Some light relief

It's been a while, my loyal reader(s). This is in no small measure due to my overwhelming apathy in the face of lots of essential tasks, plus various health complications that still have yet to resolve themselves.

With the excuses for my bone idleness made, I might as well get on with the meat of this post: bawdy poetry.

Now, having spent my entire time at school forced to study poetry, and my entire undergraduate career avoiding poetry study like the plague, you can guess what my thoughts are on the subject of anything with greater literary merit than Betjeman's entirely accurate verses on Slough. Exceptions do exist, though, and the best one on this particular subject is the ballad of Eskimo Nell. This is a personal favourite of mine: being long, pointlessly filthy and eminently suitable for recitation in all forms of company (well ...).

As much as I'd like to reproduce the whole thing here, I shan't. Instead I'll let you click the link and read the epic story of the Canadian whore who defeats the oversized Yank and his dago mate. But do allow me to share one or two of the better verses...




Now, Dead-Eye Dick was breathing quick
With lecherous snorts and grunts,
So forty butts were bared to view,
And likewise forty cunts.

Now, forty butts and forty cunts,
If you can use your wits,
And if you're slick, at arithmetic,
Makes exactly eighty tits.

...

Back to the land where they understand
What it means to fornicate,
Where even the dead sleep two in a bed
And the babies masturbate.

"Back to the land of the grinding gland,
Where the walrus plays with his prong,
Where the polar bear wanks off in his lair,
That's where they'll sing this song.




If I was Canadian, I'd be proud of this virtuous contribution to the English poetic canon. Doesn't it swell your trousers and make your scrotum burst with pride, that people similarly blessed with the gift of being brought up speaking the language of Shakespeare, Milton and the bloke wot wrote Vindaloo, men who were truly Men and appreciated the delicate balance between metre and subject ....

No, who the fuck am I kidding. This is real life poetry, the sort you find in rugby clubs up and down the land. It's got the one essential feature of a real poem: it rhymes! Ask any primary schoolkid what the most important bit of a poem is and they'll tell you it's got to rhyme. From the mouths of babes, ladies and gentlemen. Also, it's nice'n'easy to read. None of these long words like I keep on using. No overlong sentences (lines, stanzas, whatever the technical term is) to keep stealing your breath. Just simple, honest, direct and above all, descriptive verse. Everyone likes listening to a story, after all.

Out of interest boredom, I tried running "Eskimo Nell" through JSTOR, which is like Google but terminally, infernally dull. In the words of Grant Naylor (the Red Dwarf scriptwriting duo), if you changed all the words in all the books in the British Library to the word "dull" and then read every single book out loud in a boring monotone, you begin to come close to how utterly shit JSTOR is. Anyway, search Eskimo Nell through it, and the first result is (I kid you not):

"Properties and Preservation of Ethnographical Semi-Tanned Leather" (link for anyone with JSTOR access ... not that I've read it, or intend to)

What? WHAT?! What does that even mean? Does it, indeed, have any discernible meaning? Could it actually be a randomly generated set of words designed to baffle the ordinary man? How do you "semi-tan" leather anyway - surely it is or it isn't? And above all, how the hell does this relate to a filthy ballad supposedly written by Noel Coward in 1919?

It's true. Academia really has vanished up its own arse. I was half-hoping to find some scholarly analysis of it that I could rip to shreds, but it seems that genteel professors across the world have scorned this fabulous piece of writing in favour of incomprehensible bullshit like No.6 on JSTOR's list of results for 'Eskimo Nell', gloriously titled "An Appreciation of the Pioneer of Post-Distanciationalist Politometrics". Honestly, you just can't make this up.