The Naming of Daves
December 28, 2008 ~ 8 Comments
Oh, how I love Edward Gorey. As a kid, I had Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats with the Gorey illustrations and read it over and over. I also got the soundtrack to “Cats” on tape and loved it because it was mostly just the Eliot poems set to music. Then I actually saw “Cats” and it was horrifying.
For these illustrations, I figured out how to create a pretty decent pastiche of Gorey’s inking style with very thin technical pens. Much later, I used this skill to produce the beloved bedtime story Edward Gorey’s The Trouble with Tribbles, the one thing that’s ever gotten me BoingBoinged. (Andrew got BoingBoinged for posting a Spider-Man Planned Parenthood comic from the 1970s. In both cases, we were out of town when it happened and came home to massive overage charges from our webhost. Damn you, Edward Gorey’s The Trouble with Tribbles!)
That EGtTwT post sure attracts lots of spammers.
………
Back in the day, It took me far too long to find out what the original of this poem was.
I don’t know how I feel about BoingBoing as a verb.
(Taken from “Asparagus, The Theatre Cat)
Dave is the man with the technical skill.
His surname, as written with ball-point or quill,
Is actually Davenport — but we can save
Half a second addressing him simply as “Dave”.
(more later … pressed for time this morning)
I personally feel really good about BoingBoing as a verb. Any noun can be verbed.
Good poem. But I think we all know the secret deep and inscrutible name is Dave.
Verbing weirds language.
Sing skippadoo, sing skippadie,
The Kelly Mell is drawing nigh.