Xmas Reading: The Feast by J*s*ph C*nr*d

[Sir Max Beerbohm imagines how Joseph Conrad might tell a Christmas story]

The hut in which slept the white man was on a clearing between the forest and the river. Silence, the silence murmurous and unquiet of a tropical night, brooded over the hut that, baked through by the sun, sweated a vapour beneath the cynical light of the stars. Mahamo lay rigid and watchful at the hut’s mouth. In his upturned eyes, and along the polished surface of his lean body black and immobile, the stars were reflected, creating an illusion of themselves who are illusions.

The roofs of the congested trees, writhing in some kind of agony private and eternal, made tenebrous and shifty silhouettes against the sky, like shapes cut out of black paper by a maniac who pushes them with his thumb this way and that, irritably, on a concave surface of blue steel. Resin oozed unseen from the upper branches to the trunks swathed in creepers that clutched and interlocked with tendrils venomous, frantic and faint. Down below, by force of habit, the lush herbage went through the farce of growth—that farce old and screaming, whose trite end is decomposition.

Within the hut the form of the white man, corpulent and pale, was covered with a mosquito-net that was itself illusory like everything else, only more so. Flying squadrons of mosquitoes inside its meshes flickered and darted over him, working hard, but keeping silence so as not to excite him from sleep. Cohorts of yellow ants disputed him against cohorts of purple ants, the two kinds slaying one another in thousands. The battle was undecided when suddenly, with no such warning as it gives in some parts of the world, the sun blazed up over the horizon, turning night into day, and the insects vanished back into their camps.

The white man ground his knuckles into the corners of his eyes, emitting that snore final and querulous of a middle-aged man awakened rudely. With a gesture brusque but flaccid he plucked aside the net and peered around. The bales of cotton cloth, the beads, the brass wire, the bottles of rum, had not been spirited away in the night. So far so good. The faithful servant of his employers was now at liberty to care for his own interests. He regarded himself, passing his hands over his skin.

“Hi! Mahamo!” he shouted. “I’ve been eaten up.”

The islander, with one sinuous motion, sprang from the ground, through the mouth of the hut. Then, after a glance, he threw high his hands in thanks to such good and evil spirits as had charge of his concerns. In a tone half of reproach, half of apology, he murmured—

“You white men sometimes say strange things that deceive the heart.”

“Reach me that ammonia bottle, d’you hear?” answered the white man. “This is a pretty place you’ve brought me to!” He took a draught. “Christmas Day, too! Of all the— But I suppose it seems all right to you, you funny blackamoor, to be here on Christmas Day?”

“We are here on the day appointed, Mr. Williams. It is a feast-day of your people?”

Mr. Williams had lain back, with closed eyes, on his mat. Nostalgia was doing duty to him for imagination. He was wafted to a bedroom in Marylebone, where in honour of the Day he lay late dozing, with great contentment; outside, a slush of snow in the street, the sound of churchbells; from below a savour of especial cookery. “Yes,” he said, “it’s a feast-day of my people.”

“Of mine also,” said the islander humbly.

“Is it though? But they'll do business first?”

“They must first do that.”

“And they’ll bring their ivory with them?”

“Every man will bring ivory,” answered the islander, with a smile gleaming and wide.

“How soon’ll they be here?”

“Has not the sun risen? They are on their way.”

“Well, I hope they’ll hurry. The sooner we’re off this cursed island of yours the better. Take all those things out,” Mr. Williams added, pointing to the merchandise, “and arrange them—neatly, mind you!”

In certain circumstances it is right that a man be humoured in trifles. Mahamo, having borne out the merchandise, arranged it very neatly.

While Mr. Williams made his toilet, the sun and the forest, careless of the doings of white and black men alike, waged their warfare implacable and daily. The forest from its inmost depths sent forth perpetually its legions of shadows that fell dead in the instant of exposure to the enemy whose rays heroic and absurd its outposts annihilated. There came from those inilluminable depths the equable rumour of myriads of winged things and crawling things newly roused to the task of killing and being killed. Thence detached itself, little by little, an insidious sound of a drum beaten. This sound drew more near.

