Leonard Cohen and Neil Diamond To Share Twin Bill
Coming To A Stage Nowhere Near Me
According to the subheading at Virtual Festivals,
on the final day of Glastonbury Festival1 2008
If Loving Both Leonard Cohen And Neil Diamond Is Wrong, I Don’t Want To Be Right
This seems an auspicious moment to out myself as one of the few who admit to not only enjoying the songs of both artists but also perceiving more than a passing similarity between the two.
I’m not the only one. Consider these comments:
… “What’s It Gonna Be” sounds like something snatched in a pre-dawn lark from a Leonard Cohen disc.
…he sounds rather like Cohen, one of my all-time favorites.
I blame Jason for this - he loaned me his iPod shuffle on the train back from Vernezza to Milan, and it had the album on it. Shuffles lack a display, and Jason is a Hip Young Dude, so I just assumed that Neil Diamond was too uncool for him. Getting off the train, I said something like “Dude, you have some band on there that sounds exactly like Neil Diamond!”5
Are Suzanne and Sweet Caroline Sisters Under The Skin? - The Declamation
The seminal paper in this field, however, is certainly Kevin Chong’s Songs Sung Blue - Leonard Cohen and Neil Diamond: separated at birth?, published in February 3, 2006. Since the full work is available at the CBC.com site, I’ll only include a few excerpts here and urge readers to review the entire text at their leisure.
It Gets Worse
Not only do I hear similar elements in Cohen’s and Diamond’s music, I think there is a physical resemblance6 (see photo montage at top of post). This is, of course, in contradistinction to my - eh, let’s call it my questioning of the similarities in appearance others have noted.7
Footnotes
- Glastonbury Festival takes place at Worthy Farm, Pilton, Somerset 27-29 June, 2008 ~back~
- Pissing off the Taste Police with Neil Diamond ~back~
- Neil Diamond “Hell Yeah” and “Captain of a Shipwreck” ~back~
- Neil Diamond ~back~
- Damn, this is hard to say but… ~back~
- One notes that there are a number of professional impersonators emulating Mr. Diamond but none that I can find imitating Leonard Cohen. If I am correct about the congruence between the two performers, perhaps these impersonators could augment their income by adding the Cohen songbook to their act and calling the production something like “I’m Your Solitary Man.” ~back~
- See Another Leonard Cohen Look-alike Nominee and Now For The Leonard Cohen (Separated At) Birth Day. For the record, I do now kinda, sorta see the resemblance between Dustin Hoffman and Leonard Cohen when they were in their early 20s. ~back~
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The Opposite Of Eulogy Is - Eulogy
An Aside On The Meaning Of “Eulogy”
Two observations from my recent research on eulogies1 follow:
1. Every formal definition of eulogy revolves around its approbative quality - to eulogize an individual is to praise him or her.
Consider, for example, the accumulation of definitions and descriptions of “eulogy” found at Answers.com:
- A. A laudatory speech or written tribute, especially one praising someone who has died. Or B. High praise or commendation.2
- An expression of warm approval: acclaim, acclamation, applause, celebration, commendation, compliment, encomium, kudos, laudation, panegyric, plaudit, praise. 3
- Definition: praise, acclamation
Antonyms: calumny, condemnation, criticism< 4 - Words of praise, often for a dead person, but also a staple in introducing speakers, in nominating candidates, and on other such occasions.5
- A eulogy is a speech or writing in praise of a person or thing. The word is derived from two Greek words - ευ (pronounced “you”) meaning good or well and λογος (pronounced “logos”) meaning word, phrase, speech, etc. The term “eulogy” may refer to a funeral oration given in tribute to a person or people who have recently died. … Eulogies can also praise a living person or people who are still alive, which normally takes place on special occasions like birthdays etc.6
2. In English-speaking regions other than dictionary-land, the meaning of “eulogy” extends to include any commentary about an individual triggered by that individual’s death.
Q: If a eulogy is characterized as positive and laudatory, what does one call a written or spoken exposition that censures and viciously criticizes the recently deceased?
A: A eulogy
Yes, in the vernacular, “eulogy” is routinely used to designate not only a tribute to the dead7 but also its counterpoint - the lambasting, the denouncement, the vehement accretion of insults that derides the recently departed as the most dastardly of scoundrels, the basest of criminals, and the most heinous of villains.
While a “contemptuous eulogy” is certainly an oxymoron under the rules and regulations set forth by Merriam-Webster adherents, it is just as certainly a phenomenon that occurs frequently in the rhetorical jungle of print and broadcast journalism, blogs, and web sites.
Moreover, these pronouncements are brandished in print without irony; there are no real or implicit quotation marks or linguistic equivalents of a sly wink to signal that the writer is consciously using the term, “eulogy,” to denote the opposite of its literal meaning, knowingly sharing the joke with the reader.
Who Cares If Eulogy Obviates Malogy
Somewhere in this favored land, a dictionary-loving prescriptive grammarian may have composed a scholarly rant predicting the downfall of civilization as we know it lest we repent of this sloppy wielding of “eulogy” to mean an entity and its opposite, but if so, I didn’t find it. Where is the outrage?
Or, if this extension of the original meaning is a fait accompli, why are the reference books silent on the point?
I dunno, but
Three Exemplars of the Malevolent Eulogy
Only occasionally is this ditty referenced as a eulogy (possibly because it lacks an explicit listing of the sins of the departed) but my personal fondness of the song compels its inclusion here.
Hunter S. Thompson’s essay on Richard Nixon following news of the ex-president’s death, published in Rolling Stone, June 16, 1994, is routinely labeled a eulogy despite the absence of approval or praise among its expressions of disgust and loathing.
HE WAS A CROOK
by Hunter S. ThompsonMEMO FROM THE NATIONAL AFFAIRS DESK DATE: MAY 1, 1994 FROM: DR. HUNTER S. THOMPSON SUBJECT: THE DEATH OF RICHARD NIXON: NOTES ON THE PASSING OF AN AMERICAN MONSTER…. HE WAS A LIAR AND A QUITTER, AND HE SHOULD HAVE BEEN BURIED AT SEA…. BUT HE WAS, AFTER ALL, THE PRESIDENT.
“And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird.”
—Revelation 18:2
Richard Nixon is gone now, and I am poorer for it. He was the real thing — a political monster straight out of Grendel and a very dangerous enemy. He could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time. He lied to his friends and betrayed the trust of his family. Not even Gerald Ford, the unhappy ex-president who pardoned Nixon and kept him out of prison, was immune to the evil fallout. Ford, who believes strongly in Heaven and Hell, has told more than one of his celebrity golf partners that “I know I will go to hell, because I pardoned Richard Nixon.”
I have had my own bloody relationship with Nixon for many years, but I am not worried about it landing me in hell with him. I have already been there with that bastard, and I am a better person for it. Nixon had the unique ability to make his enemies seem honorable, and we developed a keen sense of fraternity. Some of my best friends have hated Nixon all their lives. My mother hates Nixon, my son hates Nixon, I hate Nixon, and this hatred has brought us together.
Nixon laughed when I told him this. “Don’t worry,” he said, “I, too, am a family man, and we feel the same way about you.”
It was Richard Nixon who got me into politics, and now that he’s gone, I feel lonely. He was a giant in his way. As long as Nixon was politically alive — and he was, all the way to the end — we could always be sure of finding the enemy on the Low Road. There was no need to look anywhere else for the evil bastard. He had the fighting instincts of a badger trapped by hounds. The badger will roll over on its back and emit a smell of death, which confuses the dogs and lures them in for the traditional ripping and tearing action. But it is usually the badger who does the ripping and tearing. It is a beast that fights best on its back: rolling under the throat of the enemy and seizing it by the head with all four claws.
That was Nixon’s style — and if you forgot, he would kill you as a lesson to the others. Badgers don’t fight fair, bubba. That’s why God made dachshunds.
Nixon was a navy man, and he should have been buried at sea. Many of his friends were seagoing people: Bebe Rebozo, Robert Vesco, William F. Buckley Jr., and some of them wanted a full naval burial.
These come in at least two styles, however, and Nixon’s immediate family strongly opposed both of them. In the traditionalist style, the dead president’s body would be wrapped and sewn loosely in canvas sailcloth and dumped off the stern of a frigate at least 100 miles off the coast and at least 1,000 miles south of San Diego, so the corpse could never wash up on American soil in any recognizable form.
The family opted for cremation until they were advised of the potentially onerous implications of a strictly private, unwitnessed burning of the body of the man who was, after all, the President of the United States. Awkward questions might be raised, dark allusions to Hitler and Rasputin. People would be filing lawsuits to get their hands on the dental charts. Long court battles would be inevitable — some with liberal cranks bitching about corpus delicti and habeas corpus and others with giant insurance companies trying not to pay off on his death benefits. Either way, an orgy of greed and duplicity was sure to follow any public hint that Nixon might have somehow faked his own death or been cryogenically transferred to fascist Chinese interests on the Central Asian Mainland.
It would also play into the hands of those millions of self-stigmatized patriots like me who believe these things already.
If the right people had been in charge of Nixon’s funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.
These are harsh words for a man only recently canonized by President Clinton and my old friend George McGovern — but I have written worse things about Nixon, many times, and the record will show that I kicked him repeatedly long before he went down. I beat him like a mad dog with mange every time I got a chance, and I am proud of it. He was scum.
Let there be no mistake in the history books about that. Richard Nixon was an evil man — evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it. He was utterly without ethics or morals or any bedrock sense of decency. Nobody trusted him — except maybe the Stalinist Chinese, and honest historians will remember him mainly as a rat who kept scrambling to get back on the ship.
It is fitting that Richard Nixon’s final gesture to the American people was a clearly illegal series of 21 105-mm howitzer blasts that shattered the peace of a residential neighborhood and permanently disturbed many children. Neighbors also complained about another unsanctioned burial in the yard at the old Nixon place, which was brazenly illegal. “It makes the whole neighborhood like a graveyard,” said one. “And it fucks up my children’s sense of values.”
Many were incensed about the howitzers — but they knew there was nothing they could do about it — not with the current president sitting about 50 yards away and laughing at the roar of the cannons. It was Nixon’s last war, and he won.
The funeral was a dreary affair, finely staged for TV and shrewdly dominated by ambitious politicians and revisionist historians. The Rev. Billy Graham, still agile and eloquent at the age of 136, was billed as the main speaker, but he was quickly upstaged by two 1996 GOP presidential candidates: Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas and Gov. Pete Wilson of California, who formally hosted the event and saw his poll numbers crippled when he got blown off the stage by Dole, who somehow seized the No. 3 slot on the roster and uttered such a shameless, self-serving eulogy that even he burst into tears at the end of it.
Dole’s stock went up like a rocket and cast him as the early GOP front-runner for ‘96. Wilson, speaking next, sounded like an Engelbert Humperdinck impersonator and probably won’t even be re-elected as governor of California in November.
The historians were strongly represented by the No. 2 speaker, Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s secretary of state and himself a zealous revisionist with many axes to grind. He set the tone for the day with a maudlin and spectacularly self-serving portrait of Nixon as even more saintly than his mother and as a president of many godlike accomplishments — most of them put together in secret by Kissinger, who came to California as part of a huge publicity tour for his new book on diplomacy, genius, Stalin, H. P. Lovecraft and other great minds of our time, including himself and Richard Nixon.
Kissinger was only one of the many historians who suddenly came to see Nixon as more than the sum of his many squalid parts. He seemed to be saying that History will not have to absolve Nixon, because he has already done it himself in a massive act of will and crazed arrogance that already ranks him supreme, along with other Nietzschean supermen like Hitler, Jesus, Bismarck and the Emperor Hirohito. These revisionists have catapulted Nixon to the status of an American Caesar, claiming that when the definitive history of the 20th century is written, no other president will come close to Nixon in stature. “He will dwarf FDR and Truman,” according to one scholar from Duke University.
It was all gibberish, of course. Nixon was no more a Saint than he was a Great President. He was more like Sammy Glick than Winston Churchill. He was a cheap crook and a merciless war criminal who bombed more people to death in Laos and Cambodia than the U.S. Army lost in all of World War II, and he denied it to the day of his death. When students at Kent State University, in Ohio, protested the bombing, he connived to have them attacked and slain by troops from the National Guard.
Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism — which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful.
Nixon’s meteoric rise from the unemployment line to the vice presidency in six quick years would never have happened if TV had come along 10 years earlier. He got away with his sleazy “my dog Checkers” speech in 1952 because most voters heard it on the radio or read about it in the headlines of their local, Republican newspapers. When Nixon finally had to face the TV cameras for real in the 1960 presidential campaign debates, he got whipped like a red-headed mule. Even die-hard Republican voters were shocked by his cruel and incompetent persona. Interestingly, most people who heard those debates on the radio thought Nixon had won. But the mushrooming TV audience saw him as a truthless used-car salesman, and they voted accordingly. It was the first time in 14 years that Nixon lost an election.
When he arrived in the White House as VP at the age of 40, he was a smart young man on the rise — a hubris-crazed monster from the bowels of the American dream with a heart full of hate and an overweening lust to be President. He had won every office he’d run for and stomped like a Nazi on all of his enemies and even some of his friends.
Nixon had no friends except George Will and J. Edgar Hoover (and they both deserted him). It was Hoover’s shameless death in 1972 that led directly to Nixon’s downfall. He felt helpless and alone with Hoover gone. He no longer had access to either the Director or the Director’s ghastly bank of Personal Files on almost everybody in Washington.
Hoover was Nixon’s right flank, and when he croaked, Nixon knew how Lee felt when Stonewall Jackson got killed at Chancellorsville. It permanently exposed Lee’s flank and led to the disaster at Gettysburg.
For Nixon, the loss of Hoover led inevitably to the disaster of Watergate. It meant hiring a New Director — who turned out to be an unfortunate toady named L. Patrick Gray, who squealed like a pig in hot oil the first time Nixon leaned on him. Gray panicked and fingered White House Counsel John Dean, who refused to take the rap and rolled over, instead, on Nixon, who was trapped like a rat by Dean’s relentless, vengeful testimony and went all to pieces right in front of our eyes on TV.
That is Watergate, in a nut, for people with seriously diminished attention spans. The real story is a lot longer and reads like a textbook on human treachery. They were all scum, but only Nixon walked free and lived to clear his name. Or at least that’s what Bill Clinton says — and he is, after all, the President of the United States.
Nixon liked to remind people of that. He believed it, and that was why he went down. He was not only a crook but a fool. Two years after he quit, he told a TV journalist that “if the president does it, it can’t be illegal.”
Shit. Not even Spiro Agnew was that dumb. He was a flat-out, knee-crawling thug with the morals of a weasel on speed. But he was Nixon’s vice president for five years, and he only resigned when he was caught red-handed taking cash bribes across his desk in the White House.
Unlike Nixon, Agnew didn’t argue. He quit his job and fled in the night to Baltimore, where he appeared the next morning in U.S. District Court, which allowed him to stay out of prison for bribery and extortion in exchange for a guilty (no contest) plea on income-tax evasion. After that he became a major celebrity and played golf and tried to get a Coors distributorship. He never spoke to Nixon again and was an unwelcome guest at the funeral. They called him Rude, but he went anyway. It was one of those Biological Imperatives, like salmon swimming up waterfalls to spawn before they die. He knew he was scum, but it didn’t bother him.
Agnew was the Joey Buttafuoco of the Nixon administration, and Hoover was its Caligula. They were brutal, brain-damaged degenerates worse than any hit man out of The Godfather, yet they were the men Richard Nixon trusted most. Together they defined his Presidency.
It would be easy to forget and forgive Henry Kissinger of his crimes, just as he forgave Nixon. Yes, we could do that — but it would be wrong. Kissinger is a slippery little devil, a world-class hustler with a thick German accent and a very keen eye for weak spots at the top of the power structure. Nixon was one of those, and Super K exploited him mercilessly, all the way to the end.
Kissinger made the Gang of Four complete: Agnew, Hoover, Kissinger and Nixon. A group photo of these perverts would say all we need to know about the Age of Nixon.
Nixon’s spirit will be with us for the rest of our lives — whether you’re me or Bill Clinton or you or Kurt Cobain or Bishop Tutu or Keith Richards or Amy Fisher or Boris Yeltsin’s daughter or your fiancee’s 16-year-old beer-drunk brother with his braided goatee and his whole life like a thundercloud out in front of him. This is not a generational thing. You don’t even have to know who Richard Nixon was to be a victim of his ugly, Nazi spirit.
He has poisoned our water forever. Nixon will be remembered as a classic case of a smart man shitting in his own nest. But he also shit in our nests, and that was the crime that history will burn on his memory like a brand. By disgracing and degrading the Presidency of the United States, by fleeing the White House like a diseased cur, Richard Nixon broke the heart of the American Dream.
The final example is also a classic, Christopher Hitchens expostulating on the death of Jerry Falwell, a performance that is typically classified as a eulogy.8
Footnotes
- See He Was One Heck Of A Guy - The Eulogy and Graham Chapman And The Parrot Are Dead - A Eulogy To Die For ~back~
- From The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition ~back~
- From Roget’s II: The New Thesaurus, Third Edition ~back~
- From Antonyms ~back~
- From The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition ~back~
- From Wikipedia - Eulogy ~back~
- Despite the conscientious efforts of dictionaries and other reference sources, those of us who populate the great unwashed almost invariably associate “eulogy” and its variants with death. Most folks offered, as in Wikipedia’s example, a eulogy on the occasion of an upcoming birthday would reflexly decline the honor with alacrity in the belief that a prerequisite for receiving such an accolade entails ones demise. But that discrepancy is an issue for another post. ~back~
- Eulogy as attack is, it seems, a Hitchens’ specialty, as this excerpt from the The QandO Blog indicates:
Eulogizing Bob Hope, Hitchens wrote… [Bob Hope] was a fool, and nearly a clown, but he was never even remotely a comedian.
Eulogizing Ronald Reagan, Hitchens wrote… [Ronald Reagan] was as dumb as a stump. … He had no friends, only cronies. His children didn’t like him all that much. He met his second wife…because she needed to get off a Hollywood blacklist and he was the man to see. …I could not believe that … such a smart country would put up with such an obvious phony and loon.
Christopher Hitchens came along too late to improperly eulogize the Last Lion, but he still managed to trample on the grave of Winston Churchill, calling Churchill “Incompetent, Boorish, Drunk, and Mostly Wrong”
~back~
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The Search Is On At Good Clean Wholesome Fun
Search Me - Or At Least GoodCleanWholesome Fun1
I’ve added a search function to the tumblelog at GoodCleanWholesomeFun.com (in the area circled above in red). Like the tumblelog itself, the search mechanism is on trial. This search is fast and covers all the posts (unlike Google, which covers only those posts indexed by Googlebot). The limitation of this mechanism is that, as far as I can determine, it can search only for a continuous string; e.g., entering “patient compliance” will find all instances of “patient compliance” as a single term but will not find posts with both “patient” and “compliance” if those words are separated - such as “The patient was in the compliance study.”
The Latest and Greatest Good Clean Wholesome Fun Posts
- Daily Show interview with Dr. Ben-Shahar, instructor of Harvard’s most popular class, Positive Psychology, AKA “the happiness course
- Bridezillas On Radical Diets
- Algorithm, Algorithm, Make Me A Match
- Top 100 Canadian Albums
- Why Does The U.S. Surgeon General Wear A Uniform?
