{"product_id":"2940012915306","title":"Doggerel Ditties:in the style of Ogden Nash","description":"Barbara Hepworth once wrote this:\u003cbr\u003e‘Perhaps what one wants to say is formed in childhood, and the rest of one’s life is spent in trying to say it.’\u003cbr\u003eIn her case, it was through great contemporary sculptures. In my case? Well, my first English schoolmaster judged:\u003cbr\u003e‘Flippant boy. That’s what you are. Flippant. About serious matters and great human\u003cbr\u003eendeavours. All I can hope is that for your sake you will grow out of it.’\u003cbr\u003eAt this time, my hero was A.A.Milne’s Sir Brian. I walked up and down repeating what I\u003cbr\u003eremembered of the words and energetically miming the accompanying action:\u003cbr\u003eSir Brian had a battle-axe\u003cbr\u003eWith great big knobs on\u003cbr\u003eHe went among the villagers\u003cbr\u003eAnd blipped them on the head.\u003cbr\u003eOn Tuesday and on Saturday\u003cbr\u003eBut mostly on the latter day\u003cbr\u003eHe called them all together\u003cbr\u003eAnd this is what he said:\u003cbr\u003e‘I am Sir Brian, sper-lash!\u003cbr\u003eI am Sir Brian, sper-losh!\u003cbr\u003eI am Sir Brian\u003cbr\u003eAs bold as a lion\u003cbr\u003eIs anyone else for a wash?’\u003cbr\u003eI would roll around in delight at this picture of extrovert schadenfreude at work. Seventy years later, I decided to finish it off, thus:\u003cbr\u003eOne man said ‘Please, Sir,\u003cbr\u003eCan I have my say?\u003cbr\u003eMost Tuesdays\u003cbr\u003eAnd on Saturday\u003cbr\u003eBut always on the latter day,\u003cbr\u003eI wear my special suiting,\u003cbr\u003e‘Cos I am SDA.\u003cbr\u003eSo, yes Sir, for your blipping,\u003cbr\u003eCould you choose another day?’\u003cbr\u003eMy English master would have been disappointed. I didn’t—grow out of it, that is. In fact I got worse. It was all the fault of Ogden Nash, that great American rhymester. I never could resist:\u003cbr\u003eVERSUS\u003cbr\u003eThe Golden Trashery\u003cbr\u003eOf Ogden Nashery\u003cbr\u003eThe grand outrageousness of his puns was matched by his deliberate flouting of syntax\u003cbr\u003econventions and scanning; and by his manipulation of invented words to produce an end-of-sentence rhyme, often lines away from its mate.\u003cbr\u003eThen there were his little pieces:\u003cbr\u003eMen never make passes\u003cbr\u003eAt girls who wear glasses.\u003cbr\u003eParsley…\u003cbr\u003eIs garsley.\u003cbr\u003eThe trouble with a kitten’s\u003cbr\u003eTHAT\u003cbr\u003eEventually it becomes a\u003cbr\u003eCAT\u003cbr\u003eThus Ogden Nash on the progressive inevitability of vanishing childhood innocence and playful dependence. But Nash remains silent about the nine or so lives of adult cat-ness; tom, cool, hep, fat, and nap for example. As the poet might have put it, but didn’t:\u003cbr\u003eProtection rules for Mother\u003cbr\u003eSWAN,\u003cbr\u003eUntil one day, the cygnet’s\u003cbr\u003eGONE\u003cbr\u003eSo Mother Swan just nods her\u003cbr\u003eHEAD\u003cbr\u003e‘Come on, Dad. Let’s go to\u003cbr\u003eBED\u003cbr\u003e‘After all,’ said Mother\u003cbr\u003eHEN\u003cbr\u003e‘Cyclic life means start\u003cbr\u003eAGAIN’\u003cbr\u003eI still laugh out loud at the Nash longer cautionary tales, mostly with stings in them. And I continue to marvel at his versatility—he might say ‘versustility’—and range of subject matter. His curiosity was insatiable. Nothing was sacred to that penetrative pen.\u003cbr\u003eYet he was never destructive, vulgar or crude.\u003cbr\u003e(Unlike some pieces included here,\u003cbr\u003eWhen even apostasy may be seen to intrude.)\u003cbr\u003eNash remains uniquely funny for his gentle ridicule of the pompous, the pretentious, the\u003cbr\u003egruesomely ordinary and the outrageously bizarre. He would have approved of calypsos and\u003cbr\u003ecalypsonians who can be sharp, bitter and iconoclastic.\u003cbr\u003eI’m glad I’ve got that off my chest. Now I have to distance myself from it. Someone said that a sense of indebtedness is the most corrupting form of human relationship. Distorts everything and satisfies no one. Especially if a second-rate acolyte is thought to be clutching at the coat-tails of the inspired and sucking at the cloth of that inspiration.\u003cbr\u003eSo if the fault is by distant derivation that of Ogden Nash, the excuse for this claim is the old one about imitation being the sincerest form of flattery. Or something like that.\u003cbr\u003eI wish it were indeed so. But Ogden Nash is inimitable. The Doggerel Ditties that follow are relieved in their pedestrian parochialism by one or two which, in places, are less bad than the others. Let me know when you find one. It would be a kindness. As that English teacher also once wrote:\u003cbr\u003e‘HE IS TRYING—VERY’\u003cbr\u003eSo you have been warned. If you are nonetheless determined on mindless masochism, proceed now. The contents eschew strict chronological sequence and are accordingly without opus numbers. The place and date of composition are laid bare when I remembered to do so. And footnotes hopefully make clear the obscure for new players. Hopefully, because footnotes are often the ultimate refuge for the intellectually confused and muddled writer.\u003cbr\u003eOne or two cuckoos have found their way into the doggerel nest.\u003cbr\u003eThey may serve as light relief from the rest.\u003cbr\u003eThe rhyme was intended as you will.....","brand":"PanOrama Publishing","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47081945727216,"sku":"2940012915306","price":7.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/2940012915306_p0.jpg?v=1763574358","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/2940012915306","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}