Max "Bunny" Sparber

DOGGEREL MAGAZINE
The Weekly Magazine of Comic Verse and Bawdy Songs
Volume 1, Number 4--August 7, 2000

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CONTENTS:

1. Editor's Introduction: What Do You Want Written on Your Tombstone?
2. Letters: The Dirty Ditty and the Morris Dance
3. A Toast
4. Limerick: To Mrs. Byrne, Who Called Me a Pantywaist (Vincent Gangly)
5. Poem: Four Detestable Children (Max Sparber)
6. Limerick: On the Semi-clad Woman on the Magazine Cover (Aldous Pudendum)
6. Poem: American Pie Reconsidered (Bill Corbett)
7. Classic Doggerel: Cemetery Sue
8. Doggerel Saints: Dr. Heinrich Hoffmann
9. The Final Word: An Epitaph for an Old Maid
10. About Our Contributors

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EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION: What Do You Want Written on Your Tombstone?

This week we introduce another new feature--the last we shall be introducing for a while. Every issue will now end with a feature we call "The Final Word," a round robin of short verse and humor. This week, we begin our new section with an epitaph--and you cannot get much further to the fringes of poetry than that!

Believe it or not, epitaph-collecting was quite popular in the Victorian-era. At that time, bored dowagers and high-strung dilettantes spent their afternoons in cemeteries with open notebooks, writing down unusual scraps of verse from the sides of moldering tombstones. Additionally, upper-class wags made sport of each other in the press by composing their own epitaphs--or those of despised colleagues. Dozens of books with titles such as "Gleanings from God's Acre" found mass audiences, although much of what was published was invented. Nevermind--we are not sticklers for authenticity here at Doggerel. If you stumble across a particularly ghastly bit of verse the next time you are grave rubbing--or you simply invent a particularly brilliant epitaph yourself--we will make room for it.

Death crops up quite a bit in this issue, no doubt influenced by this week's Doggerel Saint, Dr. Heinrich Hoffmann. The good doctor was author of one of the most sadistic books of children's verse ever published: "Struwwelpeter," commonly known in English as "Slovenly Peter" (or, with the success of a recent stage version, "Shockheaded Peter"). In Hoffmann's book, children's misbehavior is punished quickly and without mercy: Tailors cut off the thumbs of children who suck the offending digits, and storms sweep terrified mites into the sky when they foolishly go out-of-doors. "Struwwelpeter" has had an enormous influence on literature. From the ill-fated children in Edward Gorey's "The Gashlycrumb Tinies" to the bedraggled ragamuffins in the work of Maurice Sendak, the frightful (if delightful) specter of Dr. Hoffmann lurks. With Slovenly Peter, a representation of everything children *shouldn't* be, Hoffmann revealed the potential for destruction that lurks within every rosy cheeked youngster. While my own poem "Four Detestable Children" is based on history (with the names changed to protect the rhyme scheme), it is very much in the spirit of Dr. Hoffmann.

ERRATA: Last week I mistakenly identified the cockney main character in Fred Earle's song "Meat! Meat!" as selling cat meat, an error that was quickly corrected by Llewtrah, our gal in the United Kingdom. "Nope!" she wrote. "Pet-flesh was and is totally taboo in pet-loving Britain!" Llewtrah then proceeded to quote the following, from "Cat tales" by Grace HcHattie:

"Cats' meat, bought from the cats' meat man, cost about a penny a day but was sometimes so bad it couldn't be eaten. [...] The cats' meat man was a familiar sight in the years before the Second World War. He would tour the streets with his gaily painted cart, selling horsemeat and other meats, including trimmings, which were mostly considered unfit for human consumption and sometimes dyed a hideous blue colour. The carts themselves were said to be magnificent. [...] The cat's meat man disappeared from the streets of Britain during the Second World War."

I stand corrected, and to all of my English readers, I apologize for having stated that the citizens of your country once ate cat meat. Usually I pride myself on the accuracy of my discussions of England. Speaking of which, hats off to the Queen Mother, who recently turned 1,000--Man, that's old!

