Literary Doppelgangers
Both Peter Falk’s “Columbo” and Jacques Derrida underwent uncharacteristic measures to discover the truth, though the latter’s was so deconstructed and linguistically bloated it chased its own tale. “To pretend, I actually do the thing. I have therefore only pretended to pretend,” he once said. Pretend you’re hearing that in French, now find the nearest stale baguette and pretend to hit him.
Don’t: A Manual of Mistakes & Improprieties more of less prevalent in Conduct and Speech, by “Censor,” real name Oliver Bell Bunce (1st ed. D. Appleton & Company, New York, 1884) is a little known book full of hilarious advice, offered in earnest, for both ladies and gentlemen of refined sensibilities. Here Oliver beseeches us regarding spitting.
Don’t expectorate. Men in good health do not need to expectorate; with them continual expectoration is simply the result of habit. Men with bronchial or lung diseases are compelled to expectorate, but no one should discharge matter of the kind in public places except into vessels provided to receive it. Spitting upon the floor anywhere is inexcusable. One should not even spit upon the sidewalk, but go to the gutter for the purpose. One must not spit into the fire-place nor upon the carpet, and hence the English rule is for him to spit in his handkerchief — but this is not a pleasant alternative. On some occasions no other may offer.
36 Comments
July 26th, 2010 / 12:00 pm
July 26th, 2010 / 12:00 pm
Wheel of Fortune
The answer isn’t “Asshole,” as the letter “s” would have lighted up in the primary round of letters — yet that is what we see, what we hear. Language lives in the eye and ear before it enters the brain, except for Vanna White’s, who stares ahead with a straight botoxed face wondering why all the snickers? I don’t know what the correct answer is, keep on seeing A S S H O L E, like think about anything but elephants and what do you think? The elephant in the room is at once both erroneous and implicit, its verity beyond its actuality. The contestant (let’s call her Cphog) no doubt is thinking what we’re thinking, the expletive that doesn’t exist but might as well. Say goodbye to that 25K or SUV honey, you’re linguistically fuckd, missing vowels or not.
Jimmy Chen—
This man needs to write a novel.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGsoMbvHU50
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SR-rCjEnV4
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exu4HOZiXFs
34
Mustache mediation
Some say Leo D’s “Mona Lisa” was him in drag, that he was gay. Some say gay is the last chapter of evolution, that we reach a point where ppl. get to make love without the threat of babies, which leads to child support, etc. An effeminate man is often deemed sophisticated, at least in our liberal-progressive artsy business. What used to get you beat up in the playground is now considered “interesting,” a word used in place of a compliment. Testosterone is boring. Toblerone is fattening, so much for semantics. So Duchamp turns Mona back into Leonardo, or at least signifies his convoluted wants quicker, while turning himself into Rrose Sélavy. Look at the poetry of Rrose, how it looks like Prose.
On “A Handful of Dust”
Evelyn Waugh finished A Handful of Dust by practically stapling his short story “The Man Who Liked Dickens” at the end of the manuscript, lending its somewhat disjointed and unexpected ending, in which our hero is kidnapped in Brazil and forced to read Charles Dickens to his captor for the rest of his life — a tight smirk, I suppose. The novel was first serialized in Harper’s Bazaar (then with literature content), who asked Waugh to write an alternative ending which skipped the ill-fated trip to Brazil. In this ending, often included in the appendix, our hero, having waived a divorce, simply comes home to his adulterous wife under the same charade from which he had tried to escape. In the closing scene, he keeps on dozing off in the car on the way back home. Waugh’s remark, I think, is that both fates — however exotic or prosaic — are a kind of inextricable death, one in which we are all destined towards. A passport is a chapbook offering self-publishings of where we’ve been, which is short for who we think we are. The best amnesty is at home.
Literary Doppelgangers
The subtlest smirk closes in on an untold joke; the heavy eyelids weighed down by ponderous thoughts; the broad nose a bridge to the mind; the fragile inverse window of tiny spectacles. William Butler Yeats and David Foster Wallace don’t have much in common, except to say that the latter did perhaps the far opposite of rhyming, his work mired in syntactical and phonetic difficulty. Notice what looks to be a faint scar on WBY’s cheek, and its uncanny reflection in DFW’s deep crease at the same place. But only one is wearing a bandana, so we know who the gangsta is. That it is white, a soft surrender.
Barbizon school
Behind the violence of Grand Theft Auto [left], light which has been most challenging to convey since the inception of painting is unconsciously rendered, almost inadvertent, unknowing of its beauty. The television and monitor offer us emanant light, not mere reflected; its brightness comes from within. Jean Baptiste-Camille Corot [right] lived with his parents until he was fifty; he painted twice a day — in the hours preceding dusk and following dawn, when the light was most tentative and transparent. In the 150 years between our cited landscapes, a lot has happened. What took months, even years to paint, is now addressed as a backdrop; its light perfect and eerily humanist. In both, look at the faint haze of sunrise in the distance, the tickle of leaves. Computer nerds now make bank writing code for games, seducing the newest generation of nerds.