DOGGEREL MAGAZINE
The Weekly Magazine of Comic Verse and Bawdy Songs
Volume 1, Number 2--July 24, 2000
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CONTENTS:
1. Editor's Introduction: Seduction of the Innocent
2. Letters: Doggerel Leads to Depravity
3. Poem: Circle of Friends (Matt Mason)
4. Limerick: Satan's Tool (Jon Silver)
5. Poem: The Masher King (Max Sparber)
6. Classic Doggerel: My God, How the Money Rolls In!
7. Doggerel Saints: Elsa Lanchester
8. About Our Contributors
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EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION: SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT
Well, as I suspected, Doggerel Magazine is already corrupting our youth, as demonstrated in this week's letter, written by a young woman whose innocence has given way to wantonness as a result of a particularly offense poem I wrote. I suppose I must expect hundreds of such letters during the life of this magazine, and the inevitable knock at my door as a strayed soul tracks me down to offer her nubile young body to me. Well, this is the risk faced by every humorist, and I shall have to make do, even if these women come by the thousands. In fact, the scope of Doggerel has expanded this week with the addition of three new features, which will undoubtedly lead to more fallen young women. The features are as follows:
CLASSIC DOGGEREL: Bawdy songs and unpleasant rhymes from years gone by. These anonymous stanzas have stood the test of time, popping up on schoolyards and in hash houses throughout the world. We do not know who authored them, and I suspect if we knew we should be very much surprised. A vicar in Salisbury, for example, or the wife of a North Carolina senator, perhaps--somebody took the time to scratch out a dirty joke in rhymed couplets, and whoever it was, we thank them for it. We shall do our best to keep these classics alive in the pages of Doggerel, and this week we begin with "My God, How the Money Rolls In." According to Ed Cray, author of "The Erotic Muse," this nasty classic about a sinful family can be traced back to an English Commonwealth song called "Old Hewson the Cobbler." This told of a former shoemaker who eventually sat at the trial of Charles I. He must not have been a popular man, as even today's lyrics retain the spite of its origins. "A craven my father," Hewson sings in the original, "... and a beggar myself." The melody to "My God" is the same as "My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean," by the way, in case you ever have a bit too much to drink and feel like belting out a song that will get you thrown out of any reputable pub.
DOGGEREL SAINTS: Here we take a moment to praise those who have not simply scrawled anonymous verse on bathroom walls, but instead dedicated a sizable amount of their lives and talents to making an art of cruel and salacious poetry. There are more of them than you can possibly imagine, some quite respectable: Robert Burns, for example, composed many a questionable ditty. Our first saint is obscure, but once you read about her life I am sure you will agree that it was fascinating. Her name is Elsa Lanchester, and while she remains famous as the actress who portrayed the Bride of Frankenstein, she also managed to make a neat little cottage industry for herself singing what she called "bawdy Cockney songs" at a puppet theater. Intrigued? Read on.
PUBLIC DOMAIN HUMOR: Scientists have at last broken the speed of light, and I am not surprised, as I think that something already exists that goes faster than light, right under our noses: dirty jokes via email. In a race around the world between a ray of light and a really appalling punch line, I will put my money on the punch line every time.
So we at Doggerel have decided to test this theory by creating a series of jokes that we call "Public Domain Humor," which we shall send out as a separate email along with each issue of Doggerel. You are free to copy and mail out these jokes to as many people as you wish--we encourage it, because doing so would help advertise this magazine (there will be a single sentence at the bottom of each mailing telling readers how to subscribe). If you don't think the jokes are funny, toss them out. However, if they make you chuckle, and you can think of anyone else who might enjoy them, why not share the jokes by forwarding them?
Enjoy,
Max Sparber, editor
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LETTER: DOGGEREL LEADS TO DEPRAVITY
Before reading Doggerel, I spent my days making jams, perfecting the craft of basket-weaving, and caring for my 12 cats. While these may be enjoyable activities for some, they became insipid for me. I guess I was following in my mother's footsteps. She always taught me to worship the Lord, eat my vegetables, do right by mankind, and never to surrender to my hedonistic desires. Well, for most of my life, I believed in Mother's teachings, but when she died, I realized what a horribly plain life she had led. As I looked down on her stiff carcass, I vowed to make my life spicy, or at least more flavorful.
The first time I read your poem "Twelve Inches," I immediately knew the forecast of my future. I was a 23-year-old virgin with a boyfriend of two years, equally as innocent and naïve as I. He had never so much as seen me in the indecency of my nightgown, but when he came over the night after I read "Twelve Inches," he was shocked to see something in place of our usual Sunday brisket dinner on the dining room table. And it wasn't steak or quiche, but me in nothing but my unmentionables. After I brought him back to consciousness, I demanded that he remove my panties and make sweet, sweet love to me!
Unfortunately, and to my horror, my beloved did not quite measure up. That is why I am writing to you, Max. Perhaps you could do me one more favor. If what you boast is true, than bring over your 12 inches, and I'll do you till you're blue. I have included a poem for you.
Amy D.
MISTER
He stared my way from the church pew next to me,
Our eyes met and I asked, "Hey Mister,
Why don't you sit over here, so I can see
Your hungry lips up closer, and whisper
A request for you to lick me where I pee.
Don't worry, I know you're with your sister
She won't mind. I was with her last night 'till three."
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CIRCLE OF FRIENDS
by Matthew Mason
Lord, what thoughts can haunt my head
when coming on that quote again!
"When you and she are having sex,
you take to bed the other men
she's ever slept with, just as she's
now sleeping with your exes." This,
though mainly speaking of disease,
has made me question every kiss:
Will Steve respect me, why won't Mike
just call me now, and, oh, I know
I said I loved you, oh, but Mark,
I lied; and Jim, my gosh, who knew
you had such creativity!
And maybe in this branching tree
of all the million men unseen
that I now know so biblically,
will I find Jerry Fallwell? Did
Jim Bakker use me, am I soiled
by Oral Roberts? Have I sinned,
rubbed oil all over Ross Perot?
Does Richard Nixon cry my name,
did Elvis put me in a song,
does Ronald Reagan like the way
I kiss, or does he want more tongue?
If I had known these aspects, I'd
have found a small monastic home,
abandoned sexuality
and, happy, masturbate alone.
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SATAN'S TOOL
by Jon Silver
There once was a young man named Clayton
Whose tool was possessed by Satan.
It wriggled about,
turned inside out,
and drove off the girls he was datin'.
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THE MASHER KING
by Max Sparber
I show no remorse for the things that I do,
It's often reporter and oftener true;
I don't claim to be decent and I'm too tired to pretend
I've no reputation to speak of,--
So I've none to defend.
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CLASSIC DOGGEREL: MY GOD, HOW THE MONEY ROLLS IN
Grandmother makes cheap prophylactics;
She punctures the end with a pin.
Grandfather performs the abortions.
My God, how the money rolls in!
My sister was once a virgin;
She didn't know how to begin.
I showed her the tricks of the trade.
My God, how the money rolls in!
My father makes illegal whisky.
My mother makes illegal gin.
My sister sells sin in the corner.
My God, how the money rolls in!
We've started an old-fashioned gin shop,
A regular palace of sin.
The principle girl is my grandmother.
My God, how the money rolls in!
My brother's a curate in Sydney.
He's saving poor girlies from sin.
He'll save you a blonde for a dollar.
My God, how the money rolls in!
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DO YOU HAVE A CLASSIC BAWDY SONG?
Something your grandfather used to sing when he had been at the liquor cabinet? Would his mumbled lyrics raise the hairs on your parents' heads, and would they rush over to cover your ears? Send us these lyrics--we love them, and we'll give you credit for rediscovering a lost classic!
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
WE WANT YOUR POEMS
Doggerel Magazine relies on the submissions of its readers for most of its contents--so put pen to paper and begin writing, you fiends! Put plainly, we want nasty little verses and salacious snippets of song. You can receive our full submission policy by sending an email.
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DOGGEREL SAINTS: ELSA LANCHESTER
Who doesn't know the image: Elsa Lanchester, swaddled in bandages and a ragged gown, her black and white-streaked Nefertiti hair rising behind her like a ghastly parody of a halo from a religious painting. She twitches her head and stares unblinking at Frankenstein's monster, who lunges toward her, desperate to touch the mate he has demanded. However, the bride of Frankenstein responds in horror, pointing at the monster and hissing like a furious goose.
Boris Karloff's noble monster was not alone in his lust for Miss Lanchester. With apologies to Samuel Johnson, we can fairly say of Elsa Lanchester that she was not only lascivious, she was the cause of lasciviousness in others. Throughout her long career, she inspired men to write odes--many quite improper--to her charms, all of which Lanchester remembered in her fascinating autobiography, "Elsa Lanchester, Herself."
Lanchester was the product of scandal. The daughter of ardent socialists, Miss Lanchester's mother had been kidnapped by her father and older brothers for her insistence on living with a lover rather than marrying him--quite shocking behavior at the turn of the 20th Century. Her family had her declared insane on the grounds that she was "over-educated," and the case was widely reported throughout the British Empire. Lanchester's mother, a 25-year-old woman with enormous willpower (she kicked the windows out of the carriage used for her kidnapping), quickly regained her independence and returned to her lover, a self-educated Irish laborer considered to be well below her "station." Angry letters flooded the papers, protesting that her immoral cohabitation would produce children that society would naturally reject.
Elsa was born in London on October 28,1902, and had the sort of childhood that now sounds like a romantic fiction. Her parents remained firebrands (they taught their parrot to scream "Votes for women!"), and Lanchester remembers witnessing a suffragette meeting that ended with a police riot, as mounted policemen pushed protesting women up against walls and beat them with nightsticks. The family moved frequently to avoid one legal entanglement or another, and consequently Lanchester's education was sparse and eccentric. She eventually ended up in a Summerhill-type all-boys school, as well as studying dance with both Raymond and Isadora Duncan. She naturally gravitated toward the theater, and was endlessly fascinated by Music Hall performers.
At age 17, Lanchester started her own children's theater, which survived for a few tumultuous years (she had a talent both for exploiting her students' natural performing skills and for selecting material that displeased the local officials, who tried to shut her down), and eventually the whole project transformed into a professional cabaret. Called The Cave of Harmony, performances were semi-improvised and often included odd ditties such as "Rat Catcher's Daughter" that Lanchester had dug up at the British Museum. The Cave of Harmony became a popular meeting place for London artists and intellectuals, including H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, and James Whale (who would direct The Bride of Frankenstein). A local wag was the first to immortalize Lanchester in song, struck by her shock of bronze hair and her brassy behavior. He wrote:
I may be fast, I may be loose,
I may be easy to seduce.
I may not be particular
To keep the perpendicular.
But all my horizontal friends
Are Princes, Peers and Reverends.
When Tom or Dick or Bertie call,
You'll find me strictly vertical!
Simultaneously, Lanchester fell in with a gang of radical socialists called the 1917 Club, and became something of their mascot. John Armstrong wrote of the club, saying:
In nineteen one seven they founded a club
Partly as a brothel and partly as a pub,
With a membership mainly of literary bores
Redeemed by a girl in Giotto-pink drawers.
Lanchester claims she did not own a pair of pink drawers at the time, but her image was fixed: A bohemian socialist with loose morals, outrageous behavior, and brightly colored unmentionables. Geoffrey Dunlap wrote bitterly about her (he was bitter about everything, Lanchester complained), saying:
Pink drawers alas--why should her drawers be pink
Their colour gives me furiously to think--
Pink drawers--and do they never turn red
Flushed at their mistress' sin while she's in bed.
No they are pink, and peonies in their fair hue
Their innocence remains forever new.
Lanchester later noted that "Art was a word that cloaked oceans of naughtiness," and she had her share of it, working as a nude model by day and a theatrical impresario by night. Her biography only hints at the wildness of London during the Roaring Twenties, but those hints are tantalizing: Stripping nude at strangers' houses, getting advice on abortions from Tallulah Bankhead, moving from one just-barely suppressed scandal to another while singing bawdy songs--always singing bawdy songs.
Years later, when Lanchester was happily married to Charles Laughton (who only revealed his homosexuality after they were wed, news she received with aplomb) and had established herself as a respectable presence in Hollywood, she would still be singing these songs. By day, Lanchester would work at the studios, and at night she would take the stage at the Turnabout Theater, changing costumes for each new song and warbling out numbers with names like "If You Peek In My Gazebo" and "Fiji Fanny."
The Turnabout is one of those improbable theatrical projects that turned out to be quite successful. Begun in 1941 by a group of puppeteers, it consisted of two stages, one on either end of the audience. Between the stages sat reversible seats from streetcars, so that when one show finished on one side of the theater, the audience could simply switch position and watch another show as it began on the other stage. The plan was to produce an hour of puppet theater and an hour of live theater, but eventually the venue became primarily known for Lanchester's elaborate, costumed song routines. One critic wrote that her show was "A breath of fresh air in our smoky night life ... Else Lanchester, with her abstract face, her thicket of apricot hair ... oddly diverting, funny, fantastic, wistful, and wayward ... a weird and wondrous will-of-the-wisp, being female, street urchin and witty in rapid succession."
While a collection of Lanchester's performances was released under the title "Elsa Lanchester Sings Bawdy Cockney Songs." The title is misleading; Although a few of the songs (such as the morbid "Rat Catcher's Daughter") are holdovers from her Cave of Harmony days, most of the songs on the recording were written specifically for Ms. Lanchester. The songwriter was one of the great, forgotten lyricists of the 20th Century: Forman Brown.
Brown had an extraordinary talent for telling stories in verse; He could pair a couplet in a way that was straightforward, intimate, and utterly compelling in its details. Let us look at a section from one of his unrecorded songs, titled "Lackadaisy Masie":
The tinker he was a dashing man,
flashing his smile so splendid.
The women would flock around his van
and buy what they'd never intended.
Brown's lyrics had a quiet playfulness. His subtle wordplay never announced itself, as did Cole Porter's, but instead built careful line upon careful line in order to create a rich, textured story. His songs are bawdy, yes, but have a mournful quality to them that renders them quite striking. Let us look at a song of infidelity, for example, called "When a Lady Has a Piazza":
Every night when the sun goes down
On the little white house on the edge of town
I sit on my porch and rock
My neighbor on the left is Mrs. MacFaul
She never speaks to me at all
She's in bed by nine o'clock
Mrs. Pottington lives on the other side
She's a righteous women with a military stride
And she ignores me too
But Mr. Pottington and Mr. MacFaul
Have both dropped in rather late to call
A neighbourly thing to do
There is a hint of pettiness and loneliness in these lyrics that Lanchester echoed in her performance. "I am not first and foremost a singer," she once wrote, and it is not her voice that made her famous. Instead, in a now nearly lost tradition of musical theater, Lanchester would create a character for each of her songs, and create a voice for that character. Thus, "When a Lady Has a Piazza" sounds as though it were sung by a rather exhausted, depressed gentlewoman, causing a critic to comment that "there is a desperate quality about her art; in some curious way, she takes her listeners out of a close, tidy world and into a disquieting place filled with sharp winds and unsteady laughter."
Off and on, Lanchester would perform songs from her Cave of Harmony and Turnabout Theater days for the remainder of her life, creating a variety of characters to warble out Brown's amazing, almost totally unknown rhymed couplets, such as these from "The Janitor's Boy":
When we play house in the janitor's garret,
I'm momma and he is the pop.
We quarrel and I scream just like old Mrs. Barrett,
While he beats me up with a mop.
Last week Mr. Jones got a splendid allotment
Of scotch and two bottles of gin,
And did we have fun in the Jones's apartment!
At least 'till the Joneses walked in.
The janitor's boy is a marvel,
Though he's not such a popular kid.
He swiped such a funny French novel
That Mrs. Cuducci had hid.
Some parts of that book were beyond me:
It was funny the way they would act.
But the janitor's boy made the reading a joy:
He supplied all the knowledge I lacked.
It is hard to imagine these words coming from the same mouth that produced the horrified swan hissing when unveiled before the monster in James Whale's masterpiece, but then it is also impossible to imagine her singing this song in a puppet theater--and doing so for 10 years! In London in the 1940s, critics would often complain that the Music Hall was not what it had once been, and the new stars could not compete with the old. "They were giants then," came the complaint, but it was a complaint produced by a lack of observation. Giants of traditional British Music Hall still walked the earth, still producing the same delightful--if somewhat unseemly--popular ballads. The critics simply were not looking in the right location, which, odd as it still seems, was a Hollywood puppet theater.
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ABOUT OUR CONTRIBUTORS:
JON SILVER is the nom de plume of a masked avenger who wears a turtle suit and hides among anti-WTO demonstrators in Seattle.
MATT MASON has been published by numerous hyper-intelligent editors all over and his chapbooks ("Old Froggo's Book Of Practical Cows" and "Desire For More Cows") have sold like hotcakes to hyper-intelligent book buyers everywhere. He runs a Web site listing Nebraska poetry events as well as his own page of random crap and poems. "Circle Of Friends" was originally written as a complex diatribe on the rights of workers in countries with lax worker's rights laws but certain sections were changed after some serious hush money from Nike came through, at which point it became all about sex and Nixon. Mason has a master's degree from Cal Davis in something or other and he writes a lot of poetry, some of which accidentally ends up being good.
MAX SPARBER is the editor of Doggerel Magazine, as well as the theater critic for City Pages in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Samples of his criticism are available at http://www.citypages.com on the Internet.
Read more Doggerel!
The Weekly Magazine of Comic Verse and Bawdy Songs
Volume 1, Number 2--July 24, 2000
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CONTENTS:
1. Editor's Introduction: Seduction of the Innocent
2. Letters: Doggerel Leads to Depravity
3. Poem: Circle of Friends (Matt Mason)
4. Limerick: Satan's Tool (Jon Silver)
5. Poem: The Masher King (Max Sparber)
6. Classic Doggerel: My God, How the Money Rolls In!
7. Doggerel Saints: Elsa Lanchester
8. About Our Contributors
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EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION: SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT
Well, as I suspected, Doggerel Magazine is already corrupting our youth, as demonstrated in this week's letter, written by a young woman whose innocence has given way to wantonness as a result of a particularly offense poem I wrote. I suppose I must expect hundreds of such letters during the life of this magazine, and the inevitable knock at my door as a strayed soul tracks me down to offer her nubile young body to me. Well, this is the risk faced by every humorist, and I shall have to make do, even if these women come by the thousands. In fact, the scope of Doggerel has expanded this week with the addition of three new features, which will undoubtedly lead to more fallen young women. The features are as follows:
CLASSIC DOGGEREL: Bawdy songs and unpleasant rhymes from years gone by. These anonymous stanzas have stood the test of time, popping up on schoolyards and in hash houses throughout the world. We do not know who authored them, and I suspect if we knew we should be very much surprised. A vicar in Salisbury, for example, or the wife of a North Carolina senator, perhaps--somebody took the time to scratch out a dirty joke in rhymed couplets, and whoever it was, we thank them for it. We shall do our best to keep these classics alive in the pages of Doggerel, and this week we begin with "My God, How the Money Rolls In." According to Ed Cray, author of "The Erotic Muse," this nasty classic about a sinful family can be traced back to an English Commonwealth song called "Old Hewson the Cobbler." This told of a former shoemaker who eventually sat at the trial of Charles I. He must not have been a popular man, as even today's lyrics retain the spite of its origins. "A craven my father," Hewson sings in the original, "... and a beggar myself." The melody to "My God" is the same as "My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean," by the way, in case you ever have a bit too much to drink and feel like belting out a song that will get you thrown out of any reputable pub.
DOGGEREL SAINTS: Here we take a moment to praise those who have not simply scrawled anonymous verse on bathroom walls, but instead dedicated a sizable amount of their lives and talents to making an art of cruel and salacious poetry. There are more of them than you can possibly imagine, some quite respectable: Robert Burns, for example, composed many a questionable ditty. Our first saint is obscure, but once you read about her life I am sure you will agree that it was fascinating. Her name is Elsa Lanchester, and while she remains famous as the actress who portrayed the Bride of Frankenstein, she also managed to make a neat little cottage industry for herself singing what she called "bawdy Cockney songs" at a puppet theater. Intrigued? Read on.
PUBLIC DOMAIN HUMOR: Scientists have at last broken the speed of light, and I am not surprised, as I think that something already exists that goes faster than light, right under our noses: dirty jokes via email. In a race around the world between a ray of light and a really appalling punch line, I will put my money on the punch line every time.
So we at Doggerel have decided to test this theory by creating a series of jokes that we call "Public Domain Humor," which we shall send out as a separate email along with each issue of Doggerel. You are free to copy and mail out these jokes to as many people as you wish--we encourage it, because doing so would help advertise this magazine (there will be a single sentence at the bottom of each mailing telling readers how to subscribe). If you don't think the jokes are funny, toss them out. However, if they make you chuckle, and you can think of anyone else who might enjoy them, why not share the jokes by forwarding them?
Enjoy,
Max Sparber, editor
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LETTER: DOGGEREL LEADS TO DEPRAVITY
Before reading Doggerel, I spent my days making jams, perfecting the craft of basket-weaving, and caring for my 12 cats. While these may be enjoyable activities for some, they became insipid for me. I guess I was following in my mother's footsteps. She always taught me to worship the Lord, eat my vegetables, do right by mankind, and never to surrender to my hedonistic desires. Well, for most of my life, I believed in Mother's teachings, but when she died, I realized what a horribly plain life she had led. As I looked down on her stiff carcass, I vowed to make my life spicy, or at least more flavorful.
The first time I read your poem "Twelve Inches," I immediately knew the forecast of my future. I was a 23-year-old virgin with a boyfriend of two years, equally as innocent and naïve as I. He had never so much as seen me in the indecency of my nightgown, but when he came over the night after I read "Twelve Inches," he was shocked to see something in place of our usual Sunday brisket dinner on the dining room table. And it wasn't steak or quiche, but me in nothing but my unmentionables. After I brought him back to consciousness, I demanded that he remove my panties and make sweet, sweet love to me!
Unfortunately, and to my horror, my beloved did not quite measure up. That is why I am writing to you, Max. Perhaps you could do me one more favor. If what you boast is true, than bring over your 12 inches, and I'll do you till you're blue. I have included a poem for you.
Amy D.
MISTER
He stared my way from the church pew next to me,
Our eyes met and I asked, "Hey Mister,
Why don't you sit over here, so I can see
Your hungry lips up closer, and whisper
A request for you to lick me where I pee.
Don't worry, I know you're with your sister
She won't mind. I was with her last night 'till three."
