New Previously Unknown Whitman Novel Discovered

Can you believe that 165 years later a grad student with a hankering for SQL-query writing and access to the Library of Congress's digital database for newspapers was able to discover a serialized novel written under a pseudonym?

I may have misrepresented the details above, but not the essence, A grad student and Whitman scholar moved on to another one of his Whitman projects: searching various databases for anything that uses names from Whitman's unpublished notes.

A main character named Jack Engle? Go...

He got a series of hits from a currently defunct newspaper from the 1850s, had the pages microfiche sent over, and set about reading it.

Consensus: the world has been gifted previously unknown Whitman content.

It's Uncle Walt as a young man and young writer, but pieces of the foundation of Leaves of Grass are all over the place, like the nurse-centurion in Fiskadoro is really the heart of the story Johnson wants to write in Tree of Smoke.

Anyway, it's been described as "pre-modern Pynchon" for its naming shenanigans and plot twists.

Reports are that the ending is where Whitman lost interest more than a conclusion of the plots/story.

Check out an article about it here. For a PDF of the book itself before it goes up for sale on Amazon, click here.

Observations and Memories Collide

I was reading about Snagglepuss, the pink cartoon mountain lion, the other day, when I read that he was voiced by Daws Butler. Daws is the guy who voiced almost every other Hannah-Barbara character. I went to YouTube and found footage of a Butler interview; at one point he says: "...and here's Wally Gator..." and then he started doing a voice.

Wally Gator! I thought. I remember that name, if not the exact look. 

So I looked him up:

Huh, I thought. I guess it didn't really click with me as a kid that Wally Gator is just a gator-rip-off of Yogi Bear.

Yogi Bear is an animated American icon and is to Hannah-Barbara what Mickey Mouse is to Disney and Bugs Bunny is to Warner Brothers. His cartoon has been updated more than once and has even been the subject of a CG/live action film voiced by Dan Ackroyd (do you remember that Boo-Boo was voiced by Justin Timberlake?). His catchphrase of "Smarter than the average bear" is a cliche, and he's even the subject of plenty of tattoos, some even well executed:

It makes sense that Yogi would be copied by his parent company.

I just didn't realize how many knock-offs Hannah-Barbara made until I looked up Wally Gator.

The list was surprising: After Wally was Hokey Wolf, who I slightly remember, and his own little Boo-Boo (whose name I do not remember):

Almost exactly Yogi-as-a-wolf.

And then a different wolf (maybe a fox), whom I don't recall at all, Loopy de Loop:

And then they get kinda off track with Lippy the Lion and Hardy Har Har, a hyena, a pair I had never seen once in my life before that fateful Google search:

I have to say that an updated and re-imagined Lippy and Hardy Har Har could be pretty damn good.

Here's Snagglepuss, just because I should:

What I was reading about him is that DC Comics is bringing him back as a Tennessee Williams-styled southern gothic gay playwright fighting McCarthy-era politics, If Huckleberry Hound is Faulkner, then, apparently the thinking goes, Snagglepuss is Williams.

They're going with the fully gay aspect that is hinted at or joked about by fans. Here's a page from the first upcoming story, and it's pretty good, if a little serious:

DC Comics has been updating many of the Hannah-Barbara properties that it controls, like the Flintstones:

...and Scooby Doo: