Well, now!! There's a Great Idea!

While we're at it, let's do a general dunging out of all that old, boring stuff!

Let's begin with Homer's Iliad. Who gives a bloody poop about a war that happened a couple or three millennia ago and lasted for ten years? And it was all over some dizzy broad whose mother had kinky sex with a god in the shape of a swan! What the hell! Beautiful? With that lineage, she probably looked like Daisy Duck!

The Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aenaeid, these were all extremely long poems, and considering the state of literacy (or lack thereof) back then, they were probably chanted by someone who maybe had even memorized them (now there's somebody who needed to get a life!) while plucking away at a lyre or harp.   Nobody does that sort of thing anymore!

Beowulf. Supposed to be the first work of English literature. But it was about a Danish hero killing a monster who was crashing mead halls and eating everyone. Then he goes and kills the monster's mother. Then he goes and kills a dragon. Silly story! Ridiculous! And besides, nobody can read Olde English anymore!

Same for Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. All those dull people telling boring stories!

Shakespeare! His bloody plays are so bloody long! And nobody real speaks in iambic pentameter. And if that weren't enough, all the characters talk funny!

There are whole bunches, but I'm just hitting a few high points. Somebody mentioned Charles Dickens. So life for most people, especially children, in big cities in England was really crap, what with general poverty, child labor, and all that. Dickens seemed to be hung up on that sort of stuff. But these days, who gives a damn? Let the little bastards earn their keep! They're lucky to have jobs!

And my Gawd, Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronté? All that old stuff about social customs back in the early and mid-19th century. And would you believe it!?? There are Bronté societies and groups of "Janiacs" who get together to read and endlessly analyze and discuss this stuff!

All these collections of folk music and ballads? Since no one much is interested in this stuff anymore, and those who are insist on boring the crap out of everybody around them within earshot, just sweep these collections off the library shelves, then raid peoples' personal collections, and let's have a good old fashioned book burning!!!

While we're at it, all the vinyl and CDs and tapes containing any song—or piece of music—older than, say, from within the past thirty years—ought to go on the fire too. And that includes medieval chants, early operas by Monteverdi, songs and lute music by Dowland, Campion, and others, everything by Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, Puccini, Verdi, Tchaikovsky, Ravel, Rimsky-Korsakov, Gershwin, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Leonard Bernstein—

ALL of it!!!

This is a MODERN world!! Let's not allow anything in it that's older than, say, at the most, thirty years.

Back in the Sixties, there was the motto, "Never trust anyone over thirty!" Let me update that in the light of our New Order:    Never read, listen to, or sing anything that wasn't written within the past thirty years.

And you songwriters out there!

Don't dare write any songs that last longer than two minutes and forty-five seconds!

Don Firth

P. S. Oh! And if you haven't heard it on the radio within the past two weeks—it's OUT!!