Llewtrah is responsible for this week's classic doggerel, printed--unfortunately--in an abbreviated format. "Cemetery Sue" is one of those snippets of doggerel that have been kicking around for ... oh, centuries, maybe, and as a result it has accumulated a nearly infinite number of verses, as everybody enjoys rhyming a couplet or two about necrophilia. This version, therefore, should be considered a *sampler* only, and you may go ahead and add your own verses if you wish.

NEXT WEEK: A CD REVIEW dealing entirely with songs about sex and marihuana; AN ORIGINAL POEM by Daniel Kufahl of the Milwaukee-based gothic band Ophelia's Sweet Demise; ANOTHER TOAST; MOST CLASSIC DOGGEREL.

Enjoy,

Max Sparber, editor

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LETTER: The Dirty Ditty and the Morris Dance

Between the ages of 12 and 15, I was frequently in the company of morris dancers. This was not so much for the artistic, cultural, or historical aspects of this old English farmer dancing, but for the opportunities to leave town without my parents and with little--if any--supervision. So, on the pretext of watching a younger child or occasionally dragging out my violin, I got to attend several Morris Ales and a few Minnesota Renaissance Festivals. For both events, drinking and contra dancing was de rigeur in the evenings, along with campfire singalongs.

Which is where I was introduced to the Dirty Ditty.

It turns out that morris dancers don't just keep alive Anglo-Saxon fertility rites. They also keep a large number of highly amusing folk songs, old and new, in circulation. Rather than "Kumbiya" or other such pabulum, people took turns starting songs, many of which were just plain funny, such as the parody of the old mining song "I can Hew," renamed "I am Huge":

I am huge boys, I am fat and stout
I am huge boys, I have got the gout
I am huge boys, big as any man
But to tie my shoes, I don't think I can

Then there was the slightly vulgar "Phantom Flasher":

One night he flashed me in the dark
With my spray can I made my mark
Now he flouresces in the dark
He is the Phantom Flasher

Is he there?
--Don't know
Could he be?
--Possibly
I think I see him coming after you
He is the Phantom Flasher

One night he flashed the Widow Brown
She smiled and bought a wedding gown
And then she chased him through the town
He is the Phantom Flasher

And probably my favorite, "Virgin Sturgeon":

Caviar comes from a virgin sturgeon
A virgin sturgeon is a very rare fish
No good sturgeon wants to be a virgin
That's why caviar is a very rare dish

I fed caviar to my grandpa
He's a man of ninety-three
Sreams and cries were heard from grandma
Grandpa had her up a tree

Many of the songs were sung by one person on the verses, with the circle joining in on the chorus, so I have only vague recollections of them.

However, some people had large binders full of dot-matrix-printed-lyrics, in no decipherable order, that they passed around for everyone to use in a sing-along. I admit it: I stole the "good ones" out of one of the books. I hid away the dirtiest ones, fearing parental discovery. Alas, I had not yet discovered the properties of liquid courage, which allow a person to have no qualms about singing the praises of genitals--However, the rest I memorized to entertain friends and fellow students on long bus trips.

Unfortunately, is has turned out that I am better at hiding things from myself more often than not. So if any of you are familiar with that one about the Scotsman passed out in the ditch who wakes up to find that his dick has won first prize, let us know.

Katherine Neary

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TOASTS: We begin Doggerel with a toast to celebrate another week without prosecution

Here's to our guest--
Don't let him rest.
But keep his elbow bending.
'Tis time to drink--
Full time to think
Tomorrow--when you're mending.

(Anonymous)

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POEM: To Mrs. Byrne, Who Called Me a Pantywaist
by Vincent Gangly

She thought me a repeat offender
Of a sin that was bound to offend her.
Indeed, she was quite wrong,
As I'm as straight as the day's long--
So considerably less so in December.

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POEM: Four Detestable Children
by Max Sparber

Billy Murkin, sweet and mild,
Once hacked to death an infant child
And then explained to Officer Pruett
That he wanted to see
If he could do it.

The Thompson boy had a great desire
To take a match and start a fire;
All perished in the orphanage
As the wicked boy laughed
And the fire raged.

The Lowells grew quite tired of tacks
Which they placed upon the railroad tracks,
So they hoisted up a drum of tar
Killing all but one
In the dining car.

Sammy Hawkins and his brother Pete
Thought they would catch fish to eat.
Sam set his rod down on the ground
And pushed in his brother
To watch him drown.

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YOU MAY BE GOING TO HELL!

According to Father Mirvish Dickensheets, there is a special place in the netherworld for selfish humans who refuse to share Doggerel Magazine with all of their friends.

"Oh yes," says Father Dickensheets, "Satan's imps are down there now, stoking the coals, with their beady little pig-eyes focuses right on YOU. Don't give in to the deadly temptation of hoarding Doggerel to yourself! Don't place your immortal soul in the taloned hands of grinning archfiends who want nothing better than to feast on your heart and entrails! Tell everyone you know about Doggerel, and save yourself an ETERNITY OF CONFALGRATION!"

Listen to Father Mirvish Dickensheets. Subscriptions to Doggerel Magazine are free, subscribers will not be spammed, and they can unsubscribe at any time.

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LIMERICK: On the Semi-clad Woman on the Magazine Cover
by Aldous Pudendum

The covergirl's knickers were gray
And I know what you're all going to say,
But it wasn't the editor,
Said the fellow who bedded her:
"She didn't wear panties that day."

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POEM: American Pie Reconsidered
by Bill Corbett

"As American as apple pie"
Used to be praise from on high,
But now the only pie that's seen is
A place for young men to put a penis.

Reprinted with permission from http://www.TimmyBigHands.com.

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CLASSIC DOGGEREL: Cemetery Sue
Submitted by Llewtrah

They say a hard man is always good to find,
If he's three days dead then Sue don't mind
Ask her what she wants and she'll say she'll have a
Dose of rigor mortis from a fresh cadaver.

If the hearse is rocking,
Then don't bother knocking,
Cos there's room in a coffin for two,
She's the undertaker's daughter,
No better than she oughta,
Be, that's Cemetery Sue.

At nights, you'll find the casket will be tossing,
If a cold hard man is laid out in a coffin,
It's such a waste to proceed with decent burial,
Until he's given the last rites necrophilial.

In the funeral parlor,
Sue finds the men are harder,
And they stay like that for a while,
If their dick's gone wooden,
She knows she's got a good 'un,
She's a dedicated necrophile.

The police bring her corpses in a zip-lock body bag,
First they get autopsied and then they get a shag,
They may be lying silent with arms folded on their breast,
Dead men tell no secrets, and dead men get no rest:

She likes to copulate,
With her latest deceased mate,
That she met through an obituary,
She goes to the mausoleum,
When she wants to see him,
And give him the last rites funerary.

The undertaker's daughter is a necro-sexy freak,
She likes only dead men cos their hard-ons lasts a week,
If she can find a stiff one, it's indecent haste to bury it,
Before she's satisfied her urges necrophiliac.

Sue will have them all,
Till the maggots start to crawl,
As long as there's rigor in his prick,
Her passion is unfettered,
And the shagging is much better,
With a rock-hard week-dead dick.

The cold of a corpse will ignite Sue's ardour,
She can always find a stiff at the funeral parlour,
Ask her what she wants and she'll say she'd rather
Have a dose of rigor mortis from a fresh cadaver.

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DOGGEREL SAINTS: Dr. Heinrich Hoffmann

Heinrich Hoffmann terrified children. It was because he was a doctor, and doctors always terrify children. But Hoffmann discovered an easy way to calm them, displaying a facile grasp of psychology that would eventually lead him to opening his own mental asylum in Frankfurt. Hoffmann found that by drawing small, oddly proportioned cartoons, he could capture the attention of a frightened child, and their nervousness would leave them. He would begin by sketching a boy. When he had caught the attention of his nervous charge, he would add to the drawing a mop of hair, allowing it to grow into a long, straw-like mass. Then he would add fingernails, which he would likewise extend to grotesque proportions.

