1903

Tomorrow will be 1903. No, not the year--though that year has some significance for me: It was the year that MacMillan published Jack London's The Call of the Wild, the novella that would propel him into enduring (so far) celebrity. (As many of you know, I've researched and written a bit about London and Wild.)

No, tomorrow will be 1903 because that's the number of posts I will have uploaded to Daily Doggerel, my other blog here on blogger.com. (Link to that Daily Doggerel blog.)

I started posting there on September 13, 2014, and I confess that I have not ever consulted the totals, the number, the hits. I don't care. Nor have I looked again at that initial post--until right now. And at the bottom of this post I have pasted that original one from five and a half years ago (well, most of it).

One of the things that shocks me is that I apparently have in me a boundless supply of silly, insubstantial verse. (Have I been hoarding it, all my life, like toilet paper?)

I guess I really discovered I had a facility for it when I was writing shows with my middle school students back in Aurora. Lyrics set to well-known songs flew out of me like startled birds.

"All we need is to be freed from Phillip Marlowe!" sang the cast of The Periwinkle Perplex (April 1976). a show we'd written to be a kind of take-off on a Marlowe mystery (those wonderful novels by Raymond Chandler).

That line I just quoted: It fits into "In the Mood" by Glenn Miller. (Link to the song performed by the Andrews Sisters.)

I committed such plagiaristic degradation in show after show in Aurora--then did it again at Western Reserve Academy in 1980 when the drama class (taught by another) put on WRA and Peace, a show in the old Aurora-style, a show that "featured" ridiculous lyrics by you-know-who.

Then I returned to Aurora in the fall of 1982, committed more lyrical atrocities, all the way to my final show there in the spring of 1996.

And then ... some years of silence. And the pressure built.

Until all exploded out of me again, as if a sewer pipe inside me had broken, all because of Facebook and blogger.com.

So you should blame technology and the Internet, not me.

Anyway, I did not write about #1902 (today's) because I wanted to use #1903 (because of Wild). So ... pressure's on! Will I find something to post tomorrow?

Yeah. I already wrote it.

Saturday, September 13, 2014

And So We Begin ...

For the past several years I've been posting to Facebook each day some little ditties that, collectively, I've been calling "Daily Doggerel." Initially, I called them "Daily Quatrains," but I soon found I needed, at times, to be more ... expansive. Four lines just were insufficient to communicate the range of my--what?--insubstantiality? My superficiality?

Anyway, I soon was adding other little daily ditties, too. From my word-of-the-day calendar I would compose a little couplet (or more) about the word from the day before; I also began summarizing the plays of Shakespeare in rhymed couplets of iambic pentameter (hmmm ... wonder where I got that idea?).

It was not long before the whole thing was out of control. I had accumulated so many of the ditties that I decided to collect, then publish them on Kindle Direct. On June 6, 2013, I uploaded the first of what has now grown to be six volumes (each about 100 pp long); the seventh will appear at the end of November/beginning of December.  Here's a link to my Amazon Author Page where you can see these volumes--and others of more legitimate stature (an annotated edition of The Call of the Wild, a YA bio of Jack London, and numerous others).

So what are these "poems" about? In the e-published volumes, I arrange the pieces by categories--such as the following: Family; Films, Movies, Books; Quotidian Quandaries & Quibbles; Rants; Nature and Animals; Seasons and Celebrations; etc.

In order to repel a wider audience, I'm no longer going to post the doggerel on Facebook; instead, I'll put them on this site (with a link on FB) so that legions (!) of other readers can take a look and wonder in the basements of their souls what on earth is wrong with this man?