A small inexpensive mass-produced article.
May 2009 Archives
Trifling; vain; futile; insignificant.
I arrived at a shell of a thought last week.
The whiff of mortality crossed my palette.
The reality of this earthly vessel's failure tickled the back of my mind while
thinking about baseball. Yes, baseball.
If we can accept and assume the use of steroids by a majority of players in the country's only genuinely competitive baseball league then I think we can abandon our perceived indignities and look to the future of these things -- a future where comparable drugs are not just undetectable but safe and legal. Players will hit hundreds of home runs per season and -- without ever tiring -- play baseball from sunrise to midnight 365 days a year. Professional athletes will not just live longer, they will live forever, and their secrets of immortality will eventually trickle down to commoners who choose immortality.
Not in this lifetime, not for this body, not for this person who finds that none of this life's adventures or quotidian battles find comfort in knowing they will be extinguished when my earthly paces are finished.
A group of artists and writers with real or pretended artistic or intellectual aspirations and usually an unconventional life style
An artificial language for international use that rejects all existing words and is based instead on an abstract analysis of ideas
I transcribed the complete Dictionary of Ro thinking it might help me understand the mechanics of inventing a language. It did not, but it was a fun mindlock for a few days. I became interested in Ro after spotting the 2-letter word on a Wordswarm.net Random Words page.
I have transcribed many things in the same spirit. I copied long poems -- From Gloucester Out by Ed Dorn and BREATHLAHEM by Jim Brodey -- in a spirit of both servitude and hoped-for bonding. All those words passing through my hands, I imagined, would grease the wheels of inspiration and lead to me writing like those great poets.
No such transformation happened. My poetry is bad, and my poetry will always be bad no matter if I transcribed every line of poetry from Shakespeare's "fairest creaturesto Ginsberg's "urn of ashes". The mechanical act of reproducing great and not-so-great works of others lead me to no ease of craft or connection with the masters.
I may have arrived at this notion of inspiration-via-replication from having been a pianist for so long. Classical music is a re-creative art, an art of compromise in which the traditions of past eras meet practices of today. At one stage of my life my knowledge of the pianists' repertoire was pretty comprehensive, and I imagined that a pianist whose knowledge of the reportoire is fluid might be at an advantage when they set pen to paper and compose their own scores. As with the transcribing of poetry I find that all that a systematic knowledge of others' music gave me little advantage in creating my own music. The value comes from the dialogue between one individual and another, not from laborious analysis and marching orders.
To gather or wind into a ball; to collect into a spherical form or mass, as threads.
Habitually idle or indisposed to labor; lazy; listless; sluggish; indulging in ease; applied to persons.
So as to throw into ecstasy.
A friend of mine, as a joke, used to say that he was "ravishing". He meant so say he was "famished", but by substituting that word with one that had a similar -ish- core he presumed to amuse one and all who shared his sense of cunning linguistic humor.
I remember that friend once in a while for a discussion we had about eating, and specifically the language used by human beings to describe their experiences in consuming food. There are times when, to me, this type of language is borderline obscene.
"This burger was tasty and moist."
"The brownie was delicious and savory."
"My mouth watered as I brought the delectable morsel to my mouth."
Statements like this upset my stomach. Statements like this make me cringe. Detailed accounts of an individual's gastronomical intake are, to me, just slightly different from similarly vivid accounts of defecation or vomiting, which are the only ultimate results of food consumption. This act of placing food in your mouth is the beginning of the digestive process, an act of necessity that we must perform to maintain this inferior vessel into which our souls are poured. The earthly obsession with turning this necessity into a publicly-shared sensuous act is ludicrous to me. Restaurant and food reviews -- which I involuntarily encounter at times -- virtually always make we want to hurl whatever it is I am reading from, be it a printed newspaper or a handheld mobile device. If I ever get blasé enough about material possessions I imagine myself throwing a large object into a TV screen when a food reviewer appears on the screen. For now I almost spontaneously grab the remote control to change the channel when a food or restaurant review comes up on the television. I just can not tolerate the way some humans talk about food.
I know, of course, that my instincts about this matter are probably not common. Others may be indifferent to accounts of the initiation of the digestive process but I doubt if very many share my feelings of discomfort.
Beyond the grotesqueries of these accounts, though, is even more astonishment that restaurant reviews exist at all. I read people's accounts of a fabulous experience they claim to have had eating tacos at an obscure Mexican restaurant and I continually grimace, whispering "Who the hell cares?" as one reviewer lavishes panegyrics on the crispiness of the taco shells before another reviewer chimes in to say that their taco shell was stale -- stale! -- when they visited. The cultural debt incurred with the consumption of food at a dining establishment goes well beyond the moneys, it is a debt so severe that someone who spends $4 on a taco assumes the taco-maker owes them a goddam living.
Praise; panegyric; commendation. Men are quite as willing to receive as to bestow encomiums.
I first learned the word "encomium" while reading a biography of Chopin. Robert Schumann's famous quote about Chopin -- "Hat's off gentlemen, a genius!" -- was described as an "encomium", a word I had to look up in a dictionary to understand. The context of the word would seem to have made its meaning clear enough, but at 14 or 15 years of age the word was new to me, and its usage seemed so deliberate that I wanted to see if it had deeper meaning.
At the time I was interested in commonly used words with unusual 5th meanings, or even unexpected primary meanings. Sitting on the couch reading the dictionary I discovered that the first definition for "magazine" did not refer to a printed periodical but to guns and weaponry. This was new to me, and it inspired me to seek out common words with obscure alternate meanings, this so that I could baffle or at least impress English teachers.
"Encomium" seems to be rarely used today. I think of it as a term used only by musicologists and biographers in reference to Robert Schumann's comments about other composers. For this reason it rises a step above being a dictionary-only term. I probably encountered the word elsewhere when if I did I imagine I dismissed it as being borrowed from the Schumann context. Further use of that word was simply mimicry of Chopin's biographers.
All of which seems frivolous now that I think about it. I became possessive of my initial discovery of that word, biased by illegitimate notions of the primacy of first discovery. Yet this is how memory works. Any context in which "encomium" appears has become associated with Robert Schumann, or Fréderic Chopin, no matter where the word appears.
A kind of food made by boiling meat in water; broth. This mixture is usually called in America, broth or soup, but not porridge. With us, porridge is a mixture of meal or flour, boiled with water. Perhaps this distinction is not always observed.
Any time I walk past the Brasserie restaurant in midtown I laugh because I remember how a friend thought the place was called The Brothery -- as in broth (not pronounced like "brother" but like broth-er-ee). He thought he was meeting someone for soup and was surprised to find it was an extravagent (to him) French restaurant called the Brasserie. He was confused to imagine that a place in midtown specialized in soup or, stranger yet, broth. He imagined a menu of 100 pages listing broths from all corners of the world: broth done African style with smashed peanuts; broth done southern style with smashed crackers; cajun broth with picante sauce? When he told me about the Brothery we discovered that neither of us really knew what broth was. I thought of it as prison or orphanage food while my friend thought broth was a more robust product. We were both wrong to think of it as an independent, singular foodstuff. I think I confused broth with gruel, and he might have thought broth was something like stew.
To tread on; to trample under foot.
The word "conculcate" came to me in a dream one night. It was as if the dream had a title, or a subject line, and that line was "Conculcate." In the dream I was near the lake across the street from the house I grew up in. I was about 10 in the dream, which occured when I was 16 or 17. Unlike today there were few houses built on the lake when I was 10, and that is how the lake looked in the dream. Some unknown beast lurking in the bushes chased me, reaching high speeds and trampling me as it revelaed itself to be an enormously huge animal with numerous extremities. In the way that titles and subject lines sometimes follow your travels through a story or other written material I found myself almost chanting the word "conculcate" as the mystery beast trampled me. I do not know if "conculcate" was on some school vocabulary list at the time or where I learned the word but I have never had reason to use it, and the only appearance it has ever made in my life as far as I can recall was that teenage dream.
Marked by up-to-dateness in dress and manners
I just got a hair cut.
The first hours after the sheering feel awkward, no less now than when I was 10. I remember a certain Peanuts strip of early vintage: My memory of that strip starts with Snoopy as a recipient of generous, loving hugs from the girls of Peanuts. Pig Pen sees what the girls are doing and asks if he can have a hug, too. Pig Pen is rejected, and the girls skewer him saying they would never hug someone as filthy and slovenly as him.
In most of his appearances Pig Pen revels in his filth, but this time he decides that the prospect of getting a nice hug from the girls is worth the effort of cleaning up. He showers, washes his hair, and a few frames later returns to the girls, this time smiling and radiating cleanliness. His clean appearance is a sort of nakedness, as when a heavily bearded man shaves his face for the first time in many years. Pig Pen's arms open wide in anticipation of a warm embrace but he is instead rejected again. I forget now exactly what the girls said to him to shoo him away but the strip ends with Pig Pen's halo of cleanliness turning to a rippled, distorted cloud of rejection and confusion. Pig Pen then returns to a mud pool and feels like his good old self again.
