Notes

Episode 7 - On the Backbeat

I wrote this episode months after I thought I'd finished the whole thing. I'd even recorded everything when I realised I needed to establish Flea a bit better. It was agony to go back and start writing again when I thought I was done, but needs must.

Sidetrip 3. Eerie Poems in Three Languages

Let's talk about Jabberwocky. If you know your Lewis Carroll you immediately noticed that I recast the poem to make the protagonist a young girl as opposed to a young man. On a formal level, it's mostly a simple process of switching pronouns, but four verses have to be reworked more extensively. If you know me you know I'm a bit obsessed about prosody and metrics, so I wasn't going to half-ass this. It needed to makes sense, it needed to rhyme properly, and it needed to scan.

So, second stanza, which normally runs:

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”

Ok. We need to change "son". I didn't want to go with "daughter" for two reasons: one, I use "daughter" later, where it really works, and two, it was difficult to think of a word that would rhyme with daughter and play the same role as "shun". So, after much bleeding from the nose, switch "son' with "dear" and "shun" with "fear", as follows:

“Beware the Jabberwock, my dear!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and fear
The frumious Bandersnatch!”

"My dear" is a little patronising, but the old man who speaks does sound somewhat full of himself anyway, and you just know he would be patronising to a young girl.

Stanza six was more arduous. This is how it normally reads:

“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
He chortled in his joy.

Now I used "daughter" for "boy", making sure the old man remained a dad. This makes the rhyme feminine, which is interesting considering what the old man is now chortling at:

“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish daughter!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
He chortled at the slaughter.

So the whole battle is now considerably more brutal--as is only proper really.

Okay. My workings: one, I contend that the original Tenniel illustration shows Alice facing down the Jabberwock (check the hair), not some dude; two, the (few) reworked lines make the battle feel, as I say, more violent; three, the thematic link to Moth is considerably strengthened; and four, why the hell not?

Episode 9 - In the Margins

Yes, Cicada misremembers Shambleau: the story actually takes place on Mars.

Sidetrip 4. Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came

I rerecorded a stanza a few days ago when I realised that there was an error in my copy of the poem. Rerecording a bit and inserting it into an earlier recording is not a trivial process. So imagine my consternation when I twigged, half an hour before release, that there was another mistake in the blimming text.

I'll be frank: I don't have the time or the energy to change it, so I'll just explain it here. It's fairly inconsequential, but this kind of thing does vex me quite a bit.

Stanza XIV. The text as I have it reads as follows:

Alive? he might be dead for aught I knew,
With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain,
And shut eyes underneath the rusty mane;
Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe;
I never saw a brute I hated so;
He must be wicked to deserve such pain.

 

The mistake, of course, is in the first line -- "knew" should be "know", and that should have been obvious from the rhyme scheme. But I missed it, and now we're all stuck with it. God have mercy.

 

Oh! Also -- the dog you hear barking in the distance at the end is the neighbour's dog, who did bark from the neighbour's backyard as I was finishing the recording.