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SMAD. An Organ of Student Opinion. 1935. Volume 6. Number 9.

Short Shrift

page 2

Short Shrift.

Blithely indeed would one now take pen in hand, were it to review with caustic comment the gay farrago of the past few weeks, and not merely the last issue of your all-too-periodical periodical. What material in the helter-skelter claptrap of a Capping! The Extravaganza (Phillips, but less of them), the songs (Eisteddfodder), the Capping Ceremony, and the "flour of our youth" beneath the arches (belfry simply seething with bats), and the Ship of State in its inebriated corner-turning itinerary at that same function (or was it the chariot of Boadicea), Or again the Procesh, or the Ball, or "Cappicade" itself—that journal which the bard has aptly described in the lines—

"So full of vice

As leaves no place

For virtue to inhabit."

I could tell of the urchin selling this insanitary rag on Lambton Quay, using for his "Excelsior" the glad retrain, "Truth—Cavalcade—Truth—Cavalcade. . . . ." or else dilate upon strange journalistic scruples unearthed in the course of advertising, when the "Dominion" excised from an Extrav. advertisement the words "Jubilee Medals not accepted" But no—I must return (as the French would have it) to our very ancient muttons, forswearing all but the divine mission of expost facto censor of "Smad."

Well, shovelling aside the dust from your last issue, what do we find? And the answer is, in the words of the psalmist, your last issue. And within? An editorial upon the text, "Britons never (to the power of three) will be slaves": an antiseptic letter from S.W. on a still more ancient copy of "Smad" known as the F.O.B. issue (the Tournament or "full-o-beer" edition). And apart from this, the issue leaves one cold, like boarding-house bathwater. Which reminds me, why no news from the Hash House? Why no pearls from this, the incarnation of the College Spirit and So Forth? Why not some up-to date extracts from its autobiography? Or has it forsworn both vice and virtue, that it may choose this tongueless lethargy?

Of your literary standards, some unflattering opinions have been formed and many a reader has been irked into sending me his rather sulphuric views on the matter, these communications I select but one—that from William Shakespeare, a reader of "Smad." He makes some deploratory comments in a parnassagram which I give you as it left his own hand.

"I was recently reading a lyric found in Noah's Ark or Plut Ark or somewhere. It is probably well known to freshers, but may be new to others:

There's a wonderful family named Stein—

There's Gert and there's Ep and there's Ein.

Gert's novels are bunk,

Ep's statues are junk,

Anad no one can understand Ein.

"Now, that's what I call edifying, educative, and edulcorative—edible, even, alongside the tadpoles that have lately come to us from the bogs in the vicinity (but outside the three-mile limit) of the Pierian spring. One's taste for Communism, in literature at least, cools somewhat when one observes the field of Poesy, in so for as their boundaries coincide with the perimeter of this paper, expropriated by cuckoos who, after plucking the primrose from the river brink, replace it head first and then chortle—

'Side up
This
With. . .
Care!'

"The latest thing of the sort was entitled 'Rime.' It was a frost, all right.

"My heart ges out to old Don Marquis, who, after an effort to take the first of these ventures into neo-Anarchism seriously, made the following remarqus:

'So much free verse has kept me up at night

Scratching my head beneath the pale lamplight:

I often wonder what vers-librists read

One-half so rotten as the stuff they write!'

"But the Staff print it, presumably on the principle that this is a Changeling World."

You hit the mark, William, when you wrote: "There's a pleasure in being mad that only madmen know." Perhaps there is something in the stuff—talent wrapped in a napkin, for instance. What do you say to taking a paragraph from a "Dominion" editorial (or the College Calendar) and chopping it up into free verse—or worse, a Pome Polemic?