Kilmer 2009: Dishonorable Mention

Tubular
by Samantha Kuperberg, BC'10

Adorable horrible tube dress of mine
Oh wicked, fiendish foe
I do confess
I loved you once—yes,
But alas I love you no mo’

Your fabric it does cling to me
Like a really clingy guy
Who calls every day
With nothing to say,
Like “Sometimes I wish I could fly!”

Another distress of you dress I confess:
You require a strapless bra
Which rubs my skin
Till’ it’s dry as gin
So I go braless—p’sha!!

That you’ve gone down like an alto or a plane
Should come as no surprise
You’ve moved from my nips
Way down to my hips
Cause I’m quite well endowed—boob-wise.

Yes, my bountiful bosom defies gravity
As up and down it does heave
Wish to blow my nose
(I’m allergic to clothes)
But alas. I can’t. No sleeve.

A cincher belt goes round my waist
I pull it tight and hard
To accentuate
My milkshake
Which brings all the boys to the yard

Feel a blustery wind that blusters and blows
For your purchase it will make me pay
As it will expose
More than simply my toes
Like my panties with a heading: Tuesday.

I could have worn some comfy jeans
But I like how you make me look
Big chest, small waist
Long legs, bland face
Like she whose job is it to hook.

But alas, alack the pain I feel
And the lengths that I must go
Oh bitchin’ dress
Are you worth this distress?
No no no no no no no!

So, dress I will laugh if you do dare to ask
If I’d wear you again-- not a chance!
Get out of my face
You’re being replaced
With hot pants, hot pants, hot pants.

Audio


Winner
First Runner-Up
Second Runner-Up
Dishonorable Mention
Dishonorable Mention
Dishonorable Mention
Dishonorable Mention

Kilmer 2009: Dishonorable Mention

Chinese Teashop Rap
(With the exception of Darjeeling, which is an Indian tea)
by Dexter Thompson-Pomeroy, CC'12

She got some Darjeeling
And some aged Pu-erh
Old lady in the teashop was lookin’ at her
She said the price aint low!
Do you got the dough?
That’s from Huzhou zhou zhou zhou zhou zhou zhou

She got some Dong ding Wu long
And some Lapsang Souchong
She looked at that old lady hard and long
She said I’ll buy some mo’
I got the dough
Do ya have any tea from the mountains of Song Luo?

Hey, I aint never seen a girl who’d really go
This crazy with the tea spendin’ all her dough
Had expert knowledge bout all the teas
Whether to boil or leave at ninety degrees
So aromatic
She’s a tea fanatic
So enigmatic
I’m gonna be schematic
Hold up wait a minute I said no please don’t go
Please girl don’t just walk out that door
All about tea you seem to know
D’you wanna go get some Tie Guan Yin
Girl please don’t leave it’d be a sin
You’re as smokin’ as Lapsang Souchong
Lightly oxidized like Pouchong
She said “why not? Let’s go have a cuppa”
I said “yes let’s, after we have supper”


Crime and Punishment Rap

Yo I was sittin' in my room readin' Dostoevky,
Jus' sittin' in my chair sittin' on my buttsky
And I thought to myself this Raskolnikov guy
He be goin' down just like Tsar Nikolai
He killed Alyona just for the dough
He killed Lizaveta too, yea he sank low
But he hid that money right under a rock
He aint even kept a kopeck jus' blood on his sock

Prestupleniye i Nakazaniye
Why'd he kill her if he didn't want the money eh?

And I thought as I walked to my class in Pupin
Dunechka really should just dump Mr. Luzhin
But she thinks that she’s helpin’ out her big bro
By marryin’ that lyin’ schemin’ dodo
Then along comes Mr. Svidrigailov
He tries to give her money sayin’ come here my love
But she don’t want him, no! she say I ain’t a ho!
Her heart belongs to Razumikhin.

Prestupleniye i Nakazaniye
Why’d she get engaged to that dummy eh?
Cri-cri-cri-crime and Punishment
Mr. Svidrigailov ain’t much of a gent.

So I sat down again and continued to read
About Rodya and Sonya and their discussion
Rodya told her how he did a bad deed
How he might have had an itty bitty axe malfunction
At first she was scared and she wanted to shout
But then she prayed cause lord she’s really devout

Audio


Winner
First Runner-Up
Second Runner-Up
Dishonorable Mention
Dishonorable Mention
Dishonorable Mention
Dishonorable Mention

Kilmer 2009: Dishonorable Mention

If God,
Then: Newark, New Jersey
Or: Up, Up, Down, Down, Right, Left, Dog Poop
Or: God/Jay Michaelson: The Antichrist?
by Michal Richardson, BC'06

Have you heard? God’s everywhere!
Your nose, your gall bladder, your hair
Alpaca farms! Axe body spray!
Strap in, ‘cause you can’t get away.

God is every blade of grass,
God is when you wipe your ass
God is the Sears catalog;
God and I just shot your dog.

God is those wafers that you eat
And in the floorboards ‘neath your feet
‘Cause God can transubstantiate
And God can watch you masturbate.

God is Cheney, God’s Santorum
God’s your World of Warcraft forum
God made Taye Diggs’s’s chin sexy,
Sparking my God-given apoplexy.

National Enquirer headlines!
Writer’s block at thesis deadlines!
Bloody strife in Vietnam
And yes, God’s even in your mom.

So.
How is God the tallest tree
But also Vogon poetry?
Cancer! Famine! Halitosis!
You’d think we’d have been warned by Moses.

But no, it’s all this “Love thy God,”
And “I’m a gullible nimrod,”
Moses, you might have got a gun,
But God is out to get you, son.

Just whose side do you think God’s on?
It’s probably not teenage moms.
How ‘bout blustering Bible-bangers?
And God, it seems, loves wire hangers.

If the omniscient creator
Is even in my refrigerator
If I started eating now,
I could take God down, cow by cow!

How to destroy the divine provider?
The folks at the Large Hadron Collider
Just won’t work swiftly enough.
So I’ve turned to hardier stuff.

Columbians! You’re young; you’re spry
Help the apocalypse draw nigh.
Join forces and this won’t take long:
I sense the God within you’s strong.

Audio


Winner
First Runner-Up
Second Runner-Up
Dishonorable Mention
Dishonorable Mention
Dishonorable Mention
Dishonorable Mention

Kilmer 2009: Dishonorable Mention

Math Sonnets
by Adam Levine, GSAS

1. (From freshman year multivariable calculus) If psi = (2x+y cos(xy))dx+x cos(xy)dy, show that psi is exact by finding a function f such that df = psi, and compute the integral of psi around the boundary of T.

f is x to the power of 2
Plus the sine of its product with y.
We can see the equality’s true
’Twixt df and our given form psi.

We can then say that psi is exact
So it’s closed – cause for joy, not despair
For this gives us the wonderful fact
That d psi equals nil everywhere.

Now to integrate psi on the bound
Of T, use the theorem of Stokes:
Integrating d psi all around
Gives the answer. I mean it! No jokes!

So I say in this couplet of heros
That the integral comes out to zero.


2. (From senior year algebraic topology) Let X be a finite, connected CW complex of dimension n, and let Y be a space such that pi_i(Y) is finite for i<=n. Show that [X, Y] is finite.

Let X be a CW complex
That’s finite. Take another space, called Y .
In each dimension less than that of X
Assume Y has a finite pi sub i.

Now take the set of classes of functions
Equivalent up to homotopy.
Inducting on our X’s dimension
We show that finite this has got to be.

The largest cells in number are but few
We may restrict our function to each one.
And then we also may restrict it to
A map into the largest skeleton.

The classes to a finite set inject
Which proves that our theorem is correct.


Winner
First Runner-Up
Second Runner-Up
Dishonorable Mention
Dishonorable Mention
Dishonorable Mention
Dishonorable Mention

From the Book of Voices: an interview with Hunter S. Thompson

[Currently the wife of the late Hunter S. Thompson, Anita T in Latin. She has given me some of her husband's books. Story of Balaam comes from the Midrash. I think]

And in order to be fair the Lord G-d sent one prophet also unto the gentiles. And Balaam was his name. And the prophet Balaam was a wicked man and his prophecies always came to him at night and only after he did unspeakable things with his white donkey.
- I do wonder sometimes... Am I perceived as sme kind of crazy drug addict?
- Chances are you are not perceived as much of anything at all.
- You are a Quiet Type.
- But still. Suppose they do.
- Perceive.
- Notice.
- Suppose Hunter had noticed. If... If I was 34 ten years ago, not in ten years.
- If. But let's suppose.
- What do you want to show me. What do I have to notice/see?
- That reading is not a wholesome alternative to smack.
- Heroin you mean. Don't foul your pages with strong-seeming words.
- But I am sick of decent, tended meanings.
- The strong words won't be any more attractive than strong breath? Fool enough to court an empty vestige of a brutal manhood such as that?
- There is no way out of the labyrinth of reading. There is no way out of the multiverse of words.
- All depends on how you view it, I suppose.
- Your trip to Vegas turned to loathing of itself. You switch to harder drugs in REACTION. To more thorough madness in the external, materially sober world.
- The stone-cold sober world of matter run by an allegedly sober god.
- Is that the moral? Men drink and fill themselves with rancid toxins because the world itself is drunk unto white fever and hallucination and only with a mind unhinged a man can... understand. Begin to understand. The trip?
- And the much-used white ass of Balaam is the same undying snow-white talking donkey which the Messiah the last son of the House of David will ride into Jerusalem one day.
- Suppose the moral is easier than that. Suppose the moral is that there is no Search. No uppercase ideas. We rode into town packing more drogs per square inch of our flesh than the richest and the most desperate (NOT the same individuals, believe you me) junkies anywhere in out and within shooting range of sight. Suppose my moral is that those who seek the Right with a capital letter have already lost their way and those who seek the Dream also with a capital letter for their pains have only until the end of their drug high to keep dreaming. High's over and bam! back in the world of pushers and graspers - not in the intellectual sense of grasping stuff either, oh no. That old sick world of grasping for the needle in another body's arm and oh so what if you do cripple that worthless body and give your own worthless one some horrible blood-poisoning disease. Baby, you'll do it.
- No matter what the drug. Including women.
- Including a ertain way of thinking about women which brings a nice deep hit of a certain speedball brew of pheromones, adrenaline and boyish optimisim into your smart-boy clean-as-kleenex brain.
- Kleenex is not very clean. Ecologically speaking.
- Neither is your brain. Sociologically.
- Well I know my truth when I feel it. And besides. If you were already full of chemicals when entering Las Vegas.
- It is a try at narrating an acid trip.
- The other drugs, who's counting?
- Who can soberly count drugs anyway?
- Considering everybody either hates them or wants them.
- Often both. Retaining either.
- The strangest thing. I could kick a huge cocaine habit but I can't kick the habit of always being late. What do you make of that?

June 20.

From the Book of Voices

This is a kind of journal I am writing. Opinions mine, voices products of conscious artistry. (i.e. I am not insane.) Figured I'd share.


Not the smooth speeches which you could say but the slippery sentences which you do. Not the influential tomes you could have written but the few spare booklets remembered by your friends friends you actually have.
- Haven't you been meaning to say that for you sex is inseparable from friendship?
- Not the life which you may have led but the life which you are leading. Not the measured thoughts you may have if but the accidental and half-noticed ones you actually do.
- Because you know, it's not like there is some dividing line. Often there isn't even any change of feeling. When clothes start to come off you never do discover any special knowledge. No mysteries revealed. No... revelations.
- Not the right ones whom you could have been with but the wrong ones with whom you are. Not the years of comfortable peace and loyalty to one another that could have been as you imagine but the unexpected hours when disloyalty was not a tempting choice that actually were.
- And even if your world does end after the first time with a wanted woman, too bad for you. The both of you. You are too busy with belts and elbows, pantlegs and hands to seriously notice anything.
- All that is wanted happens once; all that is needed turns into a habit. A friendship is a way two bodies have of reacting to the closing of distance. Take three steps into infinity and mind the gaping void. All limits fluctuate.

May 19

Further Adventures in Found Poetry

This week I played a game similar to Oracle with my students - or at least, I tried. The youngest ones didn't fully grasp the concept, and the oldest wrote belligerent nonsense about each other.

Here's a transcript of a game I played with a third-grade girl. She's rather flighty, and about 75% likely to be thinking about food at any given time. So it's not too surprising that she not only misunderstood the game (we were supposed to continue each others' sentences), but was obviously hungry at the time. My sections are in blue; hers are red. I've preserved her errors for archival purposes.

Once upon a time there was a horse with two

baseballs haVe BaTs in iT.

PiAnos have a funny aftertaste, but they're worth it if you're

into
We are abouT To go inTo The Ping Pong rooM

Mical likes to run and jump and skip and launder her pet

camel CaMel has A faT humP

HaMburder helped me overcome my fear of

gigantic
Mrs mical is giganTic

Book time! Everybody get out your copy of "Jerry and the Manic

Kleenex
We need Kleenex or will geT sik

M Cheese