Children were always fascinating and delighted by this image. On Christmas of 1844, displeased with the bland children's books that were then popular, Hoffmann decided to write and illustrate a book for his own son. Finding himself with an extra page at the end, he sketched in the slovenly boy and named him "Peter." He wrote this verse to accompany it:

See Slovenly Peter! Here he stands,
With his dirty hair and hands.
See! His nails are never cut;
They are grim'd as black as soot;
No water for many weeks.
Has been near his cheeks;
And the sloven, I declare,
Not once this year has combed his hair!
Anything to me is sweeter
Than to see shock-headed Peter.

Almost 150 years later, children's book author and illustrator Maurice Sendak would call Hoffmann's collection of stories "one of the most beautiful books in the world," and Dr, Jack Zipes would write in his magazine "The Lion and the Unicorn" that "There is hardly a German adult or child, even today, who does not know that Struwwelpeter is the model of everything one is not supposed to become, the model of the disobedient child." Hoffmann's book, published at the insistence of his friends, quickly became an international bestseller, a perennial favorite that was translated into dozens of languages and went through more than 700 separate printings.

But the horrific image of Slovenly Peter, moved to the front of the book for later printings, paled in comparison to the grisly stories that made up the remainder of Dr. Hoffmann's "Cheerful Stories and Funny Pictures for Good Little Folk." For example, there is "The Dreadful Story of Pauline and the Matches." In this, young Pauline defies the advice of her mother and her nurse (as well as her alarmed pet cats) and chooses to play with matches. Hoffmann describes her fate thusly:

So she was burnt with all her clothes,
And arms and hands, and eyes and nose;
Til she had nothing more to lose
Except her little scarlet shoes;
And nothing else but these were found
Among her ashes on the ground.

Accompanying this poem is an image of Pauline engulfed in flame, clouds of smoke billowing from her body, her hands thrown up in horror as her two cats repeat the frightened gesture on either side of her. But even this seems tame compared to "The Story of Little Suck-A-Thumb," which I will reprint in entirety:

One day, Mamma said, "Conrad dear,
I must go out and leave you here.
But mind now, Conrad, what I say,
Don't suck your thumbs while I'm away.
The great tall tailor always comes
To little boys that suck their thumbs;
And ere they dream what he's about,
He takes his great sharp scissors out
And cuts their thumbs clean off,--and then
You know, they never grow again."

Mamma had scarcely turn'd her back,
The thumb was in, alack! Alack!
The door flew open, in he ran,
That great, long, red-legged scissor-man.
Oh! Children, see! the tailor's come
And caught our little Suck-a-Thumb.
Snip! Snap! Snip! the scissors go;
And Conrad cries out--Oh! Oh! Oh!
Snip! Snap! Snip! They go so fast;
That both his thumbs are off at last.

Mamma comes home; there Conrad stands,
And looks quite sad, and shows his hands;--
"Ah!" said Mamma, "I knew he'd come
To naughty little Suck-a-Thumb."

Hoffmann's simple line drawings are uncomfortably lurid here: The tailor springs into the frame with a single bolt and massive, pinching scissors, his hair flying behind him, as Conrad throws an arm and a leg into the air from the agony of having his thumb severed. What sort of parents would buy such a book for their child? Especially when you consider that elsewhere the book tells such stories as that of Augustus, who refused to eat his soup and died of starvation in four short days, or the story of Robert, who went out into a storm with an umbrella and was caught up by a gust of wind.

Up he flies
To the skies.
No one heard his screams and cries;
Through the clouds the rude winds bore him,
And his hat flew on before him.

