Slapstick Research Paper

DaAlexandra Baro
Moderation Paper I
April 23, 2013

Slapstick

My first problem was the ghost of Darius. I think that he came in anger. I had done this miserable thing to my copy of Aeschylus’ Persians – I had given it a fringe of those little yellow flags whose purpose it is to destroy the appearance of any fine-looking book. I had been assigned one of the first papers I'd write here, and I am sure that wanted to hold off for another moment that unspooling experience by scrambling to organize what happily bedevils the highlighting and underlining eye. I made several pages of very neat, probably very pallid notes. The thing I was going to make was due soon. The writing of it had to start now, if not the day before. I felt – and still I feel this way – as though I were sprawled out on the ground, groping at the ankles of people running quick to somewhere I don't know. I am trying to trip something that won't fall, and make it lay still with me in the dirt, where I can't see much of anything, and everything confused. Still, one has to open the book to start. This I did, and Darius came out. There was smoke, or there was noise, or confetti, or pot shards, or he didn't have any eyes, or he looked like a hologram, or he wobbled at the
There are other sorts of things that I like that do not make me feel so speechless and so dumb. Aristophanes is not the only poet to make me laugh, but when I read the Frogs for the first time, it seemed as though he had gone and stuck a clown nose on something yawning too wide for me to see or understand, so I choose Aristophanes. It may be the composite beast of all those hundreds of years. It may be something that I have invented without knowing it – I, who thinks that slapstick is a very serious thing. I want to associate with texts that make me trip. I want them to mock me. That is what the ghosts that I have met thus far do to me. I am