meredith and i tossed around using the idea of doing a Dickensian take on the drone. great minds thinking alike, clearly. we worried that it would become to slavishly close to the book, and sound like a rip off. then again, we might get some post-modern version of the “mock heroic” used so successfully by alexander pope in his “dunciad” and even more so in his “rape of the lock,” the latter was an object of close scrutiny by me in my undergraduate years. i remember reading it aloud from beginning to end. took me well over an hour. but i was mesmerized by the iambic pentameter. it was in those days that i learned the nuance of meter, and they went a long way toward my songwriting–though that wasn’t my intention at the time.