Fattening Frogs For Snakes

It took me a long time, to find out my mistakes
Took me a long time, to find out my mistakes
(it sho' did man)
But I bet you my bottom dollar,
I'm not fattenin' no more frogs for snakes

I found out my downfall, back in nineteen and thirty
(I started checkin')
I found out my downfall, from nineteen and thirty
I'm tellin' all of my friends,
I'm not fattenin' no more frogs for snakes

All right now... (solo)

Yeh it is nineteen and fifty-seven, I've got to correct all of my mistakes
Whoa man, nineteen and fifty-seven, I've got to correct all of my mistakes
I'm tellin' my friends includin' my wife and everybody else,
not fattenin' no more frogs for snakes


Sonny Boy Williamson (lyrics courtesy of the website The Online Blues)

A couple from The Savage Detectives:

"You can woo a girl with a poem, but you can't hold on to her with a poem. Not even with a poetry movement."

"And afterward, after the laugh, we`seemed about to sink back into silence, one of those embarrassing silences between people`who've just met, or between a publisher and a zombie . . . ."

from a review of My Unwritten Books by George Steiner (review by Christpher Hart in the Tines of London: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/non-fiction/article3130055.ece )

The one real surprise is a rapturous chapter entitled The Tongues of Eros, which is presumably intended as a serious, inquiring, lyrical and tender outline of a sexual autobiography, but induced uncontrollable fits of laughter in this reader. Steiner’s central argument is that making love “in German” is very different to making love “in Italian”, and that as a polyglot himself (a tetraglot, to be precise), he has had ample scope to confirm this personally.

Ch. “when nearing climax . . . would cry out, though in a muted register, the name ‘Sankt Nepomuk the Lesser.’ ” Another used the euphemism “taking the streetcar to Grinzing” to signify “a gentle, somewhat respectful anal access”.

In bed, in Angers, a French conquest used the rare subjunctive pluperfect, as perfected by Proust, “which arrested me, in, as it were, mid-flow” – something worth remembering if trapped in a lift with the professor. Another rebuked him for taking an unspeakable liberty: “ ‘How dare you address me as tu?’ panted V even as I parted her comely legs.”

He recalls “a glorious ebony partner” in Tulsa, Oklahoma, an intriguingly “unmentionable caress” called “our flowering cactus”, and another’s “lobelias gently watered with saliva”. A woman whose initial he cannot remember, a one-off in a hotel bedroom, observed as they undressed, “Am I myself? Are you you?” “The question,” Steiner muses, “seemed to stem directly out of Fichte’s meditations on the cancellation of the self.” Well, maybe. Or maybe she was just drunk.

Suitable for a housewarming party -- the "brownie" recipe from Alice B. Toklas' Cookbook (courtesy of The Straight Dope):

"Take 1 teaspoon black peppercorns, 1 whole nutmeg, 4 average sticks of cinnamon, 1 teaspoon coriander. These should all be pulverized in a mortar. About a handful each of stone dates, dried figs, shelled almonds and peanuts: chop these and mix them together. A bunch of canibus sativa can be pulverized. This along with the spices should be dusted over the mixed fruit and nuts, kneaded together. About a cup of sugar dissolved in a big pat of butter. Rolled into a cake and cut into pieces or made into balls about the size of a walnut, it should be eaten with care. Two pieces are quite sufficient. Obtaining the canibus may present certain difficulties.... It should be picked and dried as soon as it has gone to seed and while the plant is still green."

Cannibis aside, what kind of brownie recipe is this?

Nothing happened today. And if anything did, I'd rather not talk about it, because I didn't understand it.

-- from The Savage Detectives

Some useful and interesting collections of photographs, and one picture blog from Luc Sante:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/

http://unitproj.library.ucla.edu/dlib/lat/

http://ekotodi.blogspot.com/

Ok - knowing nothing more about it than the name, I am puzzled by the Yahoo group: Dommes forced to whore in slavery. In what sense are these people Dommes? It's like being interested in very short giraffes.

Early in "The Savage Detectives" -- some nice sex writing in the book. E.g., too long to quote in full:

Her fingers ran over my face, from my chin to my eyes, closing my eyes as if inviting me to sleep, her hand, a bony hand, unzipped my pants and felt for my cock. Why I don't know, maybe because I was so nervous, but I said I wasn't sleepy. I know, said Maria, me either. Then everything turned into a succession of concrete acts and proper nouns and verbs, or pages from an anatomy manual scattered like flower petals, chaotically linked. I explored Maria's naked body, Maria's glorious naked body, in a contained silence, although I could have shouted, rejoicing in each corner, each smooth and interminable space I discovered. Maria was less reserved. Soon she began to moan, and her maneuvers, at first timid or restrained, became more open (I can't think of another word for it just now), as she guided my hand to places it hadn't reached, whether out of ignorance or negligence. So that was how I learned, in fewer than ten minutes, where a woman's clitoris is and how to massage or fondle or press it, always within the bounds of gentleness, of course, bounds that Maria, on the other hand, was constantly transgressing, since my cock, treated well in the first forays, soon began to suffer torments in her hands, hands that in the dark and the tangle of sheets sometimes seemed to me like the talons of a falcon or a falconess, tugging on me so hard that I was afraid they were trying to pull me right off, and at other times like Chinese dwarfs (her fingers were the fucking dwarfs!) investigating and measuring the spaces and ducts that connected my testicles to my cock and each other. Then (but first I pushed my pants down to my knees) I got on top of her and entered her.

"Don't come inside of me," said Maria.

"I'll try not to, " I said.

