Great White – "Once Bitten, Twice Shy" (1989)

I got there in the nick of time

Before he got his hands across your state line

One of the characters in the novel I’m currently reading (Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety) is “trying to get through Jules Romains’ Men of Good Will.” 

Men of Good Will – its title is Les Hommes de bonne volonté in the original French – consists of no fewer than 27 individual volumes totaling 7892.  It’s what the French call a roman-fleuve, or “river novel.”  

I don’t know if it’s more accurate to describe it as 27 related novels with overlapping plots and recurring characters, or as one humongous novel published in 27 parts.  

Volume 27 of Men of Good Will

But I do know that it is extremely unlikely that I will ever read it.

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A roman-flueve that I do hope to read Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (or À la recherche du temps perdu).

Proust’s masterpiece is a mere seven volumes and 3031 pages – child’s play compared to Men of Good Will.

Given my advanced age, I probably should get started on In Search of Lost Time sooner rather than later.  After all, it took me about seven weeks to get through David Foster Wallace’s1104-page monstrosity, Infinite Jest, earlier this year.

It took me a lot less time to get through the late Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show and its four sequels – one of several “river novels” that the prolific McMurtry wrote before dying in March of this year.  Infinite Jest is slow going compared to McMurtry’s books, and I have a feeling Proust is going to be even harder to digest than Wallace was.

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 In Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections at Sixty and Beyond, Larry McMurtry writes that the books he chose to read while recovering from a 1991 heart attack and the quadruple-bypass surgery he underwent shortly thereafter were In Search of Lost Time and the five volumes of Virginia Woolf’s diaries.  

But shortly after finishing those books, he underwent a radical personality transformation:

From being a living person with a distinct personality I began to feel more or less like an outline of that person – and then even the outline began to fade . . . . I became, to myself, more and more like a ghost, or a shadow. . . . [T]he self that I had once been had lost its life. . . .

I didn’t feel like my old self at all, and had no idea where my old self had gone. . . . I felt spectral – the personality that had been mine for 55 years was simply no longer there.

Larry McMurtry at age 77

The most unsettling aspect of this loss of personality was that McMurtry became incapable of reading for pleasure.  Reading had been “the stablest of all pleasures” for McMurtry – he had read every day of his life since he was a boy. 

In the third year after his surgery, McMurtry slowly began to enjoy reading again – and he read many books in the two-plus decades he lived after that.  But the Proust and Woolf works remained McMurtry’s favorites.

I love Larry McMurtry’s writing, and have great respect for his judgment when it comes to other authors.  His high opinion of In Search of Lost Time is reason enough for me to get serious about diving into it.  

But despite his praise of Virginia Woolf’s diaries, I’m not so sure I’ll be reading them.  I’ve tried to read Woolf in the past, and it didn’t turn out well.  (Once bitten, twice shy.)

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“Once Bitten, Twice Shy” was written by ex-Mott the Hoople frontman Ian Hunter, and released in 1975 on his eponymous debut album.

I’m featuring Great White’s 1989 cover of the song because the music video for the Great White version is simply too fabulous for words.  For one thing, it has mass quantities of oh-so-1989 bleached-blonde hair that’s teased to within an inch of its life – and I’m just talking about the guys in the band.

No hair band ever deserved the moniker more than Great White:

Click here to read my original post featuring this record, which was published on April 12, 2015.  It’s a very impressive effort, if I do say so myself.

Click here to watch the “Once Bitten, Twice Shy” video.

And click below to buy the record from Amazon.  (Come on . . . you know you want it!)

MC Lyte – "Absolutely Positively . . . Practical Jokes" (1991)

I play practical jokes, just to get a laugh

I put roaches in my neighbor's bubblebath

If Horace de Vere Cole were alive today, he’d probably be doing a cable TV practical-joker show – something like “Crank Yankers,” or “Punk’d,” or “Jackass,” or “The Tom Green Show.” 

Cole died in 1936 – long before cable TV was invented.  But that didn’t stop him from achieving considerable notoriety as a practical joker.

Cole was an upper-crust one-percenter who was educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge.  

