it takes a Pandemic Paranoia Page for some people to use the Internet to post their own menu, but nevertheless here it is: the virtual menu as metaphor for the coiled up Vesuvius mother covering her baby with her own body in pristine preserved Vesuviun remains of a future unrecoverable except through millennia and evolutionary exigency.
Starting with fish, and there goes the monkey, turning into man again (unless it stops there, then you've basically got a movie trope referencing anything remotely conceivable), for example the last trope would obviously be the stagnation of the next evolutionary process at what was then, ironically to us (the film goer), referred to as at the only known to us, oblivious to their culture, which then further splits tropes, now employing dramatic auto-irony, assuming the reader/film-goer reads between the lines to receive the wisdom of the author/screenwriter/director in the irony of his generations assessment of themselves as 'that' evolved species--while under the same delusion, which the apes find themselves unaware, the unaware conundrum that we humans, in fact, are not evolved to the extent which we may believe we are, being egocentric as we are--we are, in fact living the Planet of the Apes in the final reference of this trope, having never achieved the 1,600 years in which the ridiculous creationists are probably well aware their convenient theory both negates the carnivalesque horror of sharing anything with the noble ape besides a peanut or Jane Goodall, their bestial ancestors who they are presumably not keen on having over for dinner as their great to the 20th power grandfather laying with, and commingling with, and propagating through their offspring (us), the ultimate 'monkey in the woodpile.'
But, and there's one more, as well, the overkill buckshot twofer which kills two pulldu from Bayou Gauche, Louisiana and in one last metaphor using real creationist magic thinking, the birds dispatched with one shotgun shell of buckshot, when birdshot and a 410 would have left the black hen halfway edible;
The American coot (Fulica americana), also known as a mud hen or pouldeau, is a bird of the family Rallidae. Though commonly mistaken for ducks, American coots are only distantly related to ducks, belonging to a separate order. Unlike the webbed feet of ducks, coots have broad, lobed scales on their lower legs and toes that fold back with each step in order to facilitate walking on dry land.[2] Coots live near water, typically inhabiting wetlands and open water bodies in North America. Groups of coots are called covers or rafts.[citation needed] The oldest known coot lived to be 22 years old.[2]
The American coot is a migratory bird that occupies most of North America. It lives in the Pacific and southwestern United States and Mexico year-round and occupies more northeastern regions during the summer breeding season. In the winter they can be found as far south as Panama.[2] Coots generally build floating nests and lay 8–12 eggs per clutch.[2] Females and males have similar appearances, but they can be distinguished during aggressive displays by the larger ruff (head plumage) on the male.[3] American coots eat primarily algae and other aquatic plants but also animals (both vertebrates and invertebrates) when available.[4]
The American coot is listed as “Least Concern” under the IUCN conservation ratings. Hunters generally avoid killing American coots because their meