Excellent; we're getting to the bottom of something here: > Number 23, On the Nothingness of a Fart, was presumably to be shelved near Book 10 dealing with an

Excellent; we're getting to the bottom of something here: > Number 23, On the Nothingness of a Fart, was presumably to be shelved near Book 10 dealing with an important area of biblical scholarship, “Concerning the method of emptying the dung from Noah’s Ark”. (that ought to be easy: dumped overboard?) Unfortunately Donne lived 900 years after Li Bai; I fear for a proper parallel we'd need recent enshittificiations of either latin or irish: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8th_century_in_poetry#Poets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8th_century_in_poetry#Poets ? We could skip back all the way to Ovid, of whom I'm sure 19th century schoolboys have provided some reworkings, but the effect is somewhat marred because he enjoyed parodying himself. Naso magister erat EDIT: wait a moment: a latin poet who writes about his lover's "dead parrot" (Amores II.6)? Did the Pythons sneak some education into their sketches?