Exhibit 27.8

Despite the Fact

...that this blog clearly peaked with that last post about would-be cat abortionists, I suppose I must go on. I'm not really sure why either.

After reading it for two weeks, here's the bulk of my commentary on The Faerie Queene: That Spenser really liked parades.

You can't go two cantos without knights running into a parade. Usually it's just long lists of sins or love emotions or whathaveyou. This is what Bart Giamatti called the "pageant¹" and what I would call annoying. Look, we all love parades, even knights allegorically representing chastity love parades. But not every demon has to have one.

Or at least that's what I thought before. I've completely come around on parades being written about in Spenserian stanzas:


Macy's parade every Thanksgiving Day,
Woody Woodpecker flies! Behold the morn
as red McDonald's haloed head allays
the guilt of Snoopy's sins no longer worn;
afloat with charity a dog newborn
to angel heaven. Good this grief they surf
in currents rising high; but cords untorn
are sinful men assigned who owe the turf
a soul they claim by holding bound a balloon Smurf.


And that's what I spent all morning doing. Not for the first time, I'm really glad I don't write Elizabethan poetry. Fiction!

¹ Pete Rose is hereby banned from baseball.