Benjamin Franklin

The editors and publisher who put out a collection of Ben Franklin's satirical essays and titled the slim volume, 'Fart Proudly,' knew what they were doing. Books are judged by their covers, or at least attention is drawn to books by their titles and covers, and an image of Ben wearing a fur hat under a title that has to do with farting is a guaranteed eye-catcher.  

It certainly caught my wife's eye when she was recently in Philadelphia accompanying my daughter to a conference on Speech Language. She bought the book solely because of the title and gifted it to me for my recent birthday because she likes to make fun of me every time I fart, which I don't believe is any more often than anyone else, or any smellier or not smellier than anyone else.

Of course my wife doesn't fart. She barely admits to moving her bowels. And if she does, there is no odor, even if there is odor, she denies it's from her. This of course is why long before we were married I nicknamed her 'Princess Poop.'

She likes to overwork the joke. When our daughter Susan went away to college at Geneseo, a state university in Geneseo, New York (what are the chances?) not far from Rochester, but in solid dairy land country, my wife works the cow theme to death. Cows are the theme of many gifts to Susan over the years, and Susan graduated in 2004, so it's been going on for a long time.

But back to Ben. The sub-title to the volume is: "Writings of Ben Franklin You Never Read in School." Ben is still esteemed (no one seems to be lobbying to knock him off the $100 bill) for being a diplomat, a statesman, a framer of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, an inventor, a publisher and of course a writer. The book is a collection of his tongue-in-cheek writings.

The first essay is about farting, but it can be hard to read 18th-century prose and realize that is what Ben is writing about. In the piece, Ben is supposedly writing to The Royal Academy in 1781, beseeching them to research and introduce the intake of a substance that will neutralize any noxious odor emanating from flatulence.

Ben offers that a remedy might be swallowing something lime flavored mixed in with our food or drink. The scientist in Ben doesn't offer any results from any experiments he's done along these lines, probably pretty much so because Ben is pulling everyone's leg.

I did find it interesting that even back then the consumption of asparagus was considered to be the source of putting the stink in urine. "A few Stems of Asparagus eaten shall give our Urine a Disagreeable Odor." No shit.

It's hard to read this prose because of all the capitalization that occurs mid-sentence, and a general lack of punctuation that creates some whoppers of sentences that rise and fall over the page like a dune buggy traveling over the sand.

One such sentence clocks in at 55 words: "The Pleasure arising to a few Philosophers, from seeing a few Times in their life, the Threads of Light untwisted, and separated by the Newtonian Prism into seven Colours, can it be compared with the ease and Comfort every Man living might feel seven times a Day by discharging freely the Wind from the Bowels?"

Ben, seven times a day? What were you eating?

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