Mr. Williams, issuing from the hut, heard it, and stood gaping towards it.

“Is that them?” he asked.

“That is they,” the islander murmured, moving away towards the edge of the forest.

Sounds of chanting were a now audible accompanient to the drum.

“What’s that they’re singing?” asked Mr. Williams.

“They sing of their business,” said Mahamo.

“Oh!” Mr. Williams was slightly shocked. “I’d have thought they’d be singing of their feast.”

“It is of their feast they sing.”

It has been stated that Mr. Williams was not imaginative. But a few years of life in climates alien and intemperate had disordered his nerves. There was that in the rhythms of the hymn which made bristle his flesh.

Suddenly, when they were very near, the voices ceased, leaving a legacy of silence more sinister than themselves. And now the black spaces between the trees were relieved by bits of white that were the eyeballs and teeth of Mahamo’s brethren.

“It was of their feast, it was of you, they sang,” said Mahamo.

“Look here,” cried Mr. Williams in his voice of a man not to be trifled with. “Look here, if you've—”

He was silenced by sight of what seemed to be a young sapling sprung up from the ground within a yard of him—a young sapling tremulous, with a root of steel. Then a thread-like shadow skimmed the air, and another spear came impinging the ground within an inch of his feet.

As he turned in his flight he saw the goods so neatly arranged at his orders, and there flashed through him, even in the thick of the spears, the thought that he would be a grave loss to his employers. This—for Mr. Williams was, not less than the goods, of a kind easily replaced—was an illusion. It was the last of Mr. Williams’ illusions.

[from A Christmas Garland (1912)]

Some Parody Collections (a list)

Max Beerbohm, A Christmas Garland (1912). Parodies, mainly in prose, of writers like H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Joseph Conrad, and Henry James. Beerbohm is probably the greatest prose parodist writing in English.

Horace and James Smith, Rejected Addresses (1812). Parodies, mainly in poetry, of William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the like. The brothers Smith are very good; some modern parodists have equaled them, none have surpassed them.

Wolcott Gibbs, More in Sorrow (1958). Includes a section of parodies, mostly published earlier in the New Yorker, including those of Ernest Hemingway (“Death in the Rumble-Seat”) and Aldous Huxley (“Topless in Ilium”).

The Hee Bee Gee Bees, 439 Golden Greats (1981). A collection of song parodies, many originally featured on the BBC radio show Radio Active, skewering the Bee Gees, the Eagles, David Bowie, the Police, and others.

Frederick Crews, The Pooh Perplex (1964). A collection of critical reviews of Winnie the Pooh, each a send-up of a particular style of criticism (Marxist, Freudian, Christian (with Eeyore as Christ!), and so on.

Liam Lynch, Fake Songs (2003). It includes superb parodies of Bjork, David Bowie, Depeche Mode, and others.

The Rutles, The Rutles (1978). This is something of an oddity, in that it contains parodies of only one group, the Beatles, more or less tracing their career from covers of the likes of Chuck Berry (“Blue Suede Schubert”) to the psychedelic phase (“Doubleback Alley”) to the end of their career (“Get Up and Go”). Utopia’s album Deface the Music does essentially the same thing.

Bret Harte, Condensed Novels: Second Series (1902). A collection of broad parodies of Anthony Hope (“Rupert the Resembler”), Arthur Conan Doyle (“The Stolen Cigar Case”), Rudyard Kipling (“Stories Three”), and others. Far superior (and generally funnier) than his first collection in the same vein, though the Cooper take-off had some good moments.

Frederick Winsor, The Space Child’s Mother Goose (1958). A collection of Mother Goose rhymes updated for the space age. Thus we have “This is the theory that Jack built,” for example, and “Little Jack Horner / Sits in his corner / Extracting cube roots to infinity, / An assignment for boys / That will minimize noise / And produce a more peaceful vicinity.” Technically burlesques rather than parodies, but still, entertaining as hell.

Randall Garrett, Takeoff! (1980). Includes a section of science fiction parodies, targeting the likes of Isaac Asimov, E. E. Smith, and H. P. Lovecraft.

Stan Freberg Presents...

When I was growing up my family was always ahead of the crowd, or else way behind it. We were one of the first in our neighborhood to get an automatic dishwasher, for example, and we were among the last to get a television. (I don’t think my father actually believed in television till he became chief engineer for a Portland television station in the eighties.) For many years we were the only family I knew (outside the radio business) to have a tape recorder in the house, and we were definitely the only family I knew where the children were allowed to play with it. Friends would come by to record their voices and hear them played back at them so they could giggle hysterically at the result. (As a matter of fact my whole second-grade class made a field trip to our house just to be recorded and listen to the playback.) When I started a band in imitation of Spike Jones around fifth grade or so we often recorded the ongoing mayhem for our own entertainment.

To save wear and tear on our records, as well as to create anthologies of favorite pieces, my father used to make tapes bearing typed labels like “Mostly Eddie Lawrence” or “KOS and chipmunks.” One of them was titled simply “Mostly Stan Freberg.” This one was a collection of comedy singles by the great satirist, Stan Freberg, interspersed with songs—I think. It’s been a long time. I’m pretty sure it had Freberg’s version of “Yellow Rose of Texas” (lampooning Mitch Miller), “The Great Pretender” (targeting the Platters), and “Rock Island Line” (aimed at Lonnie Donegan). Oh, and I’m quite sure it contained the Lawrence Welk takeoff as well.

Now I have to say that as a kid I didn’t necessarily know the originals of the people Freberg targeted, but I still found the situations funny. Lawrence Welk patiently explaining to Larry Hooper why he couldn’t perform the same song that the Lennon sisters had just sung for example (“I’m sorry, that number has been taken”) and receiving the resentful reply, “Well, I’ll sing ‘The Funny Old Hills,’ then.” Harry Belafonte desperately trying to placate his over-sensitive bongo drummer by leaving the room to do his calypso shouts. Ben Franklin trying to avoid Thomas Jefferson, who wants him to sign some kind of declaration of independence—“Too late—he’s seen you. We’ll have to let him in.” Lonnie Donegan explaining to a skeptical A&R man why the recitation is so important—“Well, it makes a difference to the sheep.” A witch replying to a protest by another character that the piece had to have a happy ending: “Why? This isn’t the Shirley Temple Storybook.”

At his worst Freberg could be clichéd (“The Lone Analyst”), obvious (“Which is the Girl and Which is the Boy”), or preachy (“Yulenet”) but at his best (interviewing the abominable snowman about his choice of footwear, say, in a devastating satire on celebrity interviews, or discoursing on the unreasonable demands of wives as Hermann van Horne, Hi-Fi expert, who will deny their husbands new speakers to buy shoes for the children or perhaps a second dress) no-one can touch him. Few even come close. George Washington clashing with Betsy Ross over the design of the American flag (“Stars? With Stripes? … I deliberately said polka dots”), Johnnie Ray coming apart during the performance of the parody “Try” (where the single word “more” manages to stretch itself out over a full two measures), Freberg offering to show the door to a sleazy record promoter (played by the inimitable Jesse White) and receiving the reply, “No, I’ll just slide out under it”—so many unforgettable moments.

Thanks, Stan—and, oh, by the way, happy birthday.

Riding Out On a Rail

Take a sniff of this
Then play a little riff
Don't be afraid to try
Don't need no airplane
To get off the ground
There's more than one way to fly
Have a little taste, baby,
Don't hesitate,
Every hit don`t have to be a song
Gonna take you to the cosmos, baby,
And boogie with you all night long.

...Riding out on a rail, feels so fine
Talking about that cocaine express mainline,
Taking a midnight cruise.
Never lived up in the northlands,
But I've been snowblind
Out in San Berdoo
Snowblind in San Berdoo.

Gr-t-f-l D--d (Tony Scheuren)

On 10 August 1974 I was living on the Oregon coast sharing house space with my mother, step-father, and a step-brother whom I will call for the purposes of this narrative Bill, as that happens to be his name. It was an interesting moment in time; President Nixon had just resigned and the fellow that was taking over, Gerald Ford, was largely an unknown quantity. Bill and I had marked the occasion of the resignation by eating all the frozen fish in the house; this because Bill had asked what a large red button on the refrigerator did, incautiously pushing it at the same time. Well, what it did was send the refrigerator into its defrost cycle, which on a hot summer day meant that the frozen fish had to be eaten...

We only got two stations on the radio then—I'm not totally sure why, now, to be honest—but one of them was a free-form rock station from Eugene, and I remember it playing away in the background as we frantically wrapped fish in newspaper and tried to get the refrigerator through its defrosting cycle before deciding we had to cook what we had. They had one of the best radio news people ever—I wish I could remember her name—Melinda something maybe—and I remember her dispassionate rundown on Nixon's entire career, complete with excerpts from his famous speeches—running as a counterpoint to our battle with the frozen food.

Bill and I had the house to ourselves at the moment for whatever reason, but our folks returned on Saturday, 10 August, bringing with them Aunt K, and things were festive. It was a Saturday, and on Saturdays the Eugene station played The National Lampoon Radio Hour. It was a favorite of mine at the time; I'd already discovered the albums Radio Dinner and Lemmings, and I liked the humor. I particularly enjoyed the song parodies. Burlesques were fairly common in that era; parodies were much rarer, and some of their efforts were pretty damn good. So that hot August day we all gathered around the radio and listened to it.

The episode was the one known as The Canada Show, and it started off with a lukewarm parody of something called "The Americans," a recording of an editorial written by a Canadian who was damn sick and tired of hearing the Americans being kicked around by the foreign press. To be honest I thought the original was pretty lame at the time, and the takeoff didn't impress me that much, though there were a couple of good lines: "I, for one, am damned glad the Americans had the generosity to invade Canada three times or we'd never have found out who our real friends are" for instance. And my stepfather laughed over the adventures of a Canadian library official after the nation's only copy of the Kama Sutra, now months overdue in the frozen north. And then came the moment that I, personally, have never forgotten.

There was the familiar guitar work, and then the voice—was that really the "sensitive whining of Neil Young"? He sang of his search for the ideal woman—the girl who would "keep my bed warm, and keep my shorts clean. I need a maid to give for free, ooo-ooh, and sew patches on my jeans." I was entranced. I was savagely depressed at the time, and the song suited my mood perfectly.

Gonna go home now, where I can grow old
With the cowgirl of my dreams.
Gonna stayed stoned now,
Just stare out my basement window and scream
Aa-aaa!

When the final words faded into the sunset—"Topanga Canyon freaks, you won't see me around no more..."—my stepfather remarked, "I knew Topanga Canyon way back when it was still Topanga Canyon."

The Neil Young parody was both written and performed by a relatively young singer-songwriter named Tony Scheuren. He'd been in the band Chamaeleon Church in the late sixties, along with Kyle Garrahan, Chevy Chase (yes, that Chevy Chase), and Ted Myers, and he'd been part of the final lineup of Ultimate Spinach. By late 1973 he'd joined the cast of National Lampoon's Lemmings, working alongside John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Rhonda Coullet, Nate Herman, Bob Hoban, and Zal Yanovsky. (This is not the cast that appeared on either the album or the videotape, by the way.) None of his compositions appear to have been featured in the show, however, which seems amazing to me, as he was one of the most gifted song-parodists of all time.

As Johnny Cash he mused about the true unsung heroes of the world—receptionists, locksmiths, and reupholsterers—and all black men who polish brass spitoons.

'Cause without invisible menders
And deep-fried donut tenders
Our country wouldn't stand a chance of getting by.

As James Taylor he looked forward to the coming of his methadone maintenance man; as Cat Stevens he mused over his S&M lover; and as the Grateful Dead he celebrated that "cocaine express mainline". Both music and lyrics were dead on. It's instructive, perhaps, to compare his work to others in the field—his Johnny Cash parody to Neil Innes' for example, or his James Taylor to Christopher Guest's and Sean Kelly's. In each case Scheuren is truer to the original, and cuts closer to the bone in his takeoff. Only Philip Pope comes as close musically, and maybe Liam Lynch lyrically, though that last is a tough call.

One Tony Scheuren parody I've never found a copy of is his Bob Dylan "Hurricane Carter" parody, celebrating the exploits of Patty Hearst. Ted Myers wrote about it in a piece I can no longer find, except as quoted by a Scheuren fan on YouTube:

Tony and I drifted apart for a number of years when I moved out to California in April of 1969. I didn't see him again until around 1977 when he was in Los Angeles working for the touring company of National Lampoon's show, Lemmings. He showed me his new songs, and we even did some recording together when he was in LA. But what really impressed me were these parody tapes Tony had made for the National Lampoon's radio show. They were brilliant: perfect vocal impersonations of people like Dylan, James Taylor and Neil Young. What's more, the songs they sang were completely original, new songs, with rippingly funny, satirical lyrics, and in the exact style of that artist. For instance, there was a Dylan send-up called 'Queen Of the S.L.A.,' chronicling the exploits of Patty Hearst in the style of Dylan's Hurricane Carter song, or there was a biting James Taylor parody called 'Methadone Maintenance Man' where he would nod out before the song was over.

For whatever reason Tony Scheuren's work has been neglected since his untimely death on Halloween, sixteen years ago. I wish I could have let him know how much I personally enjoyed his work, but he might not have appreciated it. I read somewhere (probably that same Ted Myers piece I can't find) that he regarded his parodies as throwaways, something to pass the time while working on more serious stuff. Maybe so—but it's a rare talent nonetheless.

His family has released an album of his solo (serious) work on Wham! records in 2003, which appears to be still available. When I wrote to Beacon Agency (which represents him) a while back, I was informed that an album of his parodies is in the works, and I personally am looking forward to it. For the moment, however, it is possible to enjoy his James Taylor and Neil Young parodies, courtesy of uploaders at YouTube. They should appear below this paragraph, always assuming I managed to embed them correctly.

Lemmings Lament

Are you put upon by powers?
Are you restless for release?
Death just might be that final rush you crave.
We all believe in flowers
And we all believe in peace;
There’s endless peace and flowers in the grave.

Freud, Marx, Engles, and Jung

Somewhere during my high school years, the late sixties maybe, I had a vision of a sort of parody pop album, an anthology that would do for the excesses of the day’s music what Rejected Addresses had done for Wordsworth and Walter Scott. I called it something like Plastic Sole in my mind, and I wrote a Bob Dylan parody, a Simon and Garfunkel parody, a Doors parody, and a Rod McKuen parody for it. I think maybe I had a Bobbie Gentry-style ballad planned for it too. The Dylan was particularly mean-spirited, as I recall; I had him attacking a Mr. Jones-like character who (it becomes obvious) the singer is sponging on, the singer finally ordering him to get the hell out—but only after he’s forked over all his spare change.

Of course I never did anything with it; it was just something to occupy my mind when I should have been coloring maps for Contemporary World Problems. I would have loved it if somebody else had done something like that, however, especially if it was done well. But as far as I knew, nobody else even seemed to be thinking in that direction.

Had I but known a group of jokers at the Harvard Lampoon were thinking along the same lines, maybe a bit diagonally from my take. In June of 1969 an album appeared entitled The Surprising Sheep and Other Mind Excursions and it was an album at least superficially matching the general description of my own mind excursion, Plastic Sole. I wonder what I would have thought of it if I’d stumbled on it at the time.

I think I would have liked the Bob Dylan parody, “Seventeen Miles from Waukegan My Cantaloupe Died.” The takeoff focuses on the surreal aspects of Bob Dylan’s imagery; my main objection now would be that while it is surreal enough, it just isn’t that Dylanesque. “In the Palm of My Hand” is a very broad parody of the Rolling Stones’ “Under My Thumb,” though taking the imagery in quite another direction. “Little Miss Muffet” reworks the nursery rhyme as a Wilson Pickett track, with a touch of Otis Redding thrown in. (I doubt that this one would have meant anything to me at the time, to be honest—though years later when I first heard it on the National Lampoon Radio Hour box CD set I instantly got it.) “Recipe for Love” targets Dionne Warwick, and I see by it that that same instrumental riff that irritated me also irritated its composer. I might have got a kick out of it.

But the one piece I feel fairly confident I would have liked is something called “Welcome to the Club,” a Lovin’ Spoonful parody written by Christopher Cerf. This one took that ghastly scene that unfolded in 1968 Chicago and turned it into a light-hearted “Daydream” spoof, with pun-filled lyrics:

If your life is a bore
And you’d like to get more
Of a boot out of people you meet,
Well forget your self-pity
And come down to a city
Where the folks will positively knock you off of your feet

With the police riots in Daley’s Chicago fresh in our minds, the clubbings and stompings and gassings and all that, this piece would have had a special poignancy then, or so I imagine now.

On behalf of each judicial
And executive official
We promise you a smashing good time.

On the whole I think I would have been disappointed, though. Too many performers crying out for parody were missing, and the execution was distinctly on the sloppy side. And Bob Dylan—the guy is ripe for parody, and yet till this day the best efforts fall short. Maybe Paul Simon’s “Simple Desultory Philippic,” or John Lennon’s untitled takeoff come the closest, but, well, I’m sure it’s possible to do better. Well, the moment has passed, I suppose.

But Bob Dylan (played by Christopher Guest) was featured on the next major excursion in that direction, a record entitled simply Lemmings, featuring a show put on by the National Lampoon. The first act was a series of sketches somewhat in the style of the future Saturday Night Live, and none of that appeared on the album. But the second act was a stunning parody of Woodstock, complete with takeoffs on Wavy Gravy and Max Yasgur. This is what appeared on the album, slightly abridged. (A Joan Baez parody that had already appeared on the album Radio Dinner was omitted, for example. And later incarnations of the show featured parodies of Donovan and Joni Mitchell that had yet to be created at the time of this recording. Anyway.)

The opening track, “Lemmings Lament,” sets the stage by parodying Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock” as performed by CSN&Y. It sets out the theme later made explicit by Farmer Yassir—“This here mass suicide of all you young people may just be the best goddamn thing ever happen to this country.” Next up Bob Dylan casually repudiates the protest movement he helped to launch:

You say I was your leader,
You say I turned you on,
You’re starting to suspect now
That it was all a con.

Then, after an excursion into early 1960s death rock that seems a bit out of place here, there’s the stunning John Denver takeoff, “Colorado.” Chevy Chase did Denver about as well as he did Ford, but the song is funny enough to survive even that, with lines that came back to haunt me when I did spend a winter or two in Colorado:

Oh, Colorado’s calling me
From her hillsides, to her canyons, and her rivers and her trees;
When blizzards snap the power lines, and all the toilets freeze
In December in the Colorado Rockies.

The song has moments of lyric intensity, usually followed by a thumping anticlimax:

The wind sang us a lullaby;
The snow was thick as cream,
And icicles were chandeliers
Like crystals in a dream,
And the streams were strips of diamonds,
And the hills were white as snow
And a bear ate all our soybeans in the night.

The James Taylor parody, “Highway Toes,” had previously appeared, at least as far as the lyrics went, as part of Sean Kelly’s “Swan Song of the Open Road,” which featured takeoffs on Walt Whitman, Richard Brautigan, and Pete Seeger (not “Well-Intentioned Blues”) as well. The music, by Christopher Guest, however, sounds more like Gordon Lightfoot than James Taylor. But the Joe Cocker (John Belushi) parody is dead on, if a little overlong.

The basic idea of linking musical parodies by framing them with a Woodstock satire was absolutely brilliant, and even if the “Festival of Death” thing is a bit over-obvious, the execution is solid. To quote Farmer Yassir again, “Long hair, short hair—what’s the difference once the head’s blowed off.”

If I still had my files and notes I probably would have pulled out my old high-school outline for Plastic Sole (or whatever I really called it) and looked it over one more time. There wasn’t anything in it worth saving, probably, but I did enjoy planning it so many years ago, and I probably would have enjoyed the recollection. The Rod McKuen parody, for example—I remember working on it gleefully (I detested Rod McKuen for whatever reason)—but I don’t remember anything else whatsoever about it. I imagine it was embarrassingly bad—but I don’t know, and now I’ll never know. It’s not important, but it’s irritating.

Bear with me folks; I’m having a difficult time adjusting. But I should be off this black nostalgia kick in a day or so. I hope so, anyway.

What Propheteth a Man

Alan Jacobs is a professor of English at Wheaton College, and the author of a book on C. S. Lewis (not surprisingly I guess, considering the Wheaton College connection) that I haven't read. He is also the author of a translation of some of the Gnostic gospels that I have at least tasted. Speaking as one who has made his way through many of them in the "original" Coptic, sometimes at excruciating length while sitting in on the Nag Hammadi seminar Tuesday nights at the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity (how well I remember those golden evenings so long ago), Jacobs' poetic translations are a considerable improvement not only on the more scholarly translations available, but on the Coptic versions themselves. Of course for the most part we can only guess what the Greek looked like, and maybe they did resemble what Alan Jacobs has made of them in English.

It seems, however, that Jacobs is also no mean parodist. His review of Khalil Gibran's Collected Works in last month's First Things takes the form of a Gibran parody, and is really quite good. An excerpt:

And it is the voice of Sir Laurence
Reading the King James Bible
That I hear within me as I write these words,
Which echo resonates within and bequeaths to me
The Prophetic Strain,
At least as far as you know.
Once that voice enters the mind,
As it does when one has read hundreds and hundreds of pages of Kahlil Gibran,
Its abode is fixed within,
It refuses all notices of eviction,
It continues to loop within the sphere of one’s skull,
An earworm, dread and implacable.

This is sharp, accurate, and funny, and I hope some future Dwight MacDonald will include it in the next definitive parody anthology. The complete review appears here, and is well worth reading. And revisiting, for that matter. I conclude with one further excerpt:

The words I give you now are words of Life, and not Death,
Though I suppose the Prophet would proclaim that Death and Life are the same,
And that only the foolish would divide the two,
The Two which are One.
But He’d be wrong about that, I’m pretty sure.

[Oh, and thanks to Edward Cook at Ralph the Sacred River for turning me on to this.]

Dubious Documents: The Case of the Vanishing Letter

Baylor University is a Baptist institution located in Waco Texas. From Wikipedia I learn that the university is working on an ambitious program to, among other things, "Establish an environment where learning can flourish," "Develop a world-class faculty," "Attract and support a top-tier student body," "Provide outstanding academic facilities," and "Achieve a two-billion dollar endowment." Under these circumstances it is easy to understand why they would prefer not to have tools and cranks hanging around their campus. Therefore Baylor University's decision to distance itself from an "Evolutionary Informatics Laboratory" run by notorious IDian William Dembski in association with Robert Marks, a professor of engineering should not be a surprise to anybody. If it really did make such a decision.

Somebody at Uncommon Descent claims to have received a communication from John Lilley, president of Baylor University. The text given there reads:

The removal of Prof. Robert Marks' so-called "lab" on the Baylor server is entirely consistent with Baylor's stance on academic freedom. Prof. Marks was hired to do research and obtain grants for work in engineering, not to devote the bulk of his time to work in religion. I am not moved by Prof. Marks' protestations that he is working in the field of intelligent design and that this work falls under his job description. Judge John E. Jones III ruled decisively in Kitzmiller v. Dover that intelligent design is religion, and that's good enough for me. We have a religious studies program here at Baylor as well as a seminary. Unfortunately, Prof. Marks is not qualified to serve in either of these programs otherwise I would recommend his transfer.

