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Thursday, October 19, 2006
Mr UD Likes to Say... ...that UD will endorse anything if it's well-written. This is not, strictly speaking, true, but it does get at UD's perhaps overfond love of good writing. The dark side of this love is that UD has a disproportionate response also to bad writing (as you know if you read her Scathing Online Schoolmarm feature). Bad writing makes UD's skin scaly. With each bad phrase she draws a shallow breath, often to the point of hyperventilation. There's also a sensation in her chest as if someone's stabbing her with a Bic Blunt Tip. Yet just as onlookers are loath to leave the scene of car wrecks, so UD admits to a morbid fascination with the very, very worst in prose and poetry. Only this can explain her dalliance on this blog [search his name in the search feature at the top of this page] with our erstwhile poet laureate, the Dread Kooser. In a recent meeting in Nantucket of rich lobbyists and rich Democrats, Ted Kennedy's writer put a limerick in his mouth that is the sort of thing UD's got in mind here. First, recall UD's dismay, already expressed on this blog, at the propensity of a party which presents itself as the party of ordinary working Americans to meet all the time in Nantucket, currently this country's most powerful icon of obscene material excess and haughty anti-social behavior. Then put in this location precisely the malsain stew of corruption the Republicans and their lobbyists represent. The result is, IMHO, disastrous for the Democrats. But it gets worse: Senators Edward M. Kennedy and John F. Kerry are shown hobnobbing and sharing laughs with high-powered lobbyists at a Nantucket reception for top Democratic donors, in a film clip posted on the ABC News website yesterday. Put aside the obvious political idiocy of the event, though, and go back to that limerick for chrissake... You're in the audience... You can't believe it... Nantucket, pinnacle of your dreams of wealth and glory... And there's Ted Kennedy, last living symbol of Camelot, right up there ... He begins speaking in his slow, slow, slow voice... A child's singsong voice, though old in timbre... He's reading a poem! A funny poem! A limerick! You sit back and get ready to smile... Maybe it'll even be smutty ... Nantucket/fuck it being one of the classic English language end rhymes... There once were Senate Democrats on Nantucket. Republican tide -- they all aimed to buck it. They fight hard to win, These women and men, And in November control they re-took it. As Sister Mary Ignatius put it (you know, in that Christopher Durang play), "BLAH. YOU MAKE ME WANT TO BLAH. (making vomit noises)." Instead of cursing the darkness, though, I shall write a limerick as a limerick should be written, hoping thereby to help the Senator's comedy team understand the nature of the genre: Some lobbyists up in Nantucket Took Kennedy's stiffy and sucked it. His poem's not funny, But they owe him money. November election? Oh fuck it. |