Tim Minchin has had his Jonathan Ross Christmas Show song cut, by nervous ITV execs. The song, which purports to compare Jesus to Woody Allen, because both are "Jewish" - was deemed religiously sensitive to Christians - but in fact, it seems apparently offensive on racist, grounds, instead. The yoking together of Allen, and Jesus, simply because they share a cultural identity would be outrageous in any other context. For instance, if I claimed that Mike Tyson and President Obama were actually one and the same because they were "both Black" you'd quickly sense this was not even comical, but simply ignorant, and offensive. Christmas in the UK is a minefield - it brings out the Scrooges in great numbers - and seemingly gives them permission to throw snowballs with razor blades in them - at all God's children. Get it over it, and grow up - religion is a holy time for people, and if you cannot share in the joy, then at least don't set out to spoil it for others.
When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se....
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Anyway, just have a look at it. It's not Minchin's best song but it is rather sweet: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SFdUJLebzU&feature=youtu.be