[Chris O'Carroll]

Originally Posted by Christopher ONeill

though it is far too long for the Spectator competition.

Your T.S. Eliot cruller recipe does exceed the 150 word limit, but you're only 34 words over. If you could bear to kill your darlings to that extent, you might cook up a winner.

(The New Statesman and the Literary Review have both done recipe competitions lately. I can still taste my failure to win either one.)

[Christopher ONeill]

Originally Posted by Chris O'Carroll

If you could bear to kill your darlings to that extent, you might cook up a winner.

It hadn't occurred to me before, but I suppose one of the advantages of a parody of Eliot, or Pound, or Olson, or Harwood .... is that you can tear it in half, throw part of it away, and you still have pretty much the same parody you started with.

This is a quite an old piece, going back to the days when I used to workshop on the old SparkNotes poetry site. When they closed that site down I lost any motivation for pieces I had written specifically for workshopping there; dozens of them have been sitting on a memory stick for seven years or more.

Looking at this piece now for the first time since around 2004, there are a lot of things I just don't like about it. nutrizione is very weak; and (the eggs I mean) is Ezra, not Tom.

You might just have given me the poke I needed to finally make something of this.

Thanks, Chris, I owe you one.