- Why Most Cover Songs Stink
- World’s Most Expensive Universities
- It’s not really so surprising that mortality statistics sometimes show a drop during a doctors’ strike. What’s staggering is that a reasonable person could see such stats and for even an instant think: Holy crap, those doctors are killing us
Footnotes
- GoodCleanWholesome Fun is the quick-witted, energetic, happy go lucky younger tumblelog sibling of DrHGuy’s jocose but prolix, sometimes abstruse Heck of a Guy blog. For details, see Try Some GoodCleanWholesomeFun ~back~
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Graham Chapman And The Parrot Are Dead - A Eulogy To Die For
Heck of a Guy Eulogy Research Lives On
As I noted in yesterday’s post, He Was One Heck Of A Guy - The Eulogy, my personal participation in the preparation of my eulogy appears necessary if the desired high-quality, fulsomely overblown, raucous yet cockle-warming send-off is to be assured.
Currently, that effort focuses on a search for emulation-worthy eulogies that could provide inspiration for my own effort - or, failing that, substantial chunks of prose that could be lifted directly into my personal panegyric.
Today’s post showcases an outstanding specimen of the genre, the brilliant tour de force given by John Cleese at the memorial service for his Monty Python colleague, Graham Chapman.
Left to Right: Graham Chapman, John Cleese With Dead Parrot
Graham Chapman’s Memorial Service
Graham Chapman, comedian, actor, writer, physician, and one of the six members of the Monty Python crew died October 4, 1989.1
His memorial service was held on the evening of December 6 1989 in the Great Hall at St Bartholomew’s Hospital. John Cleese delivered the eulogy. Afterward, Cleese joined Gilliam, Jones, and Palin along with Chapman’s other friends as Idle led them in a rendition of “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” from the film Monty Python’s Life of Brian.
Graham Chapman’s Memorial Service was filmed and produced by Mark Chapman for the BBC Omnibus presentation of Life of Python, 1989, and dedicated in his memory.
Graham Chapman’s Memorial Speech
Delivered by John Cleese
Graham Chapman, co-author of the ‘Parrot Sketch,’2 is no more.
He has ceased to be, bereft of life, he rests in peace, he has kicked the bucket, hopped the twig, bit the dust, snuffed it, breathed his last, and gone to meet the Great Head of Light Entertainment in the sky, and I guess that we’re all thinking how sad it is that a man of such talent, such capability and kindness, of such intelligence should now be so suddenly spirited away at the age of only forty-eight, before he’d achieved many of the things of which he was capable, and before he’d had enough fun.
Well, I feel that I should say, “Nonsense. Good riddance to him, the freeloading bastard! I hope he fries. ”
And the reason I think I should say this is, he would never forgive me if I didn’t, if I threw away this opportunity to shock you all on his behalf. Anything for him but mindless good taste. I could hear him whispering in my ear last night as I was writing this:
“Alright, Cleese, you’re very proud of being the first person to ever say ’shit’ on television. If this service is really for me, just for starters, I want you to be the first person ever at a British memorial service to say ‘fuck!’”
You see, the trouble is, I can’t. If he were here with me now I would probably have the courage, because he always emboldened me. But the truth is, I lack his balls, his splendid defiance. And so I’ll have to content myself instead with saying ‘Betty Mardsen…’3
But bolder and less inhibited spirits than me follow today. Jones and Idle, Gilliam and Palin. Heaven knows what the next hour will bring in Graham’s name. Trousers dropping, blasphemers on pogo sticks, spectacular displays of high-speed farting, synchronised incest. One of the four is planning to stuff a dead ocelot and a 1922 Remington typewriter up his own arse to the sound of the second movement of Elgar’s cello concerto. And that’s in the first half.
Because you see, Gray would have wanted it this way. Really. Anything for him but mindless good taste. And that’s what I’ll always remember about him—apart, of course, from his Olympian extravagance. He was the prince of bad taste. He loved to shock. In fact, Gray, more than anyone I knew, embodied and symbolised all that was most offensive and juvenile in Monty Python. And his delight in shocking people led him on to greater and greater feats. I like to think of him as the pioneering beacon that beat the path along which fainter spirits could follow.
