I

Death in the Classroom

First, children, let us sing the Names of Death.
Sacred Death, and Holy Death,
Most Holy Death, Most Saintly Death,
Skinny Lady, Bony Lady, Black Lady, White Lady,
White Sister, Pretty Girl,
Powerful Lady, Lady of the Shadows,
Holy Girl, Girl Skeleton, Saint Skeleton
And Godmother.
And Lord of Death,
And Lord of the Good Death, Lord of the Bad Death,
Easeful Death, and Mighty Death.
King of the Graveyard, Lord of the Boneyard,
The Emissary, The Angel and The Reaper.
The Hunter, The Finder, The Keeper.

For homework, choose a Name and write a story,
Bright with joy, dark with sorrow.
Write it with your fountain pens.
Please make sure it’s finished by tomorrow.
Revision now, on what we’ve done today.
Then, and only then, Jemima,
Can you go out to play.

Where, children, does Death live? Above.
Where, children, does Death live? Below.
Children, will Death come? He will.
When, children, will Death come? We do not know.
How, children, will Death dance? Like this.
Children, are you scared of Death? Yes, Miss!
Children! Are you scared of Death? No, Miss!

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II

Secondary School

So, sinful earth and rebel powers,
And slaves to fate and chance,
(And you too, Teddy, when you’re ready, please),
Spread the good news.
There’s happy tidings in The Times today.
A cheerful letter from the Minister – he’s
Glad to say Heironymo’s got better.
(Roger, was it lower-back pain?
No sir, he was “mad againe”.)

He also says that Death,
That feeds on desperate men,
Won’t eat us up again.
So, no more dying then!
Yes, no more dying then!

Yet, shall we still say, Sunil,
“Death, be not proud!”
Or shall we say, Anita,
Take me now,
Put me to sleep,
With poppies or charms,
Poppies or charms,
For I’ve opened my arms.

Now to “real life”, Jamar.
Consider this – a man sits in a bar,
Waiting for his friend.
He thinks, for unlike you, he’s far from clever,
“I will live forever.”
Well, he died next week,
And ten years hence,
Flesh and sense
Were bones and dust,
The bones themselves no longer bones.
Some looked like sticks,
Pocked with woodworm holes.
And others, Lucy, shells of fledgling souls.

Dry dust!
Blood in thy face!
Full of grace!
Make our pillows down, or dust.
Go, my brave young things,
Fill jampotfuls of frogspawn,
Watch it hatch, then write a piece
On Mr Heaney.

Or Mr Bleaney.

Easeful death, Bill,
Easeful death.
Here there is no light,
And seems it rich to die,
For, as you know, Miss Jones and I,
We nearly kissed.
Fled is that music. Class dismissed.

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III

Varsity Tutorial, D. Litt.

Doctors of Letters
Must know their letters.
So D is for Derrida, and Death.
Be sure to look them up.
B is for Bier, and Beer,
And Walter Benjamin,
Or the inevitable dying Breath
Of Bearwood, that intolerable Boffin.
C is for Coffee, Coughing,
Carry-him-off, and Coffin.
Note all this.

C also serves for College Cloisters,
The honey-stoned arcades,
Their bounded but strangely boundless lawn,
Where dusk turns down the volume
Of its strident, guarded green,
To a quietly beckoning emerald
As the summer clock strikes seven;
An Elysium where one day all must pass,
For now, forbidden.
Keep Off The Grass,
Pelouse interdite:
A novel yet to be written, Mr. Fleet.

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IV

Art School

John Charles Loth, A native of Bavaria,
The Apelles of his time,
Who, on account of the skill of his pencil,
Was, by the emperor Leopold,
Honoured with a patent of nobility,
Began to paint the shades of Death
On the sixth day of October, 1698,
In the fifty-sixth year of his age.

‘Painting the Shades’ begins in week 9,
Taught by artist-in-residence, Marjorie Klein,

Ms Klein writes, “Please come prepared,
With sufficient Flake White
To show the sun in flight,
And the dying of the light,
For this will prepare your souls for flight,
Your hearts for Death’s cold hand!”

This course will stand all students in good stead
Before and after they are dead.

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V

Bullet Points

Might you be shot, Gunner Short?
Yessir.
And exactly how might you be shot, Gunner Short?

● Shot in the neck,
● Shot in the head,
● Shot in the a***hole,
● Shot in bed,
● Shot in a desert,
● Shot in the knee,
● Shot before my breakfast,
● Shot before my tea.
● Shot of tequila
● Shot of rum
● Shot near a palace
● Shot near a slum
● Shot as I dream of Jill, the kids and me,
● Shot as I dream of our day by a sea
● Shot with breakers that danced on the sand,
● Shot as I think of Jill holding my hand.

Dear Mrs. Short, it is
With deep regret and sympathy
That I must now disclose
The death in action of your husband, who
According to the Adjutant’s report, was

● Shot in the head,
● Shot in the knee,
● Shot near a palace,
● Shot after his tea.
● Shot as he dreamed of your day with the kids, by a sea
● Shot with breakers that danced on the sand,
● Shot as he thought of you holding his hand.

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You have to hand it to Wikipedia. Their content becomes more agreeably bizarre by the minute, as in the excerpts from Death from laughter below. I’ve added a few notes here and there. Here is an excerpt from the comedy sketch that finished off Alex Mitchell of Kings Lynn.

On 24 March 1975, Alex Mitchell, from King’s Lynn, England, died laughing while watching the “Kung Fu Kapers” episode of The Goodies, featuring a kilt-clad Scotsman with his bagpipes battling a master of the Lancastrian martial art “Eckythump”, who was armed with a black pudding.

After 25 minutes of continuous laughter, Mitchell finally slumped on the sofa and died from heart failure. His widow later sent The Goodies a letter thanking them for making Mitchell’s final moments of life so pleasant.Diagnosis of his granddaughter in 2012 of having the inheritable long QT syndrome (a heart rhythm abnormality) suggests that Mitchell may have died of a cardiac arrest caused by the same condition.

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In 1410, King Martin of Aragon died from a combination of indigestion and uncontrollable laughter triggered by a joke told by his favourite court jester. [Wiki doesn’t elaborate on this. The king had eaten an entire goose for dinner. The jester’s name was Borra. This was the joke: “In the next vineyard, I saw a young deer hanging by his tail from a tree, as if someone had so punished him for stealing figs.”]

One ancient account of the death of Chrysippus, the 3rd-century BC Greek Stoic philosopher, tells that he died of laughter after he saw a donkey eating his figs; he told a slave to give the donkey neat wine with which to wash them down, and then, “having laughed too much, he died” (Diogenes Laërtius 7.185). [With this and the preceding story, it’s useful to know that ‘fig’ was and still is a lewd synonym for the female genitalia in Mediterranean culture, and therefore central in the jester’s repertoire.]

In 1799, William Cushing, a pauper who lived in the parish of St Andrew’s, Norwich, England, died from “a fit of excessive laughter, which lasted five minutes.” [The report in The Monthly Mirror, Vol viii, 1799: “Norwich – An inquisition was on Sunday, 21st April, taken by Mr. Marks, the coroner, on the hody of William Cushing, a pauper, who was taken with a violent fit of laughing, at the Hole in the Wall public house, in St. Andrew’s, which continued above five minutes, when he dropped down and expired. Juror’s verdict ‘Died by the visitation of God.'”

In 1556, Pietro Aretino “is said to have died of suffocation from laughing too much”. [Pietro Aretino is buried in the church of San Luca in Venice. As a result of his reputation as a pornographer and satirist, the church became a place of pilgrimage for nonconformists of various sorts, such as libertines, non-believers, journalists and free thinkers. His epitaph was striking: “Here lies Aretino, the Tuscan poet, that spoke poorly of everyone, except God, whom he said he ‘did not know’.” This was later recast by local wags as follows: “Here lies Aretino, the Tuscan poet , that every one spoke poorly about, except God, who apologized saying: ‘I do not know him’!” Having heard an off-colour joke, Aretino fell over and took a fatal bump to the head.]

Zeuxis, a 5th-century BC Greek painter, is said to have died laughing at the humorous way in which he painted the goddess Aphrodite – after the old woman who commissioned it insisted on modeling for the portrait.

In 1660, Thomas Urquhart, the Scottish aristocrat, polymath, and first translator of François Rabelais’s writings into English, is said to have died laughing upon hearing that Charles II had taken the throne.

On October 14, 1920, 56-year-old Mr. Arthur Cobcroft, a dog trainer from Loftus Street, Leichhardt, Australia, was reading a five year old newspaper and was amused at the prices for some commodities in 1915 as compared to 1920. He made a remark to his wife regarding this, and burst into laughter, and in the midst of it he collapsed and died. A doctor named Nixon was called in, and stated that the death was due to heart failure, brought by excessive laughter.

LibriVox is a rapidly expanding online platform where volunteers make recordings of literary classics, anything from short poems to major novels. Its laudable aim is the “acoustical liberation of books into the public domain”, making it a sort of vocal version of Project Gutenberg. The problem is that a great many of the volunteers, though well intentioned, fall woefully short of the mark when it comes to the interpretation of their chosen texts. Thus LibriVox is potentially a platform for the most excruciating public self-humiliation. Let me put my own head on the block before I set out some examples. Here’s the scenario…

I’m a middle-aged guy with a reasonably cultivated British accent. I also fancy myself as a literary type and a bit of a performer. I’d like to volunteer for LibriVox. Let me think of a text well-suited to my age, voice, nationality and background. Ah yes – the work to which I could best do justice, without a shadow of a doubt, is Huckleberry Finn. I shall be Mark Twain’s faithful servant, submerging any otiose expression of my own personality in favour of the greater objective, of bringing Huck and his pals to life for a new generation of listeners. Let me do a very quick voice test:

Faced with this flawlessly authentic evocation of antebellum life and language along the Mississippi River, you would surely have to agree that I should get in touch with LibriVox immediately. If I do, I shall be “a first among equals”, a member of the thousands-strong fellowship of volunteers who have added an extra dimension to literary awareness. Here is my first LibriVox example, a poem by Lewis Carroll. Poetry arguably affords us readers an opportunity to “be ourselves” for a spell, abandoning the tighter constraints imposed by novels and short stories, where we continue to strive for the authentic and indispensable sense of time and place. Here the reader courageously sets aside the high-Anglican whimsy and Oxford donnishness one might normally associate with Carroll in favour of a more contemporary reading:

And here is an excerpt from a group project, a recording of Macbeth. As to the accents and casting, finely-grained “diversity” is the deeply-struck hallmark of this production. Who needs the (freely available) old-hat performance starring Sir Ian McKellen and Dame Judi Dench when they could experience this instead?

And here is a highly individual characterization of Rodion Raskolnikov. After this one could easily imagine Russia’s favourite axe-wielding maniac being perfectly at home at a cocktail party with Gore Vidal and Tenn Williams:

Sometimes, it has to be said, a reader’s unsuitability for the chosen text is far outweighed and redeemed by some kind of mysterious inner magic, a kind of mesmerizing personal connexion with the text. Consider this, ignoring if you can the “Arksford friend”:

I am not for a moment suggesting that all English drama has to be performed in an Arksford accent, or that people should be discouraged from reading great literature aloud in class, or at informal gatherings, by virtue of their backgrounds or accents. They shouldn’t. But presenting great literature to the public, as a public service, is a different matter entirely. Whether paid or voluntary, it surely requires some measure of respect for the author, some understanding of what his or her intentions were. Bearing that in mind, I’ll get back to my rehearsal of Huckleberry Finn:

Plomer accepts Garnett’s invitation to work at Cape…

…the book referred to is Kilvert’s Diaries, the subject of a future post!

Apply now…