in Spanish, what you might have is an undistinguished English translation of a Borges story.

Crafty Witch