Fruit-stealing scoundrel has returned!
Once upon a time I started a rather quixotic art project, if being a sarcastic jerk is an art form.
At the time the internet was going through a small William Carlos Williams appreciation round, with an especial focus on what is probably his most famous poem This is Just to Say.
I have always hated that poem. I do not much care for Williams altogether, although I have to admit Paterson has its moments.
So I was annoyed at the internet’s habit of throwing out This is Just to Say parodies at the drop of a hat, here are just a few examples (note the last is more about the overarching phenomenon itself), and I decided to make fun of these parodies.
At the time I put this to a vote in Illuminati Ganga as to whether it was a project worth doing under the organization’s aegis. It failed to be accepted by a narrow margin, and as such I did it on my own as a sort of piss-take rather than anything else.
Being lazy, a virtue for both programmers and poets alike, I automated the process somewhat.
I wrote a little script that when it was given a text file it would extract the text, go through a large corpus of images and randomly select some, perform some randomized mutations on the images and insert the text from the file as a word cloud. Much of the graphics manipulation was done using imageMagick and Processing. I would choose the best of the output images and add a little description of what I had done, which would then be automatically uploaded to Tumblr -
The first post was this one
It looks like the data on the first few posts are corrupted, so to see what the original pictures look like this would be the first post that shows something
Of course any project once begun will tend to attract more work into it, so in a short time I started adding other often parodied works that irritated me, for example news stories that like to lead in with some Jane Austen — “it is a truth universally acknowledged” — as in the following:
Which starts off with
*It is a truth universally acknowledged that if someone disses you in public, you must return the favor and exact revenge.*
Often these particular parodies are not done as parodies but just as a quick way to get into an article by stealing a great opening line everyone is familiar with — you can see the same sort of thing with articles doing variations on ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”
And who am I to complain, after all I started this very article with “Once upon a time”
I also started gathering together multiple parodies in one — for example these
A collection of parodies of another Williams poem — The Red Wheelbarrow often colloquially known as So Much Depends
A collection of This is Just to Say parodies by a frequent poster on Making Light (a blog that nowadays seems sadly defunct)
More The Red Wheelbarrow parodies.
Ok, so there I am collecting parodies of poems and famous literary fragments whose usage irritates me and putting them in a semi-automated Tumblr blog to make a point about, I don’t know, maybe unoriginality?
But then something happened, I wouldn’t say I started to love the poems, but I did start to feel a certain affection for their plasticity that allowed so many easy variations of them.
Perhaps it was because my descriptions of the content of each post were themselves parodies of the poem being parodied, so for this posting
My description of it was as follows:
Listen up, punk
I just ganked your parodies from
This is Just to Say That I’m Tired of Sharing an Apartment With William Carlos Williams.
I had to do it,
because of reasons.
At this point I had semi-automated the description generation as well, with a number of premade templates, so the output was often somewhat repetitive like:
Listen up punk,
So much depends on the So much depends parodies at Parody Poems
So I had to take them,
because reasons.
OR
Hola Amigos,
I ganked your parodies at http://thisisjusttosay.tumblr.com/page/2
I had to do it because
What else am I going to do?
OR
Hola punkettes,
I am ganking your poems at http://thisisjusttosay.tumblr.com/page/4
because I am chill and thrill like that.
ooooh, attitude!!
But then I went even further, I parodied the poems myself — I think this was my first foray down that dark road
This is Just to say
I have crashed your thesis
Which you were probably hoping to inflict on someone
Good God!
What were you thinking?
Did you really think
you could
get away with it.
So cold.
Of course entering into the realm of authoring parodies myself led in the end to self-referentiality
Where I could wordcloud my own parodies.
Sunk into the depths of depravity and unoriginal parodying I next mashed up lyrics of popular songs with my poetic targets — like this mashup of Aretha Franklin with This is Just to say:
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
Baby, baby, baby, this is just to say
Baby, baby, baby, this is just to say
How much I’m gonna miss you
But believe while I’m away
That I didn’t mean to hurt you
When I stole those plums
Baby, baby, baby (Baby)
Think of me sometimes (Baby)
Because if loving cold and delicious plums was so wrong (Baby)
Then I’m guilty of this crime (Guilty, I’m guilty, I’m guilty)
I’m bewildered, I’m lonely, and you’re breakfastless
Without those plums to hold in your hand
(Reach out for me, boy)
If you’d just understand
(Reach out to me, right now)
Those that we love, we foolishly make cry
Then sometimes feel it’s best to say goodbye, goodbye
But what’s inside can’t be denied
The plums in my stomach
are my only guide
Baby (Oh) Baby (Oh) Baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, this is just to say
Just how much I’m really gonna miss those plums in the ice-box
But believe, while I’m away (I need you, I need you, I need you, I need you, I need you — but not as much as I need the red wheelbarrow)
That I really didn’t mean, I didn’t mean, I didn’t mean to hurt you
When I stole those plums
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
Or mashups of multiple poems at once to parody
This is just to say
I have dismantled the red wheel barrow
and placed it in the icebox,
on top of the frozen chicken
which you were probably planning
on having for dinner.
Forgive me,
but
Everything collapses with logic.
IT is a truth universally acknowledged
that a single man in possession of a good fortune,
must be in want of a wife
to steal some plums from
I started grabbing parodies of authors that were not Williams, like Frost with his The Road Not Taken, even though I quite like that poem.
I started worrying about what was Best In Life
The poems all started collapsing into each other
And so I quit, it was too much, I was worried that one day all my words would just be fragments from other people.
It is a universal truth that so much depends on choosing which one of two roads one wants to go down, does one want to go down the road of stealing and apologizing profusely for every pilfered item, or to build something new for oneself. Which of these is best in life? But since that time so many more parodies have come up, nobody seems to be slowing down the memeification of Williams, Frost, and Austen.
And that is why Illuminati Ganga has revisited its earlier decision and Scoundrel Steals Fruit, Apologizes Insincerely has been brought back, this time with periodic posts to our twitter account and some review of the best instances here, all the graphics generation and post automation has of course been updated, so hopefully more plums can be stolen, important wheelbarrows identified, universal truths declared on divergent paths, because in the end that is what is best in life.
Note for our preliminaries we will repost some of the best of the former Scoundrel steals fruit, forgive us but we are some cold heartless bastards.