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CIRCLE OF FRIENDS
by Matthew Mason
Lord, what thoughts can haunt my head
when coming on that quote again!
"When you and she are having sex,
you take to bed the other men
she's ever slept with, just as she's
now sleeping with your exes." This,
though mainly speaking of disease,
has made me question every kiss:
Will Steve respect me, why won't Mike
just call me now, and, oh, I know
I said I loved you, oh, but Mark,
I lied; and Jim, my gosh, who knew
you had such creativity!
And maybe in this branching tree
of all the million men unseen
that I now know so biblically,
will I find Jerry Fallwell? Did
Jim Bakker use me, am I soiled
by Oral Roberts? Have I sinned,
rubbed oil all over Ross Perot?
Does Richard Nixon cry my name,
did Elvis put me in a song,
does Ronald Reagan like the way
I kiss, or does he want more tongue?
If I had known these aspects, I'd
have found a small monastic home,
abandoned sexuality
and, happy, masturbate alone.
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SATAN'S TOOL
by Jon Silver
There once was a young man named Clayton
Whose tool was possessed by Satan.
It wriggled about,
turned inside out,
and drove off the girls he was datin'.
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THE MASHER KING
by Max Sparber
I show no remorse for the things that I do,
It's often reporter and oftener true;
I don't claim to be decent and I'm too tired to pretend
I've no reputation to speak of,--
So I've none to defend.
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CLASSIC DOGGEREL: MY GOD, HOW THE MONEY ROLLS IN
Grandmother makes cheap prophylactics;
She punctures the end with a pin.
Grandfather performs the abortions.
My God, how the money rolls in!
My sister was once a virgin;
She didn't know how to begin.
I showed her the tricks of the trade.
My God, how the money rolls in!
My father makes illegal whisky.
My mother makes illegal gin.
My sister sells sin in the corner.
My God, how the money rolls in!
We've started an old-fashioned gin shop,
A regular palace of sin.
The principle girl is my grandmother.
My God, how the money rolls in!
My brother's a curate in Sydney.
He's saving poor girlies from sin.
He'll save you a blonde for a dollar.
My God, how the money rolls in!
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DO YOU HAVE A CLASSIC BAWDY SONG?
Something your grandfather used to sing when he had been at the liquor cabinet? Would his mumbled lyrics raise the hairs on your parents' heads, and would they rush over to cover your ears? Send us these lyrics--we love them, and we'll give you credit for rediscovering a lost classic!
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
WE WANT YOUR POEMS
Doggerel Magazine relies on the submissions of its readers for most of its contents--so put pen to paper and begin writing, you fiends! Put plainly, we want nasty little verses and salacious snippets of song. You can receive our full submission policy by sending an email.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
DOGGEREL SAINTS: ELSA LANCHESTER
Who doesn't know the image: Elsa Lanchester, swaddled in bandages and a ragged gown, her black and white-streaked Nefertiti hair rising behind her like a ghastly parody of a halo from a religious painting. She twitches her head and stares unblinking at Frankenstein's monster, who lunges toward her, desperate to touch the mate he has demanded. However, the bride of Frankenstein responds in horror, pointing at the monster and hissing like a furious goose.
Boris Karloff's noble monster was not alone in his lust for Miss Lanchester. With apologies to Samuel Johnson, we can fairly say of Elsa Lanchester that she was not only lascivious, she was the cause of lasciviousness in others. Throughout her long career, she inspired men to write odes--many quite improper--to her charms, all of which Lanchester remembered in her fascinating autobiography, "Elsa Lanchester, Herself."
Lanchester was the product of scandal. The daughter of ardent socialists, Miss Lanchester's mother had been kidnapped by her father and older brothers for her insistence on living with a lover rather than marrying him--quite shocking behavior at the turn of the 20th Century. Her family had her declared insane on the grounds that she was "over-educated," and the case was widely reported throughout the British Empire. Lanchester's mother, a 25-year-old woman with enormous willpower (she kicked the windows out of the carriage used for her kidnapping), quickly regained her independence and returned to her lover, a self-educated Irish laborer considered to be well below her "station." Angry letters flooded the papers, protesting that her immoral cohabitation would produce children that society would naturally reject.
Elsa was born in London on October 28,1902, and had the sort of childhood that now sounds like a romantic fiction. Her parents remained firebrands (they taught their parrot to scream "Votes for women!"), and Lanchester remembers witnessing a suffragette meeting that ended with a police riot, as mounted policemen pushed protesting women up against walls and beat them with nightsticks. The family moved frequently to avoid one legal entanglement or another, and consequently Lanchester's education was sparse and eccentric. She eventually ended up in a Summerhill-type all-boys school, as well as studying dance with both Raymond and Isadora Duncan. She naturally gravitated toward the theater, and was endlessly fascinated by Music Hall performers.
At age 17, Lanchester started her own children's theater, which survived for a few tumultuous years (she had a talent both for exploiting her students' natural performing skills and for selecting material that displeased the local officials, who tried to shut her down), and eventually the whole project transformed into a professional cabaret. Called The Cave of Harmony, performances were semi-improvised and often included odd ditties such as "Rat Catcher's Daughter" that Lanchester had dug up at the British Museum. The Cave of Harmony became a popular meeting place for London artists and intellectuals, including H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, and James Whale (who would direct The Bride of Frankenstein). A local wag was the first to immortalize Lanchester in song, struck by her shock of bronze hair and her brassy behavior. He wrote:
I may be fast, I may be loose,
I may be easy to seduce.
I may not be particular
To keep the perpendicular.
But all my horizontal friends
Are Princes, Peers and Reverends.
When Tom or Dick or Bertie call,
You'll find me strictly vertical!
Simultaneously, Lanchester fell in with a gang of radical socialists called the 1917 Club, and became something of their mascot. John Armstrong wrote of the club, saying:
In nineteen one seven they founded a club
Partly as a brothel and partly as a pub,
With a membership mainly of literary bores
Redeemed by a girl in Giotto-pink drawers.
Lanchester claims she did not own a pair of pink drawers at the time, but her image was fixed: A bohemian socialist with loose morals, outrageous behavior, and brightly colored unmentionables. Geoffrey Dunlap wrote bitterly about her (he was bitter about everything, Lanchester complained), saying:
Pink drawers alas--why should her drawers be pink
Their colour gives me furiously to think--
Pink drawers--and do they never turn red
Flushed at their mistress' sin while she's in bed.
No they are pink, and peonies in their fair hue
Their innocence remains forever new.
Lanchester later noted that "Art was a word that cloaked oceans of naughtiness," and she had her share of it, working as a nude model by day and a theatrical impresario by night. Her biography only hints at the wildness of London during the Roaring Twenties, but those hints are tantalizing: Stripping nude at strangers' houses, getting advice on abortions from Tallulah Bankhead, moving from one just-barely suppressed scandal to another while singing bawdy songs--always singing bawdy songs.
Years later, when Lanchester was happily married to Charles Laughton (who only revealed his homosexuality after they were wed, news she received with aplomb) and had established herself as a respectable presence in Hollywood, she would still be singing these songs. By day, Lanchester would work at the studios, and at night she would take the stage at the Turnabout Theater, changing costumes for each new song and warbling out numbers with names like "If You Peek In My Gazebo" and "Fiji Fanny."
The Turnabout is one of those improbable theatrical projects that turned out to be quite successful. Begun in 1941 by a group of puppeteers, it consisted of two stages, one on either end of the audience. Between the stages sat reversible seats from streetcars, so that when one show finished on one side of the theater, the audience could simply switch position and watch another show as it began on the other stage. The plan was to produce an hour of puppet theater and an hour of live theater, but eventually the venue became primarily known for Lanchester's elaborate, costumed song routines. One critic wrote that her show was "A breath of fresh air in our smoky night life ... Else Lanchester, with her abstract face, her thicket of apricot hair ... oddly diverting, funny, fantastic, wistful, and wayward ... a weird and wondrous will-of-the-wisp, being female, street urchin and witty in rapid succession."
While a collection of Lanchester's performances was released under the title "Elsa Lanchester Sings Bawdy Cockney Songs." The title is misleading; Although a few of the songs (such as the morbid "Rat Catcher's Daughter") are holdovers from her Cave of Harmony days, most of the songs on the recording were written specifically for Ms. Lanchester. The songwriter was one of the great, forgotten lyricists of the 20th Century: Forman Brown.
Brown had an extraordinary talent for telling stories in verse; He could pair a couplet in a way that was straightforward, intimate, and utterly compelling in its details. Let us look at a section from one of his unrecorded songs, titled "Lackadaisy Masie":
The tinker he was a dashing man,
flashing his smile so splendid.
The women would flock around his van
and buy what they'd never intended.
