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Sunday 3 -
John and Charles Wesley
Now the Spycam pans to a city in the American Northeast, and settles on the figure of one Brian McCoon, 29, who's a Doctoral Candidate in Literature and Culture. He was writing a Dissertation called The Inner Lives of Nursery Rhymes, which was to be a Tome of Genius, for which he would read all available material about how most Nursery Rhymes that mothers sing to their unsuspecting kids in places like the suburbs of Montgomery, Alabama, say, are actually spawned from a bloody and nefarious history in which the Said Rhymes were, and are, about some pretty fucked-up shit! Like the one about how it's raining, it's pouring (derived from the platitude, "When it Rains, it Pours," a real Murphy's Law type of shit to be telling your Children in the First Place, according to the OED, Shorter Edition), and the old man goes to bed and bumps his head and can't get up in the morning, well, think you can guess just why the fuck that is? 'Cause he's a dead motherfucker, that's why! Oh, and the homosexual references like the one about Robin and Robert or whoeverthefuck and how they oversleep. Like that. But anyway, this was gonna be a dick-rubbing masterpiece of contemporary scholarship, it was gonna encompass everything, and then, he was sure (since his College Advisors told him so) that he'd get tenure and 70K start plus benefits to teach seminars at, like, Brown, where he'd also have time to get lots of student Pussy! Yeah! They'd pay for Conferences at which he'd do all this while rubbing elbows with Derrida. But this book, this was the ONE.
Like the one that character's writing in that old book called, I believe, Middlemarch, by Thomas Mann or T.S. Eliot or Thomas Hardy or one of those dudes, and I never read past the first couple of chapters, but I once wrote a really good Paper on it with information I got from Masterplots where I didn't but should've observed that I guess the point of that book, like that of this one, is that some pretty serious shit goes down for an appreciable number of people in or around the Middle of March, as people like Julius Caesar, or Jesus, people like that, have proved, as have all the Pisces Chicks born during this Fateful star-crossed month, girls who will grow up and become Sex Maniacs who are into the Arts and develop an unhealthy interest in the Occult, y'know, those chicks, right, and man I'm sorry but those fucking Nursery Rhymes those sensitive little bitches get taught in infancy do them no special favors, either, nor do writing books about it that get you on as an Adjunct at a community college near Chico, California, or somewhere, but at least maybe that's just what happened to Brian, I don't know. But still, while he was writing the shit (and we'll take this up in much more pronounced detail Later, as we get closer to the Middle of March), he'd occasionally encounter one of the many Nursery Rhymes he just couldn't for the Sperm of him penetrate, like this one:
Fiddle dee dee,
fiddle dee dee,
The fly has married the bumblebee.
They went to the church,
And married was she.
The fly has married the bumblebee.
And like what the fuck is that about? Why write that shit, and impart it to children?
Well, this is where a Higher Education really does Favors for your work, Aqualung. First of all, it's obviously about a Mixed Marriage. And while Brian doubted it was one between say, honkies and niggers, all right, "Fiddle dee dee" is mid-century code for "I'm a faggot" just like wearing a hankie out of a certain pocket means you like to have people defecate in your left Ear or whatever, but you know. Problem is, it's not gay code now and wasn't recorded in such a context until Captain Grouse's terrific book on Slang, which first appeared in 1879, I think, but I'm not gonna look it up, Brian already did and it's in his Footnotes somewhere, I guess, wherever that silverfish-knawed manuscript up and made off to. And it had nothing to do with anything somebody in WWII, in the Heat of Battle, cooked up, either, 'cause look! Those boys, they knew they were going into Great Danger. They knew they would be doing More than their Part. The resented having to sacrifice Years of their Youth to a War they never even Made, goddammit. They wanted to throw baseballs, not grenades, shoot a .22 rifle, not a fucking M-1. But having been Caught up in the War, they decided, all of them, to be as Positive as Possible in their Army Careers.
But such digressed thinking lead Brian to realize to just what degree Politics, and War, or Possible War, or Rumors of War, made on fucking Nursery Rhymes! Duh!!! So clearly, the Mixed Marriage was a reference to that of the English King Henry the Whatever (Peter O'Toole) and the French Eleanor of Aquataine (Katharine Hepburn), since all Nursery Rhymes are Medieval in origin or earlier, and originated in England and France, anyway, except for the ones that got kicked off in Germany, or Prussia, as it was then called, or South Korea.
So now he was seeing it clearly: the Book at least had that little part worked out, and though he still had quite a few Nursery Rhymes left to go (he meant to do them all) Brian McCoon had, on this occasion, conquered an army made up of the Demons of Historical Uncertainty that conspired to defeat lesser men, to keep the world Shrouded in the Yarns of Ignorance, and keep Academics from the illustrious future Brian now knew was His for the Taking.
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