#316

p.336 link: https://books.google.com/books?id=w-jfXz9T_2cC&pg=PA336&lpg=PA336&dq=Penniless,+ill,+abroad,+Henry+lay+skew+to+Henry's+American+fate,+which+was+to+be+well&source=bl&ots=eJA1mJjHUt&sig=pXY-EkReFzq0TeZaLih0xWC0pG4&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CB0Q6AEwAGoVChMImZnOz7SGyQIVTvpjCh1XAwGp#v=onepage&q=Penniless%2C%20ill%2C%20abroad%2C%20Henry%20lay%20skew%20to%20Henry's%20American%20fate%2C%20which%20was%20to%20be%20well&f=false

A kind of stereotype has arisen in our culture, of the 38-year old guy still living in his parents’ basement—generally with poor diet, physical fitness and grooming standards—and he only emerges when he goes to Dungeons and Dragons conventions. Then he becomes a fourth-level cleric mage, master of the 24-sided dice, and a real magical badass within the fantasy world he and legions of his ilk have created in such fantastical detail. Orcs and dragons beware! Online computer games have made it less necessary for him to ever leave the basement, but it’s the same phenomenon. Here is where literature meets the fantasy gamer! Rather than playing games about slaying dragons, you write silly poems about it.

This poem is flat, and silly, and whatever else you want to call it. Once, yesterday—okay. To keep going? Also, whatever. But to not weed this one out? Not quite sure I’m getting it. This is the hero poet going to battle against the dragonish forces of his personal demons, the uncaring and cruel world, and the dangerous and unsettling vagaries that put him cowering under the covers far from home, broke and sick? Sure get up and fight them off, metaphorically. But this has a 6^th-grade level of sophistication, I’m afraid, and I’m a bit worried it was the product of drastically declining faculties. Somebody should have told him. Lady Valerie might have liked it though, but I suspect Lady Valerie rolled her eyes when his head was turned, and when she told her friends about it, a lot of giggling came wafting out of the ladies room.

Only the last line matters: “My love & pride / fixed me like a safety pin.” The syntax is lazy, but the point is clear enough. The point is that, as disastrous as his behavior has been, it was his behavior and he insists on pride in it. And there’s some justification, because something has come of it all beyond mere decline. Out of decline has arisen an artistic record of decline. Fine. But it’s hard not to think of Walt Disney tooling around his compound on his little train, or Elvis’s last days in his velvet-padded Graceland, or Michael Jackson having long talks with his friends the chimpanzee and the giraffe in his multi-million dollar personal amusement park zoo. Anyway, I’m glad Sir Henry slayed the dragon. It’s a fantasy, though. In life, the dragon slayed him.