Ms. Oates Regrets

I never know when my beloved Jack Loscutoff, dead now a year and a half, will jump out at me.

Today he leaped off the inside cover of Joyce Carol Oates' WILD NIGHTS. There, pasted right inside her book, was Jack's parody of "Miss Otis Regrets."

You remember Miss Otis, unable to come to lunch because she's being strung up by a mob for shooting and killing her lover. That old Cole Porter tune.

Jack twisted it to choke Joyce Carol Oates like this:

   Ms. Oates Regrets

Ms. Oates regrets she is unable to lunch today, madam.

For she's installed another writer in hell today, madam.

But as she pulled the ungrateful bastard down, 

she STOPPED to look around.

"There are so many more to put away," sadly I heard her say.

And so, madam, Ms. Oates regrets she is unable to lunch today.

What did Jack mean, "she's installed another writer in hell today"?

He meant the way Oates, in her WILD NIGHTS, skewers five American writers—Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway—as she gleefully imagines their macabre last days.

Oates' reviewers call her horrifying stories hilarious and harrowing, but Jack loathed both the stories and the author. He often stomped around the dining room, haranguing and fulminating about Oates.

So he wrote his poem, printed it on a piece of paper that he cleverly cut to the size of Oates' book. He pasted it over the book's inside cover so deftly that it looks like an original page.

Did he know I'd be the first to read his parody? Perhaps. He no doubt hoped his poem would do what he couldn't: convert me, a long-time Oates lover.