Penn Students like THIS better than Shakespeare?

"Too white.  We shall have to discard
this visage."

The University of Pennsylvania is said to be one of our great universities.  It was founded by none other than Benjamin Franklin, one of the greatest Americans (or so the Reigning Establishment long opined, despite his sins of being white and unambiguously male.)

Anyway, it seems the wise Penn pedagogues tired of looking at the face of William Shakespeare. Way white.   Way old.  Way male.  They decided to replace his visage.  But they waited too long, and the oppressed students in the English department determined to pre-empt the faculty and purify the premises.  So they took Bill down, and replaced him with a properly politically-correct poet, a good lesbian, black and therefore holy in skin color, a "warrior" named Audre Lorde.

Mao's little babes.  Let America have its Great Cultural Revolution, and rid ourselves of the Four Olds: old race, old gender, old money, good poems.

And you called William Shakespeare "irreplaceable?"

Just look at this brilliant work!

 Hanging Fire

Related Poem Content Details

BY AUDRE LORDE

I am fourteen 

and my skin has betrayed me   

the boy I cannot live without   

still sucks his thumb 

in secret 

how come my knees are 

always so ashy 

what if I die 

before morning 

and momma's in the bedroom   

with the door closed . . . 

Nobody even stops to think   

about my side of it 

I should have been on Math Team   

my marks were better than his   

why do I have to be 

the one 

wearing braces 

I have nothing to wear tomorrow   

will I live long enough 

to grow up 

and momma's in the bedroom   

with the door closed.

Now that is real poetry!  It may not rhyme, true.   But how mysterious!  What is momma DOING in the bedroom with the door closed?  (Sex?  How subtle!  How universal!)  

One can almost picture this girl - how brilliantly Ms. Lorde has captured her essence, the perfect caricature of a 14-year old's heart!  The universal adolescent, with hardly a trace of individuality -- braces, check, acne, check, unrequited love, check, jealousy over being overlooked, check, misogyny (the whole point), check, questions about sex, check, worries about clothes, check.  Every single cliche one expects from an adult trying to remember or visualize the teenage female condition!  Why, this is almost as brilliant as paint-with-numbers!

  Compare such verbal wizardry to the tawdry doggerel of "The Bard," trying feebly to imagine "what dreams may come" to a desperate young man considering a rash act of revenge against his uncle: 

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? 

The Red Guards purify culture.

If only Shakespeare had added something about braces, or Hamlet had wondered what his uncle was up to when he closed the door!  Think how much more universal and suggestive that play would have been!  And why doesn't this young man talk about sex, sports, or cars?  If only Shakespeare had created more fetching and realistic portraits of young people, the eager pups at Benjamin Franklin's old school would not be ashamed to stare at his nose every day.  (Especially if he'd put black face on in shame for his wicked whiteness, and executed a quickie sex change operation.)  

There's one good thing about our Glorious Cultural Revolution.  It helps me sympathize with the lost generation in China.  And it also takes the edge off my nationalistic and class vanities.  It turns out that not a few bright young Americans, and their highly-credentialed teachers, have learned to Love Big Sister, and made themselves look every bit as daft as China's Red Guards, abandoning the wealth and beauty of a great civilization, selling their heritage for a mess of cold porridge, sprinkled with brown sugar and lots of nuts.    

Tristan Vick: "Marshall, Go Kill Yourself!"

A zombie author (well, an author about zombies) named Tristan Vick earlier this year apparently told me to "go kill myself."  In one way this makes perfect sense, since it is no doubt in his best commercial interest to have as many dead people out and about as possible.  This came as the punch-line in what he apparently regarded as an argument (more a ghost than a zombie in terms of its visibility to mortals), or else perhaps a joke. 

But silly me, I can't find much of either.  Just to make sure, I'll quote almost the whole thing, and let you tell me whether I should laugh or cry at where the minds of foolish young atheists have gone, since that Zombie Apocalypse known as the New Atheism first dawned:

Chesterton: The Rolling English Road.

Here's a poem I used to read to my Japanese students.  It's one of my favorites.  It was maybe a little over their heads, but delightful for alliteration, wit, for its subtle seriousness married to fun, and of course because English roads really do look like that.  And the last lines are Tolkien's eucatastrophe, wedded to the romance of ordinary life, and ultimate Christian hope. 


Before the Roman came to Rye or out to Severn strode,
The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road.
A reeling road, a rolling road, that rambles round the shire,
And after him the parson ran, the sexton and the squire;
A merry road, a mazy road, and such as we did tread
The night we went to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head.

I knew no harm of Bonaparte and plenty of the Squire,
And for to fight the Frenchman I did not much desire;
But I did bash their baggonets because they came arrayed
To straighten out the crooked road an English drunkard made,
Where you and I went down the lane with ale-mugs in our hands,
The night we went to Glastonbury by way of Goodwin Sands.

His sins they were forgiven him; or why do flowers run
Behind him; and the hedges all strengthening in the sun?
The wild thing went from left to right and knew not which was which,
But the wild rose was above him when they found him in the ditch.
God pardon us, nor harden us; we did not see so clear
The night we went to Bannockburn by way of Brighton Pier.

My friends, we will not go again or ape an ancient rage,
Or stretch the folly of our youth to be the shame of age,
But walk with clearer eyes and ears this path that wandereth,
And see undrugged in evening light the decent inn of death;
For there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen,
Before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green.

OK, they have a few straight ones, too. 

“

Auden on death (As I Walked Out One Evening)

A recent visitor happened to bring up the name of W.H. Auden.  I like Auden because his review of The Lord of the Rings was so on the money, and so helpful in making the book popular.  (Tolkien and Auden carried on a friendly correspondence afterwards: Tolkien always appreciated those who appreciated his creations!)  I also like Auden's poem, As I Walked Out One Evening.  It's so honest and true to life, deathly sad but not quite despairing.  Plus it has glaciers in cupboards.  So I thought I'd share it: