DANIEL
Elton John's song Daniel is a lovely, pensive, sentimental tune about two simpatico friends. How fitting, then, that Benedict Rod should pen his own lyrics to the same tune, in a fitting tribute to crunchy arch-defender Daniel Larison:
DANIEL as sung by by Benedict Rod
DANIEL IS WRITING TONIGHT ON THE NET
HOPE THAT HE'LL ADDRESS THE CONTRAS, CREEPS SAYING THAT I'M ALL WET
OH AND I THINK THAT DANIEL, WILL MAKE ME LOOK GOOD
GOD IT SEEMS LIKE DANIEL, KNOWS LOTS AND LOTS OF WORDS
DANIEL MY BROTHER, YOU ARE CRUNCHY LIKE ME
DO YOU STILL FEEL THE PAIN, OF THE SOULLESS MAINSTREAM
THEIR SPIRITS DIED, YOU SEE THEM LIKE I
DANIEL YOU'RE A STAR ON THE VIRTUOUS SIDE
DANIEL IS WRITING TONIGHT ON THE NET
HE CAN SEE THEM CLEAR LIKE I DO, CREEPS SAYING THAT I'M ALL WET
OH AND I THINK THAT DANIEL WILL MAKE ME LOOK GREAT
OH GOD BUT HERE COMES DANIEL, AN INTELLECTUAL HEAVYWEIGHT
finis
DANIEL as sung by by Benedict Rod
DANIEL IS WRITING TONIGHT ON THE NET
HOPE THAT HE'LL ADDRESS THE CONTRAS, CREEPS SAYING THAT I'M ALL WET
OH AND I THINK THAT DANIEL, WILL MAKE ME LOOK GOOD
GOD IT SEEMS LIKE DANIEL, KNOWS LOTS AND LOTS OF WORDS
DANIEL MY BROTHER, YOU ARE CRUNCHY LIKE ME
DO YOU STILL FEEL THE PAIN, OF THE SOULLESS MAINSTREAM
THEIR SPIRITS DIED, YOU SEE THEM LIKE I
DANIEL YOU'RE A STAR ON THE VIRTUOUS SIDE
DANIEL IS WRITING TONIGHT ON THE NET
HE CAN SEE THEM CLEAR LIKE I DO, CREEPS SAYING THAT I'M ALL WET
OH AND I THINK THAT DANIEL WILL MAKE ME LOOK GREAT
OH GOD BUT HERE COMES DANIEL, AN INTELLECTUAL HEAVYWEIGHT
finis
posted by kathleen at 1:11 PM
18 Comments:
Bad fit.
You're welcome to Elton John's entire oevre.
A tribute to Mr. Larison should carry with it some of the sensible experience of reading Mr. Larison's writing, so songs with a slow tempo and minor key are inappropriate.
Suggest whatever you do select must be played at 78 rpm...
art deco, can't say i agree. my "sensible experience" of larison's entire writing is definitely not at 78rpm. It's more like listening to eeyore singing brahm's lullaby.
Actually, upon rereading Larison's blog, my sentiments regarding larison's writing have changed somewhat. I now admit he shows remarkable economy in expression -- why say in 4 sentences what you can say in 1 sentence? for example:
EXAMPLE 1
"If the original formulation about these conservatives was overstated (as pretty much all of us on the crunchy/traditionalist side were willing to grant on reflection), the basic critique that too many conservatives now found themselves living as if they were on the wrong side of Voegelin’s divide between those who accepted the enduring moral order and the materialists was basically sound and was revealed in the course of the debate."
EXAMPLE 2
"There were much more solid criticisms coming from the paleo right, since most of the themes and ideas enunciated in Crunchy Cons had made their appearance in the pages of Chronicles, for example, years and decades before and had reached a depth and intensity that the crunchy con argument, which had also been expressed in much more popular, layman’s terms, never did reach."
EXAMPLE 3
"As I saw it, it was clearly they who derived from a much more recent lineage, it was they who seemed to frequently confuse human freedom with choice and the good life with satisfaction of desires, and it was they who found CCism alien to a large extent because they were unfamiliar with or hostile to the legacy of the agrarianism, localism and traditionalism of the Agrarians (up through and including Weaver and Bradford) and the New Conservatives."
an EDITOR from a known newspaper links to this claptrap? i guess run-on sentences are somehow crunchy.
