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Peter Sacks |
Helen,
my restive inamorata, my supernal queen—how you entice me! What
a frisson of pleasure travels and authors travel books of studied elegance up and
down my spine! I am like my dachshund Josh, who chases his pointy little
tail around and around and around! I love you as I love only English Language
Lyric Poetry, the vista off Westminster Bridge, and a select number of
my obsequious undergraduates! Do my khaki slacks excite the sex-kitten
I espy in you? Prevaricate not, saucy gamine, for I am a ruttish goat and
no milksop like Marc Shell.
Oh-oh-oh! Bring that edible embonpoint over here! Allow me to expatiate in your ear! |
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Helen "scented panties" Vendler responds: | You evoke an arguably ignominious value set: fucking and screwing make me less than a dame. But, O, for the scrupulous finger in your salt-and-pepper hairpiece--what an enviable appendage the former would be! Lusty and bawdy, yet knowing my place, I am like Virginia Woolf kicking Willa Cather in the quiet corner of English Literature and American Literature in English. I beg of you, darling, to rub my nose, and to render the desire declivitous. Sought after elsewhere, in my raw and elderly caverns, I exert and exhort my pussy-cat puissance; to the mountain tops of even Thomas Mann--shudder to think--I betray my well-bred manners: "Peter Sacks, punctuate the clause! Eschew, even, the predicate nominative! Only faster and faster, fragmentally, and O!" I would be drowned in your seas in an Opheliac satisfaction; and still, caress well my nylons, for the volatile legs underneath are osteoporotic. Dinner, wine, and affirmation are appropriate if not necessary. You erred beyond repentance in choosing the office furthest away from the "odor of old-womanhood coupled with the stench of aged literature." While your declamation is inexcusable, I seize your change-of-heart with eagle's talons! Saturate in the irony of your past mistakes, now; revere and then quash my insecurities. Through article (in American Literature, perhaps) and the removal thereof (your slacks preceding mine, Dandelion), christen me the Queen of Shakespeare! Make me lofty with youthful intrigue! |