That one frame, where he returns to the girls with his open arms, is often how I feel immediately after a haircut and a shave. The drawing shows Pig Pen with a stunning halo about him, a halo made all the more striking for how we have only ever known Pig Pen to be a filthy mess. I would not say that I feel like a filthy mess before getting a haircut -- nor do I expect a hug after getting a haircut -- but that cut and scrubbed post-haircut feeling always reminds me of the Pig Pen halo.
To stuff; to crowd; to fill full; hence, to make hot and close; to render stifling.
I sometimes blast my air conditioners at full tilt during the winter time. Other human beings do this, too, and as a tribe we attract the disdainful curiosity of people passing by outside who don't understand the seemingly gluttonous need for indoor air conditioning while it is 20 degrees outdoors. I usually only do this toward the start of the winter season. At that time the central heat in this apartment building is turned on, and the abrupt change in temperature and humidity is jarring to my senses. Before I got a loud air filter I also blasted the A/C for its white noise that drowned out the random sounds of city life outside. Soon after I moved in to this apartment the owner of this building quizzed me on this, asking why I ran my A/C in January while it was below freezing outside. I do not remember what I said in reply, but at the time I lacked the poise to immediately see that it was none of his business. If I had had my wits about me I might have just ended the discussion with that as a reply. Instead we ventured off into what he said was his real reasons for asking. He wanted to be sure the heat was not too high, and to be sure I knew that I could adjust the heat in the apartment, and so on. I remember this vignette because it and other blunt encounters with the owner of this building have caused me to keep a distance between him and myself for the 11 years that I have lived here.
An explanation or definition of an obscure word in a text.
Words populate a fantastically complicated system of obfuscation, a system in which no word is as obscure as the unutterable, which is itself no word at all. A purity of expression exists, I believe, in the washroom of consciousness that huddles under the weight of centuries of structured language. Here there are no symbols and no cyphers, only the blunt mettle of human animals.
A conspicuously wealthy person, esp. one returned from India with a fortune.
A story told by a college friend -- a story either exaggerated or even outright apocryphal -- says that he and a group of college buddies studying in Vienna for a semester went to Warsaw for a few days. Among other Ugly American gluttonies they went out for dinner at what seemed to be the finest restaurant in town. For hours they ate and drank, staying past closing time as the wait staff kept bringing out more desserts and wine. When the students asked for the check the waiter allegedly raised his index finger and said "One dollar." Steaks, wine, soufflés and pot roasts, all for one American dollar! The story is most likely exaggerated but a U.S. dollar probably did go a long way in Warsaw in the late 1980s. The students then allegedly left a $20 bill, a well-intentioned gesture that I think could have been interpreted as an insult, as in the song "Taxi Driver" by Harry Chapin, where Chapin's rich ex pays him handsomely out of a mix of pity and disdain: "She handed me twenty dollars for a two-fifty fare and said 'Harry, keep the change.'"
The study or mapping of the moon.
Remember, O gawky youth,
the infinity of the moon
before you land there.
A girl with an attractive bust who wears tight sweaters.
Remember the smile
of the girl who
noticed I wore my
best sweater when
I visited her apartment
at the holidays.
Reading materials (documents, written information) that you must read and deal with but that you think are extremely boring.
Remember the man whose
life work filled the attic of a
conservatory library.
Thousands of pages,
box loads of manuscripts,
all of it shit:
musicals, operas, oratorios;
page after fevered page
covered to the margins with
hacking melodies,
harmonies cold but earnest,
songs so formulaic they sound like
hate.
To practice plunder; to commit robbery. In time of war, rapacious men are let loose to spoliate on commerce.
One of the investment accounts still left over from my dad's estate is, in my opinion, a little sketchy. I won't identify it but it had produced consistent but modest returns during the recent market tribulations. "consistent but modest" is the new scam alert. I was somewhat relieved to find that the latest dividend check was worth significantly less than has been typical for that account, an account which is not tied directly to the stock markets and thus has reasonable expectations of dodging the bullets that have punctured the values of so many other holdings. I remain a bit suspicious, though, as I imagine that the dividends might have been artificially lowered to meet expectations and avoid scrutiny.
