Welp, it is Toosdai and so it is the day for some srs mischiefery with a mashery of Ogden Nashery (illustrated)! Let’s see what today is and if we have Ogden’s words to cover it… we do for our first holiday! For the second, we chose another new poet! But this post is an Open Thread, so please feel free to discuss and to post your favorite illustrated pomes in the Comments also too!
Today is Festival for the Souls of Dead Whales Day
How to Observe
Celebrate the day by having a ceremony for the souls of dead whales. A more proactive way to celebrate the day could be to support a group that is working to protect whales. Whale watching is another great way to spend the day. Some nonfiction books about whales or whaling that you could read include On the Northwest: Commercial Whaling in the Pacific Northwest, 1790-1967 and Men and Whales. Some fiction books include Moby Dick and The Widow's War.
[The Widow’s War sounds like a winner for those who like feminist novels!]
very like a whale
by Ogden Nash
[I can’t remember if I used this one before, but with such a title I can’t resist! There is no whale in the poem; do you suppose he meant he was making a big deal out of a little thing? Please follow the link to read the rest if you don’t recall!]
One thing that literature would be greatly the better for
Would be a more restricted employment by the authors of simile and
metaphor.
Authors of all races, be they Greeks, Romans, Teutons or Celts,
Can't seem just to say that anything is the thing it is but have to
go out of their way to say that it is like something else.
-snip-
That's the kind of thing that's being done all the time by poets,
from Homer to Tennyson;
They're always comparing ladies to lilies and veal to venison,
And they always say things like that the snow is a white blanket
after a winter storm.
Oh it is, is it, all right then, you sleep under a six-inch blanket of
snow and I'll sleep under a half-inch blanket of unpoetical
blanket material and we'll see which one keeps warm,
And after that maybe you'll begin to comprehend dimly
What I mean by too much metaphor and simile.