Some memories. I remember writing the undertaker speech with him, and him suggesting the punch line, ‘All right, we’ll eat her, but if you feel bad about it afterwards, we’ll dig a grave and you can throw up into it.’ I remember discovering in 1969, when we wrote every day at the flat where Connie Booth and I lived, that he’d recently discovered the game of printing four-letter words on neat little squares of paper, and then quietly placing them at strategic points around our flat, forcing Connie and me into frantic last minute paper chases whenever we were expecting important guests.
I remember him at BBC parties crawling around on all fours, rubbing himself affectionately against the legs of gray-suited executives, and delicately nibbling the more appetizing female calves. Mrs. Eric Morecambe remembers that too.
I remember his being invited to speak at the Oxford union, and entering the chamber dressed as a carrot—a full length orange tapering costume with a large, bright green sprig as a hat—-and then, when his turn came to speak, refusing to do so. He just stood there, literally speechless, for twenty minutes, smiling beatifically. The only time in world history that a totally silent man has succeeded in inciting a riot.
I remember Graham receiving a Sun newspaper TV award from Reggie Maudling. Who else! And taking the trophy falling to the ground and crawling all the way back to his table, screaming loudly, as loudly as he could. And if you remember Gray, that was very loud indeed.
It is magnificent, isn’t it? You see, the thing about shock… is not that it upsets some people, I think; I think that it gives others a momentary joy of liberation, as we realised in that instant that the social rules that constrict our lives so terribly are not actually very important.
Well, Gray can’t do that for us anymore. He’s gone. He is an ex-Chapman. All we have of him now is our memories. But it will be some time before they fade.
Coming Attractions: Still more eulogies, including at least one for a fictional character.
Footnotes
- Chapman’s death occurred one day before the 20th anniversary of the first broadcast of Flying Circus; Terry Jones called it “the worst case of party-pooping in all history.” After Chapman’s death, speculation of a Python revival inevitably faded, with Idle saying, “we would only do a reunion if Chapman came back from the dead. So we’re negotiating with his agent.” (From Wikipedia) ~back~
- Cleese and Chapman co-wrote many classic Python sketches, including the “Dead Parrot Sketch.” In the original version, written mostly by Cleese, the frustrated customer was trying to return a faulty toaster to a shop. Chapman came up with the idea that returning a dead parrot to a pet shop might make a more interesting subject than a toaster. (From Wikipedia) ~back~
- During his ‘drinking days’, Chapman jokingly referred to himself as the British actress Betty Marsden, possibly because of Marsden’s oft-quoted desire to die with a glass of gin in her hand. (From Wikipedia) Chapman would sporadically shout odd words, exclamations, and noises with no apparent connection to any ongoing conversations or events; one favorite, frequently invoked phrase was “Betty Marsden.” (From Graham Chapman) ~back~
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He Was One Heck Of A Guy - The Eulogy
DrHGuy Memorial Service Walk-through: Act II, Scene 12, Alternative B
Being Really Prepared
I’ve been considering eulogies lately. I hasten to interject that this is not a subtle signal that my demise is fast approaching. On the other hand, I do have some concerns that, should my friends await my last breath before preparing their tributes or, worse yet, attempt a genuinely extemporaneous last salute, the results will be suboptimal.
While Duke of Derm and Lord of Leisure, for example, are fine buddies, the veritable iodine-added salt of the earth, and precisely the sort of fellows one wants covering ones back, they do not, I’m sorry to report, have the comic chops for the kind of performance that - well, that I deserve.
I am, consequently, faced with two alternatives:
1. Making new friends with a flair for public speaking, compositional skills, and a sense of humor resonant with my own.
2. Preparing a script and stage directions for my eulogy myself, after which my acquaintances can audition for roles in that one and only performance of what should be, as far as I’m concerned, the greatest show on earth, based on stand-up comedy style, acting technique, stagecraft, theatric range, and the likelihood of not only outliving me but also maintaining the physical and cognitive capacities necessary to assure that the show will, indeed, go on.1
It will surprise no one who knows me to learn that I have chosen the latter course of action. 2
The Research
As a result of this process, I’ve come to realize that the time and labors required to live an altruistic, productive life of the sort that offers eulogizers a treasury of good deeds, accomplishments, and evidence of service to humanity from which to choose, can be put to more efficacious use assimilating memorial performances already proven successful in uplifting the spirits of the audience and enhancing the reputation of the deceased. Many of these speeches suggest goals reached and obstacles overcome which can be advantageously attributed to the individual memorialized without the messy inconvenience of him or her actually executing these acts.
I’ve begun the research and will close today’s post with a few excerpts from selected eulogies, not all of which are suitably laudatory for our purposes but all of which are certainly striking.
New York Fire Department Captain James Gormley on Captain Francis Callahan, killed at the World Trade Center:
Rev. Howard Moody on Lenny Bruce:
Robert Hunter on Jerry Garcia, his longtime songwriting partner:
to lend an attitude of grace
a lyric is an orphan thing,
a hive with neither honey’s taste
nor power to truly sting.5
Robert F. Kennedy on Martin Luther King Jr., given impromptu during a campaign stop in racially charged Indianapolis:
Dan Aykroyd on John Belushi:
Jacques Pépin on Julia Child:
Rev. Louis Saunders on Lee Harvey Oswald:
Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison on President James Polk:
Rich Tillman at the memorial service for his older brother, NFL player turned war hero Pat Tillman, immediately swearing into the microphone said he hadn’t written anything, he said and with asked mourners to hold their spiritual bromides:
From The London Times on French philosopher Jacques Derrida, the founder of Deconstruction Movement, a central tenet of which is that “there is nothing outside the text:”
A conceptual foundation for the deconstruction of mortality
Can there be any certainty in the death of Jacques Derrida ? The obituarists’ objective attempts to place his life in a finite context are, necessarily, subject to epistemic relativism, the idea that all such scientific theories are mere “narrations” or social constructions. Surely, a postmodernist deconstruction of their import would inevitably question the foundational conceptual categories of prior science — among them, Derrida’s own existence — which become problematised and relativised. This conceptual revolution has profound implications for the content of future postmodern and liberatory science of mortality. Is God dead?
It was, perhaps, Alan D. Sokal who most heuristically challenged the dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual outlook in his brilliant exegesis of Derridian principles Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity. Dr Sokal’s inclusive review of the literature (see especially Hamill, Graham. The epistemology of expurgation: Bacon and The Masculine Birth of Time. In Queering the Renaissance, pp. 236-252. And also Doyle, Richard. Dislocating knowledge, thinking out of joint: Rhizomatics and the importance of being multiple), and his eerily exact summary of the complementarity principle (Instead of a simple “either/or” structure, deconstruction attempts to elaborate a discourse that says neither “either/or” nor “both/and” nor even “neither/nor” while at the same time not abandoning these logics either) make his reading of Derrida irrefutable. We know only two things. We do not know. And M Derrida is in no position to enlighten us.12
Coming Attractions: Even better eulogies to follow soon.
Footnotes
- That still leaves finding singer-dancers for the chorus line, composing the music, sketching out the choreography, arranging for soloists, … , but one thing at a time. ~back~
- I had, in truth, rejected the first option by the time I finished “Marking new friends.” ~back~
- Excerpted from A Wonderful Life: 50 Eulogies to Lift the Spirit by Cyrus Copeland ~back~
- Ibid ~back~
- Ibid ~back~
- Ibid ~back~
- Ibid ~back~
- Ibid ~back~
- Ibid ~back~
- From The Liberator, June 22, 1849 ~back~
- American Tragedy by Mike Fish. ESPN.com ~back~
- The London Times Oct 11, 2004 ~back~