This item is taken from PN Review 206, Volume 38 Number 6, July - August 2012.
Letter from John Lucas
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Sir:
Rory Waterman says that it’s sloppy of me to twist syntax to find a rhyme when I report that the protagonist in the poem ‘My Baxter’ ‘knows how it crumbles, cookie wise’. But ‘That’s the way it crumbles, cookie-wise’ is exactly what Jack Lemmon (Baxter) says in The Apartment. And it seems a bit rich to complain that I offer ‘easily dismissed sneers at the privileged’ without noticing that those who at the end of ‘Ballad of the Makers’ spoon out Beluga while ordering someone to send for tame engineer and sad-fuck carpenter were once the very engineers and carpenters the ballad also celebrates. That’s the way it crumbles, class-wise.
JOHN LUCAS
Nottingham
Sir:
Rory Waterman says that it’s sloppy of me to twist syntax to find a rhyme when I report that the protagonist in the poem ‘My Baxter’ ‘knows how it crumbles, cookie wise’. But ‘That’s the way it crumbles, cookie-wise’ is exactly what Jack Lemmon (Baxter) says in The Apartment. And it seems a bit rich to complain that I offer ‘easily dismissed sneers at the privileged’ without noticing that those who at the end of ‘Ballad of the Makers’ spoon out Beluga while ordering someone to send for tame engineer and sad-fuck carpenter were once the very engineers and carpenters the ballad also celebrates. That’s the way it crumbles, class-wise.
JOHN LUCAS
Nottingham
This item is taken from PN Review 206, Volume 38 Number 6, July - August 2012.