"What do you mean you'll try, you jerk? Don't come inside!"

In hard-boiled detective fiction, there are wrong crowds to fall in with, and wrong crowds to fall in with:

Toronto has its own Village. It's very much like the original in New York -- on a smaller scale, of course. Hester got in with a gang of ballet buffs. She went overboard for dancing lessons . . . . She had her hair clipped short, and her ears were pierced for earrings. She took to wearing white silk shirts and matador pants around the flat. She was always doing entrechats or whatever you call 'em.

"The Barbarous Coast" -- Ross MacDonald

On to a new book, because I'm reading too much: begins really well:

November 2

I've been cordially invited to join the visceral realists. I accepted, of course. There was no initiation ceremony. It was better that way.

November 3

I'm not really sure what visceral realism is. . . .

The Savage Detectives -- Roberto Bolano.

Behind every paragraph the reader ought to be able to hear the music of present joy and future grief. Insh'Allah.
Diary of a Bad Year.

Two from Grinderman, that cheer me right up. Turn the black sky grey.


I changed the sheets on my bed,
I combed the hairs across my head,
I sucked in my gut and still she said
That she just didn't want to.

I read her Eliot, read her Yeats,
I tried my best to stay up late,
I fixed the hinges on her gate,
But still she just never wanted to.

. . . I sent her every type of flower,
I played her guitar by the hour,
I patted her revolting little chihuahua,
But still she just didn't want to.

. . . thought I'd try another tack,
I drank a litre of cognac,
I threw her down upon her back,
But she just laughed and said that she just didn't want to.

"No Pussy Blues" [sung brilliantly -- great glottal catch in the recurrent "she didn't want to" line. And manages to make flower, hour and chihuahua rhyme]

I've got to get up to get down and start all over again
Head on down to the basement and shout:
"Kick those white mice and black dogs out!
Kick those white mice and baboons out!
Kick those baboons and other motherfuckers out! And...

Get it on
Get it on

"Get It On"


"Man on the Moon" is less cheerful:

My daddy was an astronaut
That’s what I was often taught
My daddy went away too soon
Now he’s living on the moon

Latest amusement:

on a site called LibraryThing (one of those sites where you can list books you've read, see who else has read them, etc.) the site offers "unrecommendations." You can look up any book and see what people who list the book are NOT reading. For instance, given the number of people listing "History of My Life" by Casanova, you'd expect 25.3 to have read "The Drawing of the Three" by Stephen King, and also 25.3 to have read "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" -- and yet, no one who has listed Casanova's book has listed either. I guess we are talking about a different type of effectiveness.

A column on the side says: if you liked "Screw The Roses, Send Me The Thorns," you won't like "Little Women." Seems reasonable.

For future reference:

Athletes all over the world have absorbed the American model of self and body, presumably because of the influence of American sports psychology (which "gives results"). Athletes speak openly of themselves as machines of a biological variety that have to be fed certain nutrients in certain quantities at certain times of the day, and "worked" in various ways by their taskmasters to be brought to optimum performance level.

One imagines the lovemaking of such athletes: vigorous activity, followed by a burst of orgasm, rationalized as a kind of reward to the physical mechanism, followed by a brief winding-down period during which the ghostly supervisor confirms the performance has been up to standard.

and, by way of contrast of a sort:

Romantic music seeks to recover a lost state of raptness (which is not the same as rapture), a state of exaltation in which the human shell will be shed and one will become pure being or pure spirit.

from the "Strong Opinions" section (Sect. 27 -- On Music) of Diary of A Bad Year -- J.M. Coetzee.

* * *

Less didactically:

Alan squirms like a little boy, but his embarassment doesn't run deep. I know what sort of childhood he had . . . . Now he is bursting to share his new secret.

Learned from "Diary of a Bad Year" -- in Australia apparently, talk radio is known as talk-back radio. [This fact makes a reappearence later on.]

Early response -- a more entertaining book than expected. I had expected it to be interesting, but not quite so amusing and entertaining.

Donald Barthelme's Fine Soups

My fine homemade soups are interesting, economical and tasty. To make them, one proceeds in the following way:

FINE HOMEMADE LEEK SOUP
Take one package Knorr Leek Soupmix. Prepare as directed. Take two live leeks. Chop leeks into quarter-inch rounds. Throw into Soupmix. Throw in 1/2 cup Tribuno Dry Vermouth. Throw in chopped parsley. Throw in some amount of salt and a heavy bit of freshly ground pepper. Eat with good-quality French bread, dipped repeatedly in soup.

FINE HOMEMADE MUSHROOM SOUP
Take one package knorr Mushroom Soupmix. Prepare as directed. Take four large mushrooms. Slice. Throw into Soupmix. Throw in 1/2 cup Tribuno Dry Vermouth, parsley, salt, pepper. Stick bread as above into soup at intervals. Buttering bread enhances taste of the whole.

FINE HOMEMADE CHICKEN SOUP
Take Knorr Chicken Soupmix, prepare as directed, throw in leftover chicken, duck or goose as available. Add enhancements as above.

Taken from The Teachings of Don B. (as quoted on the website Overnight To Many Distant Cities)

My daughter at Hebrew/Sunday school:

Librarian to class: We have all these wonderful books for you to take out and read.

Other student: My uncle wrote this book [called something obviously Jewish]. Do you have that?

Librarian: No , but that's great we'll have to get that right away.

My daughter [being a smartass]: My grandfather wrote a book called American Indian Law. Do you have that?

Librarian: OH that's wonderful. Is it Jewish?

My daughter: No.

Librarian: Oh then we don't have it.