Not too many people know Tiny Tim sings in A Christmas Carol. Except for the musical version of the book, Tiny Tim does not sing in any other movie adaptation that I recall. I particularly love the description of Tim's voice ("plaintive little"), which just reinforces how sick and weak he is. Dickens is great a depicting small, doomed children. He does it in quite a few of his novels. Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop. Paul Dombey in Dombey and Son. Smike in Nicholas Nickleby. And, of course, we have Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol. That's a pretty long list of sick and dying kids. The fact that Tim's song is about a lost child in the snow isn't very surprising. It strengthens Tim's vulnerability. He is singing about a lost child and he is a lost child himself.
Today is P.O.E.T.S. Day. That stands for Piss On Everything Tomorrow's Saturday Day. I was introduced to this term by one of my English professors when I was an undergraduate. He would gleefully come into the classroom every Friday, carrying an anthology of poems, and, for the first 15 minutes of class (sometimes for the entire hour), he would read us poems. He took the day seriously. He didn't believe in working too hard on Fridays. I remember those days as some of the best I ever spent in a college classroom. I felt like Ethan Hawke in Dead Poets Society, listening to Robin Williams read Walt Whitman. It was great.
Yes, I will be giving you a new poem today. I have already begun working on it. It will be included in my second post, this afternoon or evening. At the moment, it's not quite formed enough to carve it electronically on this Internet cave wall, so to speak. Never fear, though. Poetry is on the way.
Saint Marty will sound his barbaric YAWP over the roofs of the world very soon.
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| O Captain! My Captain! |
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