Category Archive: WRITING & LITERATURE
Parody # 5: This Be the Disgrace
(with apologies to Philip Larkin and “This Be the Verse”) They f__k you up, your teaching staff. They may not mean to, but they do. Merrily they meet and laugh When a spot of teaching might fall due. But they were f__ked up in their turn By the hapless, cringing bureaucrats, Who half the time lacked all concern And half involved in drunken spats. Teachers take sabbaticals, That last longer than world wars. Bring the kids home from school halls Protect them from a useless cause.
Continue Reading →Parody # 4: The Blogger’s Children
(With apologies to Rudyard Kipling) I keep six slavish acronyms By whom I set much store, Their names are WTF and LOL, IMHO and more, And FOMO and TBH and also BRB, My serfs I like and I keep them, but also set them free. I send them over the world wide web I send them high and low But after they have done their work I’m told just where to go.
Continue Reading →Parody # 3: “The Prince and The Influencer”
(with apologies to Edward Lear and “The Owl and the Pussycat”) A Royal wranger went over the sea On a beautiful private jet, With a B-grade actress, and some cash And a Netflix contract to get. The Prince looked out over L.A. below And sang to his i-pod stream: ‘Will you be my mummy as we go, Can I join your millennial team?” So they took their bows and renewed their vows With the turkey who has her own show, They had a beach pad and kale they had Which they ate with a runcible spoon: With their hands…
Continue Reading →Parody # 1: “Un vieil imbécile sans pitié”
MANCHESTER NH. - OCTOBER 9: Ex Vice Pres. Joe Biden makes the sign of the cross after speaking about Giuliani speaks to supporters at an event at McIntyre Ski resort on October 9, 2019 in Manchester, NH. (Staff Photo By Stuart Cahill/MediaNews Group/Boston Herald)
With apologies and thanks to Charles Dodgson, The Varnished Culture offers some poetical parodies (based on great poems) to synthesize our thoughts on the preceding and forthcoming years… “Un vieil imbécile sans pitié“ (Inspired by “La Belle Dame sans Merci” by John Keats) O, what can ail thee, Joe Biden, Alone and palely loitering? The right has pulled-back from D.C. And no tweets sting. I see creases on thy brow, With anguish moist and fever dew, And in the gardens fades the rose: Fast withereth too. You met a lady on the Hill Full socialist, and Woke,…
Continue Reading →Cat’s Cradle
By Kurt Vonnegut (1963) Something of a succès d’estime in reverse, this book won admiration for its bleak humour, deadpan reportage and sci-fi elements, until the rot set in and everyone realised that it wasn’t hugely good, with its glib, jerky, episodic micro-chapters, cardboard characters and terrible snatches of verse. Vonnegut was not yet really a novelist; Cat’s Cradle is not really a novel. But here Kurt is an accumulator of ‘bits,’ an amasser of literary bitcoin, and some of his stock is quite brilliant. His false religion, Bokononism, owes something to Spinoza, but with typical jokey authorial touches –…
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