Eve Tushnet has a top-ten post on horror in pop songs. Unfortunately, I’ve never heard of any of the songs, and only one of the performers – Siouxsie and the Banshies – who was (were?) the object of a Beavis & Butt-Head text-and-commentary segment. The last title on the Tushnet list is a song by the Cramps (whoever they are) called “Eyeball in my Martini”. My split-second reaction was “shouldn’t that be ‘Eyeball in my Highball’?”. A Google search shows that a song by that name has already been written, and is available for 50¢ from Lulu. I haven’t decided yet whether to pay for a copy.

Charles Rosen, The Classical Style, p. 170:

It was Handel who said that Gluck ‘knows no more counterpoint than my cook’ . . . Tovey has pointed out that Handel’s cook, who was also a singer in Handel’s opera company, probably knew a good bit of counterpoint.

Next Tuesday, the Criterion Collection will be coming out with a five-DVD collection of Ingmar Bergman’s earliest movies. Here’s the IMDB plot summary of the earliest of all, Hets or Torment (1944):

Jan-Erik Widgren is a high-school senior. His Latin teacher, Caligula, is feared by everybody, both teachers and students. Widgren falls in love with Berta, who works in a tobacco store. She tells him that she is harassed by a mean, sadistic man, but does not tell him that it is Caligula himself.

Here’s a user comment:

The brilliance of Stig Järrel needs to be mentioned. He is so convincing in his performance that when you’re leaving the movie-theater you might just see him coming around the corner with his wooden ruler . . .

According to IMDB, this was a reprise of a previous performance as a sadistic Latin teacher in a non-Bergman movie, not available on DVD. I hope my local Border’s has the Bergman set in stock on the day of release, since that’s also the last day of Teacher Appreciation Weekend (March 22-27).

. . . and probably influenced by it. This scoptic epitaph is entitled “De Erastenes, Medico” in the cheap paperback edition in which I found it (Rimas de Lope de Vega, ed. Gerardo Diego, Madrid, 1979), “De Erásthenes Medico (with an H) on the Virtual Cervantes site. I wonder if the name should be Eratost(h)enes. Either way, the title requires no gloss. Here is the text, with a rough translation:

Enseñé, no me escucharon;
escribí, no me leyeron;
curé mal, no me entendieron;
maté, no me castigaron;

Ya con morir satisfice;
oh muerte, quiero quejarme,
bien pudieras perdonarme
por servicios que te hice.

I lectured, they did not listen to me;
I wrote, they did not read me;
I ministered badly, they did not understand;
I killed, they did not punish me;

Now, by dying, I have paid in full.
Death, I wish to lodge a complaint:
you might well have pardoned me
for my services to you.

I suppose I should leaf through Book XI of the Anthology to see whether this is modeled on some particular epigram or just written in the same spirit as quite a few of them.