Tetherd Cow Ahead

Spam Observations #35

Fabron Jenkins wrote to me this morning with an offer to sell me some Via.gra and to give me some frank, if slightly nauseating, advice.

From: Fabron Jenkins
Via.gra Email from ED. Lowest Pr1ce Guaranteed

Taking sildenafil after eating a high-fat meal (such as a cheeseburger and french fries) may cause the medication to take a little longer to start working.

So, ladies, are you conjuring up the same image as I get – some fat guy scoffing down a cheeseburger and a bucket of fries, impatiently waiting for his equipment to come online so he can play Hide the Salami? I bet that’s got you in the mood.

It set me to wondering if there might be a less, er, low-rent approach to selling this kind of product. And where else would one turn for such a makeover but to a writer of classical repute? So, spammers, pay attention as our new TCA Copywriter (By Appointment), Mr R. Brooke, sets his quill to the matter:

Mummia* ~ Rupert Brooke

As those of old drank mummia
To fire their limbs of lead,
Making dead kings from Africa
Stand pandar to their bed;

Drunk on the dead, and medicined
With spiced imperial dust,
In a short night they reeled to find
Ten centuries of lust.

So I, from paint, stone, tale, and rhyme,
Stuffed love’s infinity,
And sucked all lovers of all time
To rarify ecstasy.

Helen’s the hair shuts out from me
Verona’s livid skies;
Gypsy the lips I press; and see
Two Antonys in your eyes.

The unheard invisible lovely dead
Lie with us in this place,
And ghostly hands above my head
Close face to straining face;

Their blood is wine along our limbs;
Their whispering voices wreathe
Savage forgotten drowsy hymns
Under the names we breathe;

Woven from their tomb, and one with it,
The night wherein we press;
Their thousand pitchy pyres have lit
Your flaming nakedness.

For the uttermost years have cried and clung
To kiss your mouth to mine;
And hair long dust was caught, was flung,
Hand shaken to hand divine,

And Life has fired, and Death not shaded,
All Time’s uncounted bliss,
And the height o’ the world has flamed and faded,
Love, that our love be this!

Now. Fabron. Can you see the difference here? “Their blood is wine along our limbs, their whispering voices wreathe savage, forgotten drowsy hymns…” Can you hear the customers shouting: My God! Mr Brooke! Take my credit card! Give me a year’s supply of the stuff!?

Fabron, do you understand at all how the involvement of a cheeseburger in your pitch kinda takes the spark out of the moment?

Fabron? Fabron?

Crap. There I go talking to myself again.
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*Mummia, an alleged aphrodisiac and concoction for improving one’s amorous stamina was in use for many centuries. It was made from ground-up Egyptian mummies.†

The picture at the head of the post is a container for mummia. Go visit Ingenious and read all about it. And buy a poster from them.

†Never let it be said that you ever walked away from The Cow without some little useful party-conversation-enriching tidbit…

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Today I buried Kate‘s ashes with the Newton apple tree.

More from my special mystery guest:

April 13, 2006,

No! I must not yield to frail human weakness lest I fail
To quell those demons that would fall on me with sharpened tooth and claw.
Though I surely might erase my pain in Bacchus’ sweet embrace
I must resist and turn my face again to matters evermore
Jejune, prosaic, tiresome and certain to ensure
The kind of gossip I deplore…

My neighbour in the garret has this week acquired a parrot
Or some other feathered creature – I am not entirely sure,
But its raucous Harpy shrieking, as he tries to get it speaking
Sets my shattered nerves to creaking, and it rubs my patience raw;
The screeching shrill viaticum that filters through the floor
Strangely sounds like ‘Nevermore’!

…to be continued

My guest blogger writes on:

April 12, 2006

Now the sombre shadows thicken and I feel my heartbeat quicken
At my melancholy musings on the one that I adore
Ah! My beautiful Victoria! Her name evokes euphoria!
Her love might lead a warrior to make a cause for war!
Surely Paris would shun Helen as a diamond with a flaw
If Victoria he saw…

Yet the very contemplation of my Angel brings deflation
Of my soul, and so my spirit is a boat without an oar
Should I look for Eldorado in my best Amontillado?
Or perhaps that false bravado the Green Faerie would assure,
Seeking silent sinking solace in the Dionysian maw
As I often have before…?

…to be continued

Over at Jill Writes I learnt about a grass roots promotion for a book called The Lost Blogs: From Jesus to Jim Morrison by blogger Paul Davidson.

Jill says:

The subtitle of the book pretty much sums it up: The Historically Inaccurate and Totally Fictitious Cyber Diaries of Everyone Worth Knowing. The premise is this: friendly bloggers give Paul a hand in promoting his book by spending the work week of April 10-14 blogging as historical figures (of their own choice, but that aren’t included in the book). Readers guess who they are.

