Arnold Zwicky's Blog

An inventory of postings on this blog — I’d have liked to include Language Log as well, but even sticking to this blog the project was tremendously time-consuming — about this sort of play. The focus is on poetry and song lyrics, but there’s some material on music and on visual art. The comics are especially well represented.

9/25/09: bawdlerize (link): a parody of poetry anthologies

11/30/09: The Komodo dragon (link): parodies by Bob and Ray

6/29/10: Words and music (link): Zippy: plays on formulas

7/1/10: Golden State Rufskin tit (link): AMZ riff on a Diane Wakoski poem

7/3/10: The figs of fear (link): playful allusions; quote:

All these templates are derived from the model. Should we call them snowclone patterns?

I think not, unless we’re willing to extend the term snowclone to all sorts of playful allusions to some model fixed expression, as the Language Loggers have argued over the years, with reference to riffs on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (here) and a variety of other expressions (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, among other places). Word play that takes off on titles (of books, films, tv shows, rock bands, whatever), quotations, proverbs, clichés, idioms, and so on is all over the place, and folding such examples in with clear examples of snowclones pretty much reduces the notion of snowclone to vacuity.

7/4/10: Revolutionary music (link) and 7/2/11: Star-spangled banners and my country (link); reference to:

Louis Moreau Gottschalk’s “The Union” (Op. 48), a concert paraphrase (for the piano) “on the national airs Star Spangled Banner, Yankee Doodle, and Hail Columbia” and Henri Vieuxtemps’s “Souvenir d’Amérique — Variations burlesques sur Yankee Doodle” (Op. 17)

7/8/10: Varying formulas (link): Zippy: variations on formulas

7/18/10: The Pig’s Daughter (link): Zippy: beatnik poetry

7/20/10: Oh X the flowers of spring (link): The Mikado: the people, setting, and language in Doyly Carte productions aren’t authentically Japanese, but fantastical burlesques of “Japanese”

8/26/10: More Zippy names and things (link): Basil Wolverton’s grotesque images of people

10/31/10: Somewhere over my poncho (link): Zippy: “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”

11/1/10: Lady chow mein (link): Zippy: “Lady of Spain”; Walt Kelly’s “Deck us all with Boston Charlie” (taking off on “Deck the halls with boughs of holly”)

4/16/11: Back to the 50s (link): Zippy: beatnik stuff

5/12/11: Defective, damaged, etc. (link): Zippy: echo of Isaiah 53:3, as we hear it in Handel’s Messiah

5/13/11: Riffing and ripping on poetry (link): Zippy: Ginsberg’s Howl

7/27/11: Boldly going (link): playful allusions (see “The Figs of Fear”)

7/28/11: American Gothic (link): Walker Evans allusion to “American Gothic”

7/31/11: Critical thinking (link): The Flying Spaghetti Monster and other parodic creations

8/3/11: From the puns desk (link): on a large class of puns that play on fixed expressions (idioms, catchphrases, quotations, titles, names, etc.) as models

8/20/11: Munch up to date (link): parodies of Munch’s “The Scream” (and other artistic parodies)

8/24/11L Marisol (link:  Marisol’s Last Supper: translation, reinterpretation, burlesque?

8/30/10: limericist (link): with a parody limerick

9/23/11: My funny serpentine (link): Zippy: “My Funny Valentine”

9/26/11: More Zippy burlesque (link): Zippy: “Everything Happens to Me”

11/22/11: Allentown riff (link): Zippy: riffing on Billy Joel’s song “Allentown”

11/24/11: Product satire (link): Zippy: a festival of mangled product names

12/22/11: Christmas elves (link): Rhymes With Orange: burlesque of “You Ain’t Nothin’ But a Hound Dog”

1/1/12: My favorite things (link): Zippy: a riff on “My Favorite Things”

1/5/12: Three deaths (link): Ronald Searle parodies and caricatures

1/6/12: Disco Duck (link): Zippy with “Disco Duck”: “Not a burlesque, but a genuine novelty hit from the heyday of disco”

1/20/12: Beatnik poetry, invented and found (link): Zippy: two pieces of invented beatnik poetry (on tv in the 60s), plus found poetry from Herman Cain back in November

3/8/12: Lunar matters (link): Multiverse: parody of “That’s Amore”

 

This entry was posted on March 8, 2012 at 4:52 pm and is filed under Art/lit/music/film, Language play, Resources. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.