The Great Court at Trinity College, Cambridge

While he was a Cambridge student, Cole read that the Sultan of Zanzibar was visiting London.  He sent a telegram to the mayor of Cambridge stating that the Sultan would be arriving in that fair city later that day on a particular train.  

When Cole arrived on that train along with his pal, Adrian Stephen (who was the younger brother of Virginia Woolf, a famous author of utterly unreadable novels), they were welcomed enthusiastically by the mayor and various other officials and taken on a tour of the university.

Virginia Woolf

The pranksters were almost exposed when an elderly ex-missionary spoke to them in Swahili, but Cole (who was pretending to be the Sultan’s English-speaking uncle) told her that the religious beliefs of the Sultan (who was played by Stephen) did not permit him to speak to a woman unless she was one of his wives or harem members.

Years later, Cole pulled off his most famous hoax – one that was modeled on his Cambridge prank.

From an April 1, 2006 New York Times article about Cole:

In 1906, the British Navy launched the Dreadnought, a fast, heavily armed behemoth that changed naval warfare.  Its awesome power was the focus of attention abroad, just as its shocking expense was a point of debate at home.  In 1910, Cole decided it was worth a look.

He recruited a crew of pranksters . . . including [Adrian] Stephen, the painter Duncan Grant, and Stephen's sister Virginia, later Virginia Woolf.  Posing as a member of the Foreign Office, Cole then wired the Admiralty to announce that the Emperor of Abyssinia would soon arrive to inspect the Home Fleet.

H.M.S. Dreadnought

Virginia, Grant and a few others were made up in beards and blackface, and the group boarded the train for Weymouth, where the fleet was docked. . . .

Once again Cole's party was met by an official entourage, this time in full military regalia.  The emperor was invited on board the Dreadnought and shown the ship's innovations.

According to a newspaper account of the prank, Cole and his posse shouted “Bunga, bunga!” to demonstrate their enthusiasm for everything the Dreadnought’s captain pointed out to them during their tour of the battleship.  

“Bunga, bunga!” soon appeared in the lyrics of music hall songs, and London street urchins taunted naval officers by chanting “Bunga, bunga!” as they passed them on the streets.

Here’s a photo of the Dreadnought pranksters.  Virginia Woolf (then Virginia Stephen) is at the extreme left.  Horace Cole is the guy in the top hat:

As you know if you’ve read the previous 2 or 3 lines, that term has a very different meaning in Italy, where it refers to an orgiastic game or ritual whose key elements were a swimming pool, 20 or so naked young women, and former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi and a few of his nearest and dearest friends. 

The “Dreadnought Hoax” is what Cole is mostly remembered for today.  But he was the mastermind behind many other fabulous practical jokes.

For example, he once bought a number of theater tickets and gave them away to completely bald men he encountered.  The seats had been chosen so that the bald heads spelled out an expletive that was quite legible to those sitting in the balcony.

A Horace Cole biography

Cole once gave a party and invited only guests whose names included the word “bottom” — Bottoms, Bottomley, Winterbottom, etc.  (Wouldn’t you have just loved to have been there when the guests figured that out?)

Another one of Cole’s jokes would be just as shocking today as it was a hundred years ago.  From the Daily Mail:

A regular prank was to wander the streets with a cow's udder poking through his flies.  At the moment of optimum outrage, he would then produce a pair of scissors and snip off the offending protrusion.

Cole’s second wife played quite a prank on him – she got herself knocked up by Augustus John, the leading British portraitist of the era.  Some believe that the very randy Mr. John fathered something on the order of 100 children. 

Augustus John's portrait of
Lawrence of Arabia

Cole’s sister was the wife of Neville Chamberlain, who was the British Prime Minister in the days leading up to the outbreak of World War II.  It’s too bad Cole wasn’t still alive when Chamberlain went to Munich to meet with Hitler in 1938 – no doubt he would have figured out a way to prank der Führer.

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MC Lyte (who was born Lana Michelle Moorer in 1970) was the first female solo rapper ever nominated for a Grammy.  

“Absolutely Positively . . . Practical Jokes” was released in 1991 on her third album, Act Like You Know.

Here’s “Absolutely Positively . . . Practical Jokes”:

Click below to order the song from Amazon: