Prose by any other name

Since I'm entirely incapable of resisting a challenge like this:

The Iliac
Homer's epic poem about his pelvis.

O Hello
Well met in Cyprus

The Canterbury Ales
Straight, no Chaucer

Deowulf
Long-lasting protection

McBeth
The bloodiest burger of them all

Midsummer Night's Ream
Printing documents at the last minute

Sensex and Sensibility
The intuitive way to play the stock market

Sensei and Sensibility
The True Story of Jane Austen's Japanese Lover

The Origin of the Spicies
The Evolution of Indian and Mexican food

Homeo and Juliet
The Capulet Guide to Alternate Medicine

Song of My Shelf
Whitman's book collection

Sub Liners
Wrapping sandwiches the Irish way

Olive Twist
Please, bartender, can I have some more martinis?

Bing and Nothingness
Existential Search

Bleak Hose
Underwear in the Victorian age

Oedipus T. Rex
Incest in the Jurassic age

Far from the Madding Crow
Critical Essays on Poe's Raven

Abslalom! Abslalom!
Winter Sports in Yoknapatawpha County

Clitemnestra
Finding happiness while your man's away at war

Rabbi, Run
Jewish anxiety in the suburbs

Trackstatus Logico-Philosophicus
The contents are everything that's in the Fed-Ex case

Wealth of Notions
Some ideas about the Economy

Dude the Obscure
The Lesser Known Lebowski

For the Union Dad
What to do when your wife's in Labor.

Jane Byre
What does he see in that stupid cow?

The Grapes of Wraith
The Vineyards of Angmar

Bardot Thodol
The Tibetan Book of Hot French Actresses

Get Anjali
How to score with the girl next door

The Weaves
Threads of Consciousness

Rumayana
The Holy Book of Old Monks

Update (a few more):

Sorrows of Young Weather
The Stormy Passions of Youth

Lorna Dune
Romance on Arrakis

The Dino Elegies
Every raptor is terrifying

The Cattle
Josef K. Cowboy

Rime of the Ancient Marinara
Pasta, pasta everywhere

King Solomon's Mine
Confessions of the Queen of Sheba

The Odds
Horace, Bookmaker

Ajar
The insanity of leaving doors open

Never judge a book by its lover

via Book Bench, this handy list of authorial stereotypes

Apparently I'm a confirmed 90's literati with good taste in music, wine and bondage who didn't fit in as a kid, as a result of which I now avoid cream cheese with tenacity and thinks John Cusack movies are dubious, but who Lauren Leto would like to sleep with anyway (and who can blame her).

I'm also a high-school professor with either an undergraduate degree in English or a master's degree in French (I can't remember which because I spent most of college making out with other girls and writing it all down in a journal), but we'll let that pass.

Best baby pictures EVER

I am awed. Truly awed.

It's a woman's life, they said

You know what I don't get? Is the use of 'persuasion' to mean gender. You know, how people will say so-and-so is of the female persuasion. I mean, are we really to believe that so-and-so was going to be a man until someone came along and changed her mind? Is there some sort of special purgatory up there where large numbers of gender salesmen roam the mountain passes, trying to recruit people into their gender?

"You there, have you considered becoming a woman? It's really great, you know. Sure, you get treated like a second-class citizen pretty much anywhere you go, but on the flip side, you get to wear make-up and have lots more fashion choices and can always find someone to have sex with you, though there is the chance this may result in you ending up all bloated and gross and then having to undergo unimaginable pain, but it's all in the interest of propagating the species, and what's more, if you sign up for a lifetime subscription we give you this neat biological clock absolutely free! So what do you say? Yes, you'll join? Great! just sign here please. What's that? You'd rather be a man? Are you sure? Well, okay, but can I at least interest you in a fine set of encyclopedias?"

Interpretation

Does it still qualify as a nightmare if it makes you sad, but not afraid?

***

In the dream I'm meeting with my analyst and we have a breakthrough. I discover that for the last 25 years I've been repressing the memory of a tragic accident I had as a child. I can't believe I've been hiding this from myself all these years. It explains so much.

When I wake up I think - what was the dream trying to tell me?

***

I don't believe in psychoanalysis. Apparently, my subconscious does.

Troubling allure

Troubling allure of eating disorder books

- Headline from the NY Times, May 11, 2009

What's for dinner tonight, honey? Ah, that book on schizophrenia I caught at Barnes & Noble last week. Yum!

What's in a name?

Via Book Bench, the news that German courts have decided to limit hyphenated last names to three. I wonder what that means for the greatest name in German baroque music?

The Further Adventures of Hark! DaButt

Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away, on the sprawling planet of Massomedia, there lived a princess named Hark! DaButt. Hark! DaButt was the heir to the throne of the kingdom of Enditivy, as well as being an accomplished trumpet blower and a follower of the TRPsichorean muse. All the people of the kingdom loved their princess who they thought was beautiful and brave and so very clever.

Well, almost all. One small, indomitable group of galling citizens continued to hold out against Hark! DaButt's considerable charm. This rebel group, who called themselves 'globbers' and feared only the Skype falling on their heads, were always criticizing the princess, claiming she was hysterical, unprofessional and generally insensitive. These accusations hurt the princess deeply. Many a night did she spend shedding inky tears into her crocodile skin pillow. It wasn't that she thought the criticisms were valid (how could they be? She was a Princess, with Chelpark Blue blood in her veins - she could do nothing wrong), nor that she was an insecure, vengeful little minx who couldn't take criticism. It was just that she felt these criticisms were an affront to the dignity of Enditivy, and therefore had to be punished.

One day, when Her Shrillness was out playing in the garden, she spotted a globber lurking in the shrubbery. Quick as a newsflash, she had the globber captured by her guards, and brought him before the High Council. When the High Council told her that no, she couldn't have his head cut off (only her cousin, the Red Queen, could use that head line), she proceeded to whine and pout until the poor globber agreed to issue a public apology for the things he'd said about her and promised never to say anything bad about her again. This made Hark! DaButt very happy because:

a) bringing a months old comment out of total obscurity and making it a source of renewed outrage was obviously the best way to silence criticism

b) going to the trouble of hauling a globber before the High Council for some throwaway comment was a sure way of saying that the globbers were inconsequential people to whom she, Hark! DaButt, paid no attention

c) wording the apology in proper legal terms would make it obvious to every one that the globber's apology was sincerely meant; no one could possibly imagine that she had forced it out of him

d) by striking out against one globber she had effectively silenced their entire community, who would never again dare to criticize her, because the prospect of having to issue an official apology if they were caught would really, really scare them

e) using the resources of her vast kingdom to pick on one poor defenseless globber was a classy act that was sure to make people admire her all the more

(Did I mention that Hark! DaButt was a little delusional?)

In any case, the globber apologised, the princess went back to blowing her own trumpet, and the kingdom of Enditivy moved on, like a slow dinosaur with Hark! DaButt as its pea-sized brain.

The End.

Entirely Voluntary Notice (No, really!)

This story is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to person or persons living or dead is purely coincidental. In particular, this story has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with a certain TV channel's treatment of a certain blogger. I, Falstaff, have always admired said TV channel for the diligence with which it manages to stay just within the law and its courageous defiance of anything resembling taste. Further, I have absolutely no criticism to offer of their star reporter, a woman I have always respected for her...for her....errr...a woman I have always respected.

The Latest in Perse-phone

In case you haven't seen it already, here's the new Pomegranate Phone.

What will they think of next?

Undecided

"I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”

To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked."

Personally, I'm still trying to decide whether I like David Sedaris' new piece in the New Yorker, but I figured I may as well point you to it anyway.

Poetry that matters

"America's metaphors have become strained beyond recognition, our nation's verses are severely overwrought, and if one merely examines the internal logic of some of these archaic poems, they are in danger of completely falling apart," said the project's head stanza foreman Dana Gioia. "We need to make sure America's poems remain the biggest, best-designed, best-funded poems in the world."