Well, I’m a bit of an outsider on this, but I support anyone doing something clever, especially if there is a literary bent to the enterprise, and the idea caught my fancy so I’m participating in spirit if not in fact (and besides I missed the starting post).

Herewith my guest writer’s first entry. I don’t think it will be too hard to guess who it is, but it’s kinda not the point for me – I just like the idea.

Settle back, and light a solitary candle. Are you sitting comfortably…? OK, channelling:

April 11, 2006

Dear reader, once again have I retired to take up pen
(These days should I say keyboard? I can never be quite sure…)
And resume my nightly journal of philosophies nocturnal,
The ephemera infernal that my mind will not ignore;
Visions from the world of Charon that the righteous would abhor
Rendered tangible once more.

And I draw the heavy curtain, sure that she is dreaming, certain
That the night will bring her respite from the coughs that rack her core
This I hope, at least, for hoping is my only way of coping
Else I sit here merely moping, and the dread comes as before
Crushing, crashing waves of dread from some cold atramentous shore
Heaving heavy at my door…

…to be continued

On my way to work this morning I heard a ‘comedian’ on the radio reciting a limerick. Not only was it not funny, it wasn’t properly a limerick. A nicely constructed limerick is an elegant gem of amusing poetry and the thing he coughed up was a leaden lump of clangourous word globs.

Herewith some rules for writing limericks:

The proper scan for a limerick is (where ‘a’ is a weak emphasis, and ‘B’, a strong):

a B a a B a a B (There was an old man with a beard)
a B a a B a a B (Who said ‘It is just as I feared…)
a B a a B (Two owls and a hen,)
a B a a B (Four larks and a wren)
a B a a B a a B (Have all built their nests in my beard!’)

There are some variations on the syllabic structure, but this is basically the plot. It’s really simple and you can easily feel it by clapping on the strong syllable (of course, to limerick writers this is the equivalent of moving your lips while reading to yourself, but I feel that if people started out by doing the clapping we would have far fewer terrible limericks in the world).

How, then, do people get it wrong so often? Consider:

There once was a young lady from Spain

This is incorrect. Can you see how it screws with the meter? You need to say either:

There was a young lady from Spain

or

There once was a lady from Spain

It is important to get the meter right in a limerick because that is one of the rules. You can’t just bandy any old thing about. Why? Because then it’s not a limerick. If you decide that you wish to change the rules, fine, but don’t introduce your effort as a limerick, but as a bad poem, which is what it will surely be.

Some other tips for writing limericks:

·Don’t start and end with the same line: this is an inferior form and should be avoided.†

·Don’t use the same rhyming word more than once: it shows a lack of cleverness.

·Rhyme properly: ‘time’ doesn’t rhyme with ‘dine’

·Avoid contrivance in language or rhyme: if it sounds forced it will not work.

Once you have mastered these simple rules, off into the world you may venture and with luck you may even create some jewels such as these:

From the depths of the crypt at St Giles,
Came a scream that resounded for miles,
The vicar said ‘Gracious!
Has Father Ignatius
Forgotten the bishop has piles?’‡

or

I sat next to the Duchess at tea,
It was just as I feared it would be
Her rumblings abdominal
Were truly phenomenal
And everyone thought it was me!

When you have mastered the proper form, you may then join the elite and become revered. Consider this masterpiece from Edward Gorey:

There was a young curate whose brain
Was deranged by the use of cocaine
He lured a small child
To a copse dark and wild
Where he beat it to death with his cane

Gorey is not only in complete control of the form, but he has subverted it by making the punchline grim and surprising, an effect that only works because we are not expecting that outcome (it is, of course, a very Gorey thing to do).

The most skilfull limerickists (I just made that word up) then really excel. This one uses expected rhyme for a superb piece of trickery:

There was a young lady from Bude
Who went for a swim in the lake
A man in a punt
Stuck an oar in her ear
And said “You can’t swim here it’s private!”

See how wonderfully funny that is? But it’s only funny because it breaks the rules. Otherwise it would just be surrealism. And to break rules, you gotta know rules, capisci?

From there, the possibilities are endless. How about this:

A limerick fan from Australia
Considered his efforts a failure
His verses were fine
Until the fourth line

Or one of my favourites:

There was a young man from New Haven
Who had an affair with a raven
After wiping his chin
He declared with a grin
“Nevermore!”

Next week, on Post Bovus Ergo Propter Bovus, we investigate The Haiku. Please sharpen your knives.

Whoops. Er… sorry that’s seppuku.††

*I realise that by introducing a topic such as this I risk another worrying poetry competition between jedimacfan and Polanski. Sigh.

†As in: “There once was a man from Japan… That silly old man from Japan” Tsk.

‡Limericks don’t have to be bawdy, but it is a grand tradition.

††Which is what the guy on the radio should have immediately committed, if he’d had any common decency.