Brown's lyrics had a quiet playfulness. His subtle wordplay never announced itself, as did Cole Porter's, but instead built careful line upon careful line in order to create a rich, textured story. His songs are bawdy, yes, but have a mournful quality to them that renders them quite striking. Let us look at a song of infidelity, for example, called "When a Lady Has a Piazza":
Every night when the sun goes down
On the little white house on the edge of town
I sit on my porch and rock
My neighbor on the left is Mrs. MacFaul
She never speaks to me at all
She's in bed by nine o'clock
Mrs. Pottington lives on the other side
She's a righteous women with a military stride
And she ignores me too
But Mr. Pottington and Mr. MacFaul
Have both dropped in rather late to call
A neighbourly thing to do
There is a hint of pettiness and loneliness in these lyrics that Lanchester echoed in her performance. "I am not first and foremost a singer," she once wrote, and it is not her voice that made her famous. Instead, in a now nearly lost tradition of musical theater, Lanchester would create a character for each of her songs, and create a voice for that character. Thus, "When a Lady Has a Piazza" sounds as though it were sung by a rather exhausted, depressed gentlewoman, causing a critic to comment that "there is a desperate quality about her art; in some curious way, she takes her listeners out of a close, tidy world and into a disquieting place filled with sharp winds and unsteady laughter."
Off and on, Lanchester would perform songs from her Cave of Harmony and Turnabout Theater days for the remainder of her life, creating a variety of characters to warble out Brown's amazing, almost totally unknown rhymed couplets, such as these from "The Janitor's Boy":
When we play house in the janitor's garret,
I'm momma and he is the pop.
We quarrel and I scream just like old Mrs. Barrett,
While he beats me up with a mop.
Last week Mr. Jones got a splendid allotment
Of scotch and two bottles of gin,
And did we have fun in the Jones's apartment!
At least 'till the Joneses walked in.
The janitor's boy is a marvel,
Though he's not such a popular kid.
He swiped such a funny French novel
That Mrs. Cuducci had hid.
Some parts of that book were beyond me:
It was funny the way they would act.
But the janitor's boy made the reading a joy:
He supplied all the knowledge I lacked.
It is hard to imagine these words coming from the same mouth that produced the horrified swan hissing when unveiled before the monster in James Whale's masterpiece, but then it is also impossible to imagine her singing this song in a puppet theater--and doing so for 10 years! In London in the 1940s, critics would often complain that the Music Hall was not what it had once been, and the new stars could not compete with the old. "They were giants then," came the complaint, but it was a complaint produced by a lack of observation. Giants of traditional British Music Hall still walked the earth, still producing the same delightful--if somewhat unseemly--popular ballads. The critics simply were not looking in the right location, which, odd as it still seems, was a Hollywood puppet theater.
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ABOUT OUR CONTRIBUTORS:
JON SILVER is the nom de plume of a masked avenger who wears a turtle suit and hides among anti-WTO demonstrators in Seattle.
MATT MASON has been published by numerous hyper-intelligent editors all over and his chapbooks ("Old Froggo's Book Of Practical Cows" and "Desire For More Cows") have sold like hotcakes to hyper-intelligent book buyers everywhere. He runs a Web site listing Nebraska poetry events as well as his own page of random crap and poems. "Circle Of Friends" was originally written as a complex diatribe on the rights of workers in countries with lax worker's rights laws but certain sections were changed after some serious hush money from Nike came through, at which point it became all about sex and Nixon. Mason has a master's degree from Cal Davis in something or other and he writes a lot of poetry, some of which accidentally ends up being good.
MAX SPARBER is the editor of Doggerel Magazine, as well as the theater critic for City Pages in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Samples of his criticism are available at http://www.citypages.com on the Internet.
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Gloria Said,
Good piece on Miss Lanchester! I am often surprised that many of her aboved fans never go beyond "The Bride", which, in film terms is sad as in other films like "Witness of the prosecution" or "Vessel of Wrath/The Beachcomber" she has longer -and certainly, as interesting- roles. In fact, most film fans tend to tag her as a woman of bizarre roles, obliterate that she was also capable of sensible, touching characterizations such as her role in "Rembrandt", and then she was a most humorous Anne of Cleves to laughton's Henry (ah! the times when fat kings could be portrayed by fat actors and not presented as perfume-advertising hunks!).
On stage, she was remembered as one of the most remarkable Ariels the stage has seen in "The Tempest" during an Old Vic season she did with Charles. Incidentally, she was also Peter Pan to hubby's Hook in Xmas 1936 (according to stage director Tyrone Guthrie, on that occasion the children got more scared by Peter than by the good ol' captain, LOL).
About her marriage, Laughton biographer Simon Callow mentions that about her declaration that she married Charles without knowing he was gay, Elsa had quite a number of gay acquaintances in her wild circle of bohemian friends, I mean: didn't she notice anything about her art-loving, flower loving, shy boyfriend of hers? He would go with her to buy her clothes... and enjoy it!! (hetero boyfriends just flee from shopping sprees like from the Fiend itself)
... So with Callow, I wonder if she actually knew well who was she marrying and, hum, just presented things differently for posterity.
Posted on April 11, 2008 10:36 AM