In any case, academic freedom does not warrant the toleration of labs and groups willy-nilly. Surely you would not object if I took measures similar to those I took with Prof. Marks' lab if a Baylor history professor proposed to start a "holocaust reexamination group" or a physics professor here proposed to found a "zodiac and astrology lab." Academic freedom comes to an end where reason and common sense give way to ignorance and nonsense. I plan to issue an official statement concerning Baylor's stance on intelligent design in coming months. The short of it is that ID is not welcome here in Waco and professors who want to work in this area can do so on their own time.

Thank you for your concerns. I hope that we can put this matter to rest quickly and that Prof. Marks can get back to being a productive member of the Baylor community.

The communication is signed "JL."

The thing that struck me immediately about it was the tone. I'm sorry, but this thing just didn't read to me like the work of a university president. It's not that all university presidents write alike--but they usually withdraw quietly under a cloud of unctuousness, rather than to strike a combative note, at least in issues like this. Phrases like "so-called 'lab,'" "that's good enough for me," "willy-nilly," and "ID is not welcome here" don't ring true to me. Of course JL could be a different breed of university president. I decided to check him out.

Here is a sample of John Lilley's prose, taken from the Baylor University website:

The Board of Regents bestowed a great honor, a challenge and an opportunity in its invitation for me to serve as Baylor's 13th president. After more than 25 years of leading universities in Pennsylvania and Nevada, it is a great privilege to return to the institution that had such a transforming effect on my life.

I look forward to serving alongside the more than 1,800 faculty and staff who have invested themselves in this great university. It is apparent to me that everyone associated with Baylor wants it to be in the ranks of America's top universities.

To accomplish that, we need to be intentional about our mission as a Christian university in the historic Baptist tradition, and we need to provide inspiring teaching/mentorship while increasing our research and creative endeavors. These are goals that have been consistently embraced by the Board of Regents, the Faculty Senate, the Staff Council, Student Government and many other Baylor constituents.

In the weeks since my election as president, I have spent many hours meeting with regents, administrative leaders, faculty, staff, students and alumni leaders. The primary purpose of these meetings has been to listen. One of the things I have heard is that the natural disagreements in our academic life need to be spoken in a more respectful manner, one that is consistent with the Christian community of which we are a part.

Over the next few weeks, I will be asking the university community to help in identifying the specific objectives that will allow us to achieve the two goals mentioned above. This process will allow all of us to help set priorities for strengthening current programs and for creating new programs and for the allocation and reallocation of resources and space. That collaboration can build consensus if we are successful in communicating more effectively.

I am eager to engage more of you in the days ahead as we work together to make stronger this university which all of us serve and so dearly love.

Now that's what a university president writes like. I particularly invite your attention to the part where he comments on the need to deal with "natural disagreements in our academic life ... in a more respectful manner, one that is consistent with the Christian community of which we are a part." Come on--does that really sound at all like the guy that wrote the letter Uncommon Descent claimed to have received?

I'd got this far in looking things over when I had to deal with the real world. It's my sister-in-law's birthday, and cake and ice-cream were in order up the street at my brother's house. Before I left I checked Uncommon Descent again, finding now that they were now claiming that this letter was a parody. When I got back home, bloated on pound cake and appetizers, the letter had vanished completely. Fortunately PZ Myers had noted the letter, and his post sent me to this link at Panda's Thumb, where a screen-shot preserves the letter in all its glory. Otherwise I might have started wondering if I had imagined the whole thing.

Now, I know something about parody, at least enough to recognize a parody when I see it. Whatever this letter was supposed to be, it was not a parody. Compare the styles of the two documents quoted above. Is there any similarity? If the author of the first thought he was anywhere close to parodying the author of the second item, he was kidding himself.

Whatever the intentions of the author, what the first is is a common, or garden, fake. There is no element of humor, satire, or exaggeration in it. The only purpose I can see is to stir IDians up against John Lilley in particular, and Baylor University in general. If it was intended as a joke of some kind, apologies are in order. If not--well, then, words fail me.