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What's the shortest and/or most enjoyable book I can read that will really impress people?

If you're slaving through Finnegans Wake or Gravity's Rainbow in hopes of drawing attention at a holiday office party this year, you might be putting yourself through undue punishment. Reading the work of the late George Starbuck, a CAS English professor from 1971 to 1988, on the other hand, is more time-efficient preparation for witty parlor conversation.

According to CAS Associate English Professor Aaron Fogel, Starbuck's The Essential Shakespeare, which consists of several quite skinny volumes, "are among the best chapbooks or bonsai pamphlets, and make miniaturized literature itself a comic theme."

Volume I, Richard the Third in a Fourth of a Second, for instance, condenses the masterwork into six "acts," each of which is a poem of no more than fourteen syllables, one syllable per line. Act VI, for example, reads:

Thin-
king
which
nerd
murd-
ered
Rich-
ard
third.

Starbuck directed BU's Creative Writing Program from 1971 to 1978. He died in 1996. "He was a modest great comic master whose work looks better and better as time goes by," says Fogel. "His chapbooks, like many such books, were put out in very limited editions. They are hard to find. But maybe his are so terrific because they stand for the whole mode of playful reduction in forms like chapbooks or broadsides, and for the pleasure of loving some poetry or writing that in fact looks ultra minor, or infra dig, and can't impress people a whole lot."

And after all, "to impress," Fogel points out, used to mean to round up for military service, especially in the Navy. "In an age of literary servitude," he says, "which is just about any age, it could be better to be a landlubber."

And to stick to sports and politics over cocktails.

"Ask the Bridge" welcomes readers’ questions. E-mail bridge@bu.edu or write to "Ask the Bridge," 10 Lenox Street, Brookline, MA 02446.

15 December 2000
Boston University
Office of University Relations