Makes me want to regain lost weight, and everything else

C.D. was jolly and obscene. With C.D. I felt happy, amused, outraged. C.D. made me feel that I'd been violated and survived. C.D. went over the hill with a huge yelp of delight and then, every trace of greed and lust and all those appetites that kept him constantly on the boil finally withdrawn, he fell into an unrousable slumber. And I felt like laughing. And I felt good and I felt tough.

Compared with the slim hard-bodied men his figure was a joke -- round, tubby, pillow-paunchy, it had the consistency of foam rubber; rolling around with him was like rolling around with some big beach toy.



from The Old Man and Me

from James Tate's poem "Waylon's Woman"

Waylon, it should be said, is a rooster. Loretta is not a hen.

. . . At closing time, we say our good-byes,
and I kiss Loretta, just a little peck, because
I know she is married to a chicken, and I respect
that. Waylon has made her happy in ways I never
could. The starry sky, the police hiding in the
bushes, God, it’s good to be alive, I think, and
pee behind my car in the darkness of my own private
darkness.

The entire poem can be found here: http://www.takethehandle.com/interactive/?p=790

Doug Glanville on the anxiety of the baseball player: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/14/opinion/14glanville-anxiety.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

from the story "Blue Light" by John Updike:

At the beach, when she and Fleischer were still married to other people . . . Tracy's long-toed bare feet beside Fleischer's groggy face had bronzed insteps and pale soles and cherry-red nails, and he wanted to lick them, every square inch, but for the scandal this would have caused, and the sand grains that would have adhered to his tongue.

Optimism and a helpless dependence on being loved, he saw with the reluctant wisdom of age, are the meager survival weapons we bring with us into the world. Fleischer still wanted to be loved, how ever little he deserved it.

Father Daughter Conversation On The Way To See A Mamet Play

Daughter: This is an older play, right?

Father: Yes. It's a revival. [pause] So there'll be lots of gospel music.

[At least five minutes of silence.]

*

All Water Is Holy

from the story "My Father's Tears" by John Updike. Better in context.


We are surrounded by holy water; all water, our chemical mother, is holy. Flying from Boston to New York, my habit is to take a seat on the right-hand side of the plane, but the other day I sat on the left, and was rewarded, at that hour of midmorning, by the sun’s reflections on the waters of Connecticut—not just the rivers and the Sound but little ponds and pools and glittering threads of water that for a few seconds hurled silver light skyward into my eyes. My father’s tears for a moment had caught the light; that is how I saw them. When he was dead, Deb and I divorced. Why? It’s hard to say. We boil at different degrees, Emerson said, and a woman came along who had my boiling point. The snapshots I took of Deb naked, interestingly, she claimed as part of her just settlement. It seemed to me they were mine—I’d taken them. But she said her body was hers.

After our divorce, my mother told me, of my father, “He worried about you two from the first time you brought her home. He didn’t think she was feminine enough for you.”

“He was big on femininity,” I said, not knowing whether to believe her or not. The dead are so easy to misquote.

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/02/27/060227fi_fiction?currentPage=1

Sacred Blue!

A leading French business newspaper is launching a multi-lingual version of its website using automatic translation, dispensing with journalists but producing often comic results.

"Ryanair loan to make travel of the passengers upright," read a typically bizarre headline on La Tribune's site this week above a story in equally mangled English on the low-cost airline's plans to make people fly standing up.

"The Chinese car in ambush," "Internet Explorer: mistrust!" and "Assets of the continental right in management of the crisis" were some other mysterious headlines the same day on the site, which is still in an experimental phase.

http://tech.yahoo.com/news/afp/20090710/tc_afp/francemediaindustrylanguageinternet

Sigh

Pogonophilia — The fixation on bearded men

Once, interviewing a woman with this fetish, I showed her four pictures of naked men: a well-endowed eighteen-year-old model, an extremely thin bearded man in his early thirties, a heavily muscled former professional athlete in his late forties, and Peter North, the porn star. Asked to choose the most "virile and masculine" of the group, she selected the bearded man instantly.


from: http://www.nerve.com/personalessays/Saknussemm/my-ten-favorite-fetishes-a-lifelong-sex-researcher-on-his-most-unusual-discoveries/index.asp?page=1

While it would be nice if all I knew partook of the fetish above, in my case, could most profitably be combined with:

Catoptrophilia — Unusual titillation in the presence of mirrors

Poem From My Dream Last Night, Including Both Titles

Instructions For Staying Alive

Inhale

Exhale

Repeat

(alternate title: Instructions For Smoking Pot)

*

Amusement at another's expense

Amusing critical view of Michael Chabon's young adult book about baseball Summerland:

Everything that makes a bad baseball book bad is here–lyricism laid on with a trowel, the “mythology” of baseball and its deep meaning, aching fancy in place of hard exactness. Supposedly a Young Adult novel. Give it to your son only if you want him to hate the sport forever. “A baseball game is nothing but a great slow contraption for getting you to pay attention to the cadence of a summer day,” Chabon writes. No, it isn’t, any more than cream cheese is a ready smooth device for measuring the contours of a bagel.

from a consideration of best and worst baseball novels: http://www.hardballcooperative.com/?p=1044

[for my future reference - from 1962, re ending a marriage]

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/62jul/johnson.htm

Even I Not So Sure

from a British show about Elton John:

"Though he had been married before, he had always been a confirmed bachelor."

This amuses me

Though I don't mean to make fun of the [facebook] friend of a [facebook friend] who posted it:

"Leslie.....you are right, there are no coinsidences, thank you."

Breakfast

"I was so darned sorry for poor old Cindy that I hadn't the heart to touch my breakfast. I told Jeeves to drink it himself."

-- from My Man Jeeves.