Song of the moment:

"Speed of Light" -- Joseph Arthur

Selections from Chapter III of "All About H. Hatterr"

"My father used to say, " I droned to Always-Happy, from the corner of my mouth, "ye never assail an enemy asleep, undressed, unprepared, undefendant, or showing signs of fear and dread."
"Correctly spoken, rector," whispered the feller in agreement, contradicting me -- still dancing for his daddy! -- "but my heaven-gone father used to say, "If ye have no cows, ye milk the bulls instead."
Damme, to this day, I cannot make out how the hell that young feller justified the bulls analogy as analogous to the circumstance!

*

Then Always-Happy gives the signal cry: affirming the battle's on!

"Maro maro maro! May they have sexy and swollen lizards for their sisters, maro!"

*

The world's greatest Churches have approved of such men [those who castrate themselves], because, to them, excuse me, life is no vaudeville.

*

" ... Einstein said it first! Damme, all watches, and chronometers are giving wrong time! . . ."

"May I ask if the same Prof. Einstein did not send naughty post cards by postal delivery to the author Mr. Upton Sinclair?"

"Man, that was a fellow called Eisenstein! ...."

Misheard lyric:

Without clowns, there is no rain.

Lessons from sports talk radio, admonitions dept.:

"You who are without sin, remember what the big guy upstairs said: Cast the first stone!"

H. Hatterr meets Mrs. Smythe, who works at her husband's circus:

Damme, I couldn't take me eyes off of Mrs Smythe!

I fell for her, formidable! and fell in an extremely libido way! Maybe, it had something to do with her buxom hoddy-doddy anatomy: maybe, her tight breeches: perhaps, the red boots she was wearing: her whip: maybe, it was the sheer lack of femininity, her 'I may not by easy on the eye, but I'm no lady' personality, a To hell with Agnus Castus! attitude, which made me feel free of all decorum inhibitories. Maybe . . .

I couldn't say.

She sensed my civil attitude towards her and asked me to call again.

* * *

Later, more aphoristically:

This is Life, or what do you think?

You seek a`woman in a medical libido way. She denies. But she promises, though post-dated, to give all, provided you accept her lion!

The joys of G.V. Desani's All About H. Hatterr, in the current NYRB edition anyway, begin with the blurbs on the back:

"In all my experience, I have not met with anything quite like it." -- T.S. Eliot

"I didn't read many books while writing Augie. One I did read and love was All About H. Hatterr. . . . So, what about All About? I hate to be siding with T.S. Eliot . . . but what can you do?" -- Saul Bellow

from the book, which could simply be quoted in full:

"If two tired elephants should decide to sit upon one, what is the worth of one's feelings about it? It is one of Life's little panto-comedies, against which there lies no appeal."

"The earth was blotto with the growth of willow, peach, mango-blossom and flower. Every ugly thing, and smell, was in incognito, as freshness and fragrance: radiant, dewy!
Being prone, this typical spring-time dash andvivacity played an exulting phantasmagoria note on the inner-man. Medically speaking, the happy circumstances vibrated mt ductless glands and fused into me a wibble-wobble Whoa, Jamieson! fillip-and-flair to live, live!
. . .
Then, all in a huff, I suffered an overpowering Hereford and Angus bull-power impulse, Now or never!
Yet, I could not quite make up my mind."

Eagle, carved of a single piece of wood with a chainsaw. The stripes are shadows cast by the blinds.

Poem of my daughter's rediscovered cleaning my desk:

I saw her at the county fair
and I kicked her
and I told her
that jazz was for creeps
and she said "I don't
believe in God"
and then I got so mad
I just up and left
without even getting validated.

From a New Yorker review (a really interesting and smart review) of The Savage Detectives, on the background of the author:

He [Roberto Bolaño] returned to Mexico City in 1974. At a café on Calle Bucareli—Mexico City’s Left Bank—Bolaño met Mario Santiago, a defiant, acidly intelligent poet of Indian extraction. The two men, along with a dozen or so friends, formed a band of literary guerrillas, whom Bolaño christened the infrarealistas. The group’s aesthetic, Bolaño later said, was French Surrealism fused with “Dadaism, Mexican style.” They published iconoclastic magazines and engaged in myriad forms of provocation, such as shouting out their own poems at readings given by their “enemies” in Latin America’s cultural establishment—in particular, Octavio Paz, the poet who eventually became Mexico’s first Nobel Laureate. Another prominent Mexican writer, Carmen Boullosa, has spoken of her “fear,” before approaching a lectern, that infrarealistas might be lurking in the audience: “They were the terror of the literary world.”

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2007/03/26/070326crat_atlarge_zalewski

This should stand as a warning to those about to give any readings, esp. if they've been warned to be careful.

More short passages from The Savage Detectives (don't ask me why these):


And at a certain moment the atmosphere became so fraught, every thing on pins and needles, that I thought to myself these assholes must know something I don’t, something strange is going on here, it isn’t normal for the fucking bus to be circling the city like a ghost, it isn’t normal that no one’s getting on it, it isn’t normal for me to start hallucinating for no reason. But I got a hold on myself, the way I always do, and in the end nothing happened.


And then I said: how can you call yourself a Marxist, Jacinto, how can you call yourself a poet, when you can say things like that? Do you plan to make a revolution with clichés? And Jacinto answered that frankly there was no way he was planning to make revolutions anymore, but that if some night he happened to be in the mood, then making it with clichés and the lyrics of sappy love songs . . . .

And after screwing, mi general liked to go out into the courtyard to smoke a cigarette and think about postcoital sadness, that vexing sadness of the flesh, and about all the books he hadn’t read.

The fourth cup brings madness, said Apuleius . . . .

And then Norman said: it has nothing to do with visceral realists, asshole, you haven’t understood a thing. And I said: well, what does it have to do with, then? And Norman, to my relief, stopped looking at me and concentrated on the road for a few minutes, and then he said: it has to do with life, with what we lose without knowing it, and what we can regain. So what can we regain? I said. What we’ve lost, said Norman, we can get it back intact. It would have been easy to argue, but instead I opened the window and let the warm air ruffle my hair. The trees were passing by at an incredible speed.

I'll be yr bird -- M. Ward

I'll be your bird
I'm not the tiger, he never had,
I'm not the first hit when you got it bad.
I'm not your second, I’m not your third,
I'll be your bird.

I'm not your Chesnutt,
I'm not your Mould,
I'm not your DJ on late night radio,
I'll be the first one to ask where you were,
I'll be your bird.

Then when there's no one to care
I could protect like I’ve always been there,
I'll become your bear.

I'll sing statistics, & hide the truth,
I'll tell your dad anything you want me to,
I'll hide your locket under the dirt,
I'll be your bird.


just seemed a good song today.

Latest candidate for best urban legend circulating on the internet:

It seems that the Make-A-Wish is bankrupt, or close to it, because some time ago, they signed on a sick child, and told him he could have a wish. He chose as his wish the right to have unlimited wishes. So Make-A-Wish, bound by its promise and its mission, has run itself into the ground granting this child several trips to Disney World and various other costly luxuries, including daily hot dog lunches with Yankee star Johnny Damon.

[Further investigation reveals this as an Onion story taken for true by the credulous or the logical.]

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?