CXXV
Gender bent her
El secreto de Victoria, siempre
Ah, but what is straight?
The leading ladies didn’t play it safe on the red carpet on Sunday night, flaunting tight stomachs, extreme cleavages and capes fit for superheroes.
Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Hudson and Brie Larson led Hollywood’s most fierce femmes with cutout gowns showing off every curve and six-pack…
“It was all girl power, very empowering, like these women were coming to battle,” said celebrity stylist Phillip Bloch… [NY Daily News, 1/11/16, reporting on the Golden Globes awards]
But pardon, genitals all,
The flat unraised spirits that have dar’d
On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth
So great an object. Can this cockpit hold?
Or maybe cram within this wooden O, O – Oh!
Ever more pulverized to no good purpose, Manhattan’s bedrock sends out a distress call: Save our schist!
In the beginning there was a river. The river became a road and the road branched out to the whole world. And because the road was once a river it was always hungry. Writ Ben Okri in The Famished Road.
“I don’t much believe words for which authors have been paid,” says Saul Straight. [Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, “Someone Else’s Theme,” Memories of the Future, Joanne Turnbull, trans. New York: NYRB, 2009, p. 66.]
La prueba está en el flan
Every native was once a migrant
Sitting by the sound, watching Gertie gallop
Recently discovered and newly published: The Critical Film Essays of Bigger Thomas
Mazeltov cocktail
“Happiness, I argued, doesn’t like to oblige people because people don’t give it (happiness) any holidays. If people knew how to live like the sonata, in three movements, interspersing meetings with partings, allowing happiness to go off for short spells, for a few bars at least, they mightn’t be so unhappy. Strictly speaking, music isn’t in time, time is in music. Yet we treat our time unmusically…” says Saul Straight in Krzhizy’s “…Theme.”
World’s most ineffective sign:
NARCISSIST BEWARE!
The word “but” can separate, in order to link, a real clause and a bullshit clause. Or it can form a bridge between two bullshit clauses. For obvious reasons, though, it rarely connects two real clauses.
Paralogism strikes deep
Into your life it will creep…
When the dog mind slips its lead: ah, the wolfish thoughts…
Parthenonogenesis, mon amour
Taxonomy doth make Buffons of us all
Abercrombie & Fitch & Fulton & Barnum
Catch a falling theme
Saul Straight, in his discourse on separations from life, neglected to mention a greater separation: from one’s own self. For it does occasionally happen that the je ne sais quoi by the one-letter name of “I” gets away from a person, like a dog from its master, and wanders about the devil knows where. And when your “I” is missing, when you’re just the binding from which the book has been ripped out… it’s impossible to explain because there isn’t enough… “because.” [Krzhizhanovsky, op. cit.]
“Oh, how George Washington loves his cake! And, oh, how he depends on Hercules, his head chef, to make it for him. Hercules, a slave, takes great pride in baking the president’s cake. But this year there is one problem – they are out of sugar.” This from the Scholastic’s description of A Birthday Cake for George Washington, a recently published picture book pulled from the market amidst criticism of its racial insensitivity.
Hercules, known to the Washington-Custis family as “Uncle Harkless,” was brought to Philadelphia (at the time the US capital) to serve as presidential chef. There, he acquired a reputation as a dandy, was allowed to go to the theater by himself, and permitted the lucrative concession of selling leftovers from the presidential table. In Philadelphia, he would have been eligible for freedom after six months, so, like George and Martha’s other enslaved staff, he was sent back to Mount Vernon, and put to labor. Hercules escaped from Mount Vernon on Washington’s 65th birthday in 1797 (whether before of after making the traditional cake is not known). The now ex-President wrote to his personal secretary: “I pray you to desire Mr. Kitt [a slave catcher] to make all the enquiry he can after Hercules, and send him round in the Vessel if he can be discovered & apprehended.” Hercules, however, remained free. He is probably the subject of the portrait by Gilbert Stuart below. [With thanks to Ned Sublette, from whose newsletter this is drawn and adapted.]
Personafornication, mon amour
And fate, accompli
Thousand yard chicken
All my writing is about writing.
But what is writing?
Masseur of the air
Under cover of light
Just what does the flautist flaut?
Or flaunt?
All but quiet on the Anatolian front
Tierra del humo
The fog, the friction
The frog, the fiction
Mass disturbation
Taxonomy without representation is tyranny
Tympani?
Huh?!
What’s the madder?
I’ve gaucho under my skin
Cache of the day: fish fulfillment
A nuyoProustian moment: you steer clear of a pothole and swinging back, a bottom corner of the plasticized grocery bag hanging from your handlebars drifts into the spokes; and the sound sends you back to when kids in your neighborhood used to tie balloons to their bike forks to emulate the sound of a motorcycle.
Question Marx
Yet, slowly but slowly, inch by mile, Bernie’s woods close in on high Dunce Inane
When shall we three meet achooo!
Ah, the snottish play…
In her story, “A More Perfect Union,” Jessamyn Smyth writes: “The radio strings together words in ugly, binding ropes.” You read “ugly, blinding tropes,” then realize something’s off, then read again. Thus demonstrating that is a good thing, when practicable, to read all texts three times. [Jessamyn Smyth, The Inugami Mochi, Hilo, HI: Saddle River Press, 2015]
Genomicide, mon amour
The imaginary Maginot between…
“It’s difficult to convey what the models are projecting without appearing to sensationalize the event.” What an extraordinary sentence! [Bob Henson writing on Jeff Masters’ blog; Wunderground.com, 1/20/16, referring to an epic snowstorm predicted for the mid-Atlantic states.]
Cow with beef on lam in Queens: Slaughterhouse bovine bolts for freedom: Page 6.
This headline from the front page of the NY Daily News, 1/22/16. Last week, a goat escaped from a different slaughterhouse, this one in St. Albans. Bought for forty bucks by the cops who captured and named it Billy the Kid, the goat now resides in a petting zoo on Long Island.
The cow, for its part, got loose from a joint called Archer (Avenue) Halal Live Poultry, and led police on a merry chase through Jamaica. Returned to the slaughterhouse, it was sprung after PETA picketed, and an animal-rights activist encamped overnight in his trailer at the building’s entrance. Freddie the Cow – named for Freddie “I Want to Break Free” Mercury of Queen (singular of Queens) – now lives in a “sanctuary” in New Jersey.
Still, inquiring News readers want to know how we can be positive that Freddie is the same cow that escaped. Sure, they look similar, but…
Cow one is not cow two.
The map is not the territory.
The word is not the thing.
Said Alfred Korzybski, oncet, though he was well aware of the limitations of to be, posed negatively or otherwise.
What is the relation between a crack down, and a crack-up?
And since when is a cow “poultry”?
On my best days, I am an inhabitant of that felicitous island nation called Synchronesia.
Which appears neither on map one, nor map two.
When reality overflows, map it up
Cow with beef on lam(b), hold the mayo!
You can never step in the same slaughterhouse twice, said Heiferclitus, weeping
Adam and Eve on a raft – whisky down!
Wreck ‘em!
Crimea River
Corporal punishment beats General semantics any day of the week
Extry! Extry! Brave Bovine Bolts Archer Avenue Abattoir – read all about it!
Discounting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike
Other crazies, other times
Is that “ruble” with one or two “b”s?
The forging of change
Whenever a train rumbles into the Hanoi Railway Station, the conductor plays a patriotic song that chronicles Hanoi’s recovery after the Vietnam war and ends with an ode to one of the city’s most famous monuments: a shrine in the center of Hoan Kiem Lake built in the 1880s to honor the sacred turtle. [Mike Ives, “A Revered Turtle’s Death Sets Hands Wringing: Symbol of Vietnam Expires During Leadership Review, and Some See Omen,” NYT, 1/22/16]
Said turtle was known as Cu Rua, or Great Grandfather Turtle. One of a handful of nearly-extinct Yangzi giant soft-shelled turtles, Cu Rua weighted 360 pounds and was reputed to be several centuries old. According to a Pamela McElwee, a “Vietnam expert and professor of human ecology” at Rutgers, Cu Rua was seen not just as a symbol of Vietnam’s independence and recovery from the devastation of war, but as an incarnation of one of the four sacred animals, the others being the dragon, phoenix and unicorn. Cu Rua thus formed a link between earth and heaven, between “the here and now… and the spiritual world.”