Robert is lost: "No one ever yet could tell where they stopp'd, or where they fell," Hoffmann writes. While these stories hypothetically serve the function of moral instruction, indoctrinating children into the Teutonic "Kultur de Zurückhaltung" ("Culture of Restraint"), where civility was defined by self-control, this is not enough to explain the books' massive popularity. After all, Hoffmann's stories contain casual, but terrifying, inversions of the normal world. Robert, for example, does exactly what he should on a rainy day: he brings his umbrella with him. Yet winds catch that umbrella and carry the terrified child off to his unknown doom--and what lesson is being taught here? That we should leave our umbrellas at home?

Perhaps children should be taught not to suck on their thumbs, but warning them that their punishment will be mutilation seems preposterous. Again Hoffmann is inverting the world; after all, tailors sew things together, they don't cut them apart. As someone who was exposed to these stories when I was a boy in England, I can speak from experience when I say that they left me utterly horrified. I could hardly stand to look at the book, although I would frequently quickly peek at it in the same way I peeked in on horror movies on late-night television.

Audiences have remained perpetually ambivalent about Slovenly Peter and his cohorts, some arguing that the book is evidence of a sadistic streak that courses through children's literature and stems from a cheap delight parents get in frightening their children. Others argue that Hoffmann meant his book as a subtle parody of the excessively moralistic literature of his day. Hoffmann's own text is profoundly ambivalent--no amount of rereading the books sheds any further light on Hoffmann's intentions, although Jack Zipes, in an interview with Doggerel, insists that Hoffmann really did mean the book as moral instruction. In an introduction he recently wrote for a Feral House reprinting of the book (with ghastly, not-for-children illustrations by Sarita Vendetta), Zipes wrote that, "The voice that speaks in Struwwelpeter and the hand that draws are authoritative and directive. Hoffmann does not write and draw because he is [a lover of children]; he is more concerned in maintaining the strictures of bourgeois training than he is about caring for children."

Speaking with Doggerel, Zipes described "Slovenly Peter" as "humorous but savage." "Hoffmann's intentions were good, even if his methods were questionable. He was a product of the 19th century, when people did not believe in sparing the rod, but instead were didactic and moral." But Zipes confesses that there is more complexity in the book, explaining that Hoffmann's views on psychiatry were progressive, even at their most authoritarian. In fact, Hoffmann's work with the mentally ill consisted primarily of encouraging them towards engaging in meaningful work. As one writer pointed out in an issue of "The Lion and the Unicorn" that was dedicated to "Slovenly Peter," Hoffmann was a philanthropist who believed in civilizing people, rather than punishing them. In many ways, "Slovenly Peter" is an explanation of civilized behavior for children--rarely are those who misbehave punished by their parents. Instead, the word itself turns upside down: fish laugh at drowning boys, rabbits seize guns and turn on their hunters, and tailors use their shears to snip off fingers.

Hoffmann's book was extreme, but not unusual in his day; children frequently died in the literature of the 1800s, a fact that Edward Gorey would parody extensively in his own Victorian-styled chapbooks (most famously in "The Gashylycrumb Tinies," in which 26 children die alphabetically, but also in such books as "The Pious Infant," in which the titular character dies of an illness caught from giving bread pudding to a widow) However, "Slovenly Peter's" continued popularity raises trickier questions. Certainly, some modern are attracted to the book's sadism (I am, but I am in good company, as Mark Twain translated the book for his own children one Christmas, heightening every act of violence in the process). The Feral House republication is a vision of cruelty, not simply because of Vendetta's garish illustrations, but also because it reprints the entirety of a 1915 American translation that added in a dozen additional (and anonymous) poems that increases the infant mortality rate considerably. Additional, it includes a British parody of "Slovenly Peter" printed during World War II called "Struwwelhitler," which includes these immortal lines:

Here is cruel Adolf, see!
A horrid, wicked boy was he;
He made a purge to serve his end,
And shot up all his oldest friends.

(By the way, such parodies were common, including multiple British versions that were meant as barbs against the government, as well as a more recent American version by Dr. Joseph Wortis called "Tricky Dick and His Pals.")

A contemporary reassessment that has most completely dealt with the complexities of "Slovenly Peter" was a recent stage play, titled "Shockheaded Peter." Created by London's Cultural Industry Project, the play split the attitudes toward the book neatly in half. On the side of pure sadism was cult band The Tiger Lillies, whose lead singer and accordionist Martyn Jaques followed Twain's example by increasing the violence of the text in his musical adaptations of Hoffmann's poems. Singing in a funereal falsetto, he gleefully called for the deaths of each of the offending children, at one point refusing to sing until the entire audience joined him in screaming for one boy's butchery.

This was balanced out by the direction of Julian Crouch and Phelim McDermott, a team famous for creating epic plays out of puppets and garbage. They staged "Shockheaded Peter" in a what looked like a Victorian-era toy stage, but their version radically reconsidered the story. In their telling, Slovenly Peter was the infant child of two parents who were so appalled at their son's ghastly appearance that they buried him under their floorboards. As the Tiger Lillies played their songs of murder, these parents slowly went mad, eventually sprouting long hair and fingernails like their abandoned son. In one horrifying scene, the father staggered past the mutilated body of young Conrad, who had bled to death after having his thumbs cut off. As the man watched, a giant insect emerged from the wall and carried the infant corpse off--an image certainly not found in the original, and probably part of the reason "Shockheaded Peter" was not recommended for children.

At the play's climax, the mad parents open the floorboards and reclaim their despised child, who by now has grown enormous and even more hideous. In this scene, Crouch and McDermott rejected the sadism of Hoffmann's original novel--briefly. But then the play's narrator, played as a sort of histrionic King Lear by Julian Bleach, turned savagely on the audience and berated them for not understanding the play, sounding similar to Hoffmann himself, who often aired such opinions about his critics to the public. "This book is supposed to evoke fairy-tale-like, horrid, and exaggerated ideas," Hoffmann once whined before telling his critics that they should raise their own children by taking them to museums, although this would result in very bored children.

But Hoffmann was a man of warnings, and we will leave you with this one, found at the very beginning of "Slovenly Peter":

When children have been good,
That is, be it understood,
Good at meal-times, good at play,
Good at night, and good all day,--
They shall have the pretty things
Merry Christmas always brings
Naughty, romping girls and boys
Tear their clothes and make a noise,
Soil their aprons and their frocks,
And deserve no Christmas-box.
Such as these shall never look
At this pretty Picture-Book.

The Feral House edition of Strewwelpeter, as well as the Tiger Lillies soundtrack to Shockheaded Peter, are available from Amazon.com.

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THE FINAL WORD: An Epitaph for an Old Maid

Here lies the body of Martha Dias,
Who was always uneasy
and not over pious;
She liv'd to the age of threescore and ten,
And gave that to the worms
she refused to the men.

(Shrewsbury churchyard, Shropshire)

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ABOUT OUR CONTRIBUTORS:

VINCENT GANGLEY runs the Rhode Island School for Wayward Boys, as well as hosting a yearly festival of poems and plays by Oscar Wilde.

MAX SPARBER is the editor of Doggerel Magazine. In addition, he is one of the screenwriters of Kylie Ireland's notorious film "Timeless," in which actor Ron Jeremy declared the immortal line, "A spark set fire to my back hair and I lit up like a menorah."

ALDOUS PUDENDUM is a journalist who specialized in writing about New England architectural oddities. A collection of his work, titled "My Hat Blew Where?", is scheduled for publication in October of next year.

BILL CORBETT was a writer and performer for the television show "Mystery Science Theater 3000," playing the wisecracking robot "Crow", a fey freaky alien called the Observer, and various other characters. His play "The Big Slam" was recently published by Dramatists Play Service in N.Y., and has been produced by a dozen theaters over the last few years. Bill is a graduate of the Yale School of Drama, and he is still paying for it.

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