I like this from example 3: "[the] agrarianism ... of the Agrarians." yeah baby!
sorry, it's the "legacy of the agrarianism ... of the Agrarians." hee hee. OK i'll shut up now.
Kathleen,
It's academic writing as I'm sure you are aware. There is a general belief among academics that obfuscation through run-on sentences and use of jargon proves that you have a superior intellect.
Damn. If only I were more familiar with or less hostile to the legacy of the agrarianism, localism and traditionalism of the Agrarians (up through and including Weaver and Bradford) and the New Conservatives, I wouldn't have found the CrunchyBlog so . . . so . . . alien.
the bryan garner book i referred to in the other thread really is worthwhile. i attended one of his seminars and felt like i was at the feet of the maharishi mahesh yogi.
kathleen, I too attended a Bryan Garner seminar. I write for a living, and had been for years -- after that seminar, though, I have changed many things for the better.
My favorite lesson from him was that, if you don't understand something that you read, generally the fault is with the writer, rather than the reader (that applies in spades to that Larison post, IMHO).
I also recommend Bryan Garner's Dictionary of American Usage. I use it weekly.
That guy was great in the Rockford Files, too.
Regarding "Daniel": Kathleen, you're going to make me enjoy Elton John the same way you did with Rupert Holmes. Of course, Homer Simpson's accidental "pina colonics" almost trumps that. (But that was a mondegreen, if you know what I mean.
Maybe you could try the "Crunchy-phile Rock" (Crocodile Rock) next.
In the very same day you get:
http://www.beliefnet.com/blogs/crunchycon/2006/11/life-unworthy-of-life-watch.html
and then this
http://www.beliefnet.com/blogs/crunchycon/2006/11/day-after.html
What about the judiciary? Whose likely to give us Euro-Supremes?
Whoever is in charge of writing posts here, you ought to write a post that this election now just about guarantees that all those little kindergarten males you see today will now certainly be fighting in wars twenty years from now.
Their rationale for voting against Bush today was to save their baby's from endless war. Good luck now.
Cube, but the republican congress, such as it was, did deserve to lose. what a bunch of duds. they did nothing they set out to do domestically while they had a golden opportunity.
american voters obviously have their heads in the sand regarding foreign policy, they just want iraq and the bad bad terrorists to go away (our friend Benedict Rod is a great example of that, i guess he'll be buying a couple of tickets to canada for his sons in a dozen years or so. blog entry "i've always really liked canada and canadians, so julie and i bought a cabin..."). most of the americans who voted "against iraq" have no freaking idea where iraq is on the map (uh, between iran and syria and above saudi arabia. maybe not such a bad idea for america to have a badass military presence there, ya know? there's a reason terrorists don't like it, and it's not coca cola) the republicans were losers in every sense of the word. the media would never let them sell iraq so it was asinine of the republicans to shy away from social security form, tax code reform. they didn't fight. Hastert was an embarrassment. they played it safe and they lost. maybe a good, necessary lesson in the long run.
oh yeah, and the republican spending is destroying the american currency. another small mark against them.
"Hastert was an embarrassment."
Amen to that. I never understood why that guy was chosen. Rumor is he will resign and that will be a good thing, IMHO.
God, I'm getting sick of Larison. It's not like I can avoid him...for some reason bloggers I do read (Rod, Sailer, etc.) have all seemed to simultaneously decide he's just the bee's knees.
I don't understand it. He reminds me of some of the nerdy reactionaries I knew in college, more royalist than the pretender to the French crown, always calling 1861-1865 "The War of Northern Agression", just certain that somewhere in this whole Enlightenment Lockean experiment called America, there is a strain of neo-feudalist/Jacobite/de Maistre tradition just aching to be expressed.
Colin, LOL re: Larison. But he's really smart. I guess he's working on some kind of PhD thingy in-between blog posts. Plus he is the king of the exclamation point.
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