FSM bless the Onion

Godawful Poetry # 1

Zigzackly informs me that today marks the beginning of the godawful poetry fortnight, so I thought I'd do my bit:

Night Song

Now the moon, like a smallpox victim,
hides his pitted face,
afraid that the sun may evict him
from his nightly dwelling place.

While the sad and unplucked roses
dream in slow perfumes
and rehearse the unconscious poses
of Death in living rooms.

And a little mouse squeaks like a gate
someone has forgotten to oil;
squeaks of Love and Loss and Fate
and Blood and Sweat and Toil.

P.S. Zigzackly also points to a Flash Fiction contest, one that is, alas, only open to those residing in India.

Godawful Poetry Fortnight

I'll have a bream

Back when one was still young and immature (and no, I'm not talking about yesterday, thank you - I'll have you know that I'm positively middle-aged now, what with twenty-somethings wanting me to adopt them) one had a penchant for long, complicated narratives all building up to an elaborate multi-part pun.

Nothing one pulled off in those days, however, came close to the complexity / desperation of this Sunday's Pearls Before Swine:

See also this and this.

All Dick and no Moby

Today's Groan!-I-should-have-seen-that-coming award goes to Adam Gopnik, writing about the new Orion 'abridged' version of Moby Dick:

The subtraction does not turn good work into hackwork; it turns a hysterical, half-mad masterpiece into a sound, sane book. It still has its phallic reach and point, but lacks its flaccid, anxious self-consciousness: it is all Dick and no Moby.

Mad Dogs and Englishmen

All this talk about heat waves sweeping the East Coast and people not being able to go out (imagine that!) in summer - and all because the temperature touched some 36 C - made me think of this.

Tops and Bottoms

Meanwhile, over at Language Log Melvyn Quince takes issue with Condoleeza Rice's claim that she will "stay on top of it and get to the bottom of it"

Of course, when it comes to tops and bottoms the final word will always belong to Cole Porter.

Now that's what I call a birdie

Sometimes the jokes just fall into your lap.

Needless to say, this blog strongly disapproves of cruelty to animals, especially endangered species. What do you think humans are for?

Meanwhile, the Yahoo News site continues to be a source of endless entertainment. Another article from the site informs me that scientists have discovered that the Grand Canyon is at least ten million years older than it's usually considered to be. That's about 2,628,000,000,000 missed photo ops. No word yet on how old John McCain actually is.

Author admits boring memoir is fantasy

Hohum County, Nevada

In a tearful statement here today 62 year old Emanla E. Rymton, author of a critically and commercially unsuccessful memoir about the joys of growing up in 50's America, admitted that her memoir, All Things Nice, is a complete fabrication from beginning to end. Ms. Rymton said "she didn't know what possessed her to publish that ghastly thing as my life story" but said that while she herself had never experienced any of the events in the book, the stories in it were drawn from the reminiscences of fellow residents of her old-age home. "I guess I just got sick of listening to them talk about all the pretty dolls they had", Ms. Rymton said.

Published last year, All Things Nice tells the story of an idyllic childhood in the suburban mid-west, spent playing with dolls, giggling about boys, and dreaming of white weddings and washing machines. The book, which the only critic who read it described as a 'saccharine snore-fest', and which is currently being made into a movie starring Lindsay Lohan, was an instant flop across the country, selling a total of 14 copies in the first month, including the three copies someone stole from Ms. Rymton's room.

It seems however, that the childhood Ms. Rymton describes never happened. Ms. Rymton never lived in a suburb outside Chicago, never owned a complete set of Barbies and did not spend her days cutting pictures out of Woman and Home to stick in her tinsel-and-ribbon filled scrapbook. Nor was Ms. Rymton ever a cheer-leader, in fact, she never even attended high school.

The child of a Mr. and Mrs. Rymtonski, a Jewish couple forced to flee their native Poland after the Nazi occupation, Ms. Rymton was orphaned at the age of 6 months when her parents were both killed in a mining accident in South Dakota. The rest of her family having vanished in the Holocaust, Ms. Rymton spent her childhood in a series of foster homes, where she suffered physical and sexual abuse, before running away to the Alaskan wilderness at the age of 12, where she proceeded to establish a working rapport with the grizzly bears and survived by hunting elk. A career as a drug-runner followed, then a stint in the CIA during the Nixon administration, followed by twenty years running covert operations for the Canadians in Northern Mongolia (as part of the series of top secret espionage missions described in Warren P. Aren't's thrilling book The Cold Shoulder War: The Race to be the Less Insignificant Neighbor).

When asked why she had chosen to conceal these facts, Ms. Rymton said that she felt like she needed "a different voice, a voice people would listen to, would respect, would understand". She also says that she apologizes for any disappointment her readers may feel upon learning of her true past, but that it was never her intention to trivialize the sufferings of the survivors of American suburbia, whom she described as "the true heroines of my story".

The revelation of the book's fictional nature caused little consternation, since no one has actually read it, but Simple and Huckster, the publishers of the book, issued a statement immediately following Ms. Rymton's expressing "their disappointment at being made the victims of this hoax, as well as of being deprived of this woman's real story, which we might actually have made of a profit off".

Ms. Rymton's statement is the third in a series of such revelations that have shaken the publishing industry recently, the other two being Margaret B. Jones' Love and Consequences and Misha Defonseca's Misha.

P.S. This just in: The reporter behind this news story just issued a statement saying that the entire report is a fantasy. In a tearful statement to his fellow journalists...

It must be something I 8

Ok, it's official. I am not doing another tag for at least three months. Or 8. So there.

Meanwhile, I suppose I may as well get this one out of the way (who comes up with these things anyway?):

1. 8 things I am passionate about

a) Poetry (surprise!)
b) Beethoven, Mozart, Bach
c) Miles
d) Films with subtitles
e) Dark Chocolate
f) Procrastination
g) Being right
h) Air-piano

2. 8 things I want to do before I die

a) Finish my dissertation (it may take that long)
b) Read Proust
c) Conduct the Berlin Philharmonic (what? No one said I had to be realistic)
d) Win an argument on the Internet (see above)
e) Clean the fridge (I don't really want to do it, but figure I should, at least once)
f) Develop a new flavor of Ice-cream (How does Single Malt Dark Chocolate Espresso sound to you)
g) Stop putting off things I want to do
h) Commit suicide (this list is in no particular order)

3. 8 Things I say often

a) "Three things"
b) "And now for something completely different"
c) "Hello"
d) "Goodbye"
e) "What was it Eliot said?"
f) "My dissertation?...uh...well, you see, I haven't really decided yet..."
g) "Go ahead. Make my day" (I don't really say this often. But I'd like to)
h) "Not another tag!"

Bonus: Things I'd like to say often

4. 8 Books I've read recently

(You can actually see this from the Shelfari list on the side - but let's see which ones I remember)

a) Susan Sontag, At the Same Time (currently reading)
b) J.M. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year (currently reading)
c) Paul Celan, Selected Poems trans. by Michael Hamburger (currently reading)
d) William T. Vollmann, The Atlas
e) Nicanor Parra, Emergency Poems & Poems and Antipoems
f) Rae Armantrout, Veil: New and Selected Poems
g) Ursula K. Le Guin, Searoad
h) Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

5. 8 songs I could listen to over and over

a) Franz Schubert, Winterreise (okay, okay, so that's 24 songs right there, but you can't seriously expect me to pick between them)
b) J.S. Bach, Erbarme Dich, Mein Gott (from Matthaus Passion BWV 244)
c) Georges Bizet, Habanera (from Carmen; see also)
d) Joni Mitchell, River
e) Bob Dylan, Desolation Row
f) Ella Fitzgerald, How High The Moon / Mack the Knife
g) Begum Akhtar, Mere Humnafas mere humnawa
h) Tom Lehrer, Masochism Tango (talk about passionate)

6. 8 Things that attract me to my best friends

a) A well-stocked bar (also, apartments in Manhattan and / or a penchant for driving rental cars to distant National Parks)
b) A disdain for all things popular
c) Comic book collections
d) A complete absence of spouses, children and other such domestic inconveniences
e) A well-stocked bar
f) A taste for bad puns
g) Willingness to be seen with me in public
h) A well-stocked bar

7. 8 people I think should do this tag

a) Raul Castro: "8 things I want to do before I die. Hmmm. Fido, what do I want to do before I die?" ("Oh, never mind, too late.")

b) Barack Obama "8 things I'm passionate about: Change, change, change, change, change, change, change and...ummm...maybe change?" (Hillary: "Did you hear that sixth change? Didn't it sound exactly like the fifth one? He's plagiarizing himself again.")

c) Snow White "8 things I'm passionate about: The Prince, Doc, Grumpy, Happy, Sneezy, Bashful, Sleepy and Dopey"("Yes, sometimes all in one night")

d) George W. Bush "8...errr...8...Uncle Dick, what's a b-o-o-k?" ("Uncle Dick, Uncle Dick, I got up to five. Can you tell me what comes next? I've got a book in my other hand.")

e) Quentin Tarantino "8 things I say often: ****, ****, ****, *******, ******, ******-******, ******-******, ******-******* *******" ("It's a tough job, you know, writing your own scripts")

f) The Spanish Inquisition "8 things that attract me to my best friends: Surprise, fear, ruthless efficiency, an almost fanatical devotion to the pope, nice red uniforms, comfy chairs, soft cushions, diabolical laughter and The Rack! The 9 things that attract me..." (You weren't expecting that were you? well....)

g) Nipper: "I'll listen to anything! Any 8 songs, I tell you! Anything but that damn voice!" ("Oh, come on, not 'How Much is that Doggy in the Window'!!")

h) Elizabeth Barret Browning: "8 ways I love thee" ("a) The depth my soul can reach b) The breadth....")

Hitch

In case you haven't seen it already, Vanity Fair has a special photo feature paying tribute to Hitchcock by the somewhat bizarre method of shooting imitations of famous scenes from his films with modern day actors in them. It's a fairly silly tribute, if you ask me, but it makes for fascinating discussion. You can see the full series here.

Personally, I can't say their choices are all bad. I happen to think Jodi Foster in Birds would be a distinct improvement, as would Naomi Watts in Marnie (it occurs to me, btw, just looking at that photo, that the perfect person to play Marnie may actually be Nicole Kidman - after all, you have only to look at Ms. Kidman to know that something traumatic happened to her as a child), but this may be because I think anything short of a block of wood [1] would be an improvement on the mannequin that is Tippi Hedren. And I can certainly see Keira Knightley in Rebecca. Admittedly Ms. Knightley can't really act, but then Joan Fontaine can't either, and Ms. Knightley is both more spirited and much better looking. I'm even willing to live with Charlize Theron taking on Grace Kelly's non-role in Dial M for Murder, though I draw the line at letting either Scarlett Johansson or Gwyneth Paltrow replace her in Rear Window and To Catch A Thief respectively. As for Rene Zellweger in Vertigo, the very idea of letting that woman onto the set of a Hitchcock film makes my blood run cold, let alone actually giving her a part in one [2].

On the men's side things are not so bad. I like the idea of Josh Brolin in Lifeboat and I can totally see Javier Bardem carrying off Jimmy Stewart's role in Rear Window (and that's a serious compliment, though it's hard to imagine a role Bardem couldn't carry off) except that I think the sight of him staring out of a window unable to move will bring back too many memories of The Sea Inside. You're likely to end up spending more time worrying about his death wish than what's happening in the apartment opposite. The role they should really use Bardem in is Olivier's role in Rebecca.

It is, of course, entirely impossible to imagine anyone, and I mean anyone, replacing Cary Grant in anything, but I can just about see how Robert Downey Jr. could pull of To Catch A Thief. The idea of trying to have Seth Rogen (who in case you're wondering is the guy from Knocked Up) substitute for Grant, on the other hand, is utterly ridiculous. It would be like replacing a bottle of champagne with mango Rasna.

[1] Actually, even a block of wood might be better, remember that Monty Python sketch?

[2] I'd say "act in one" but there's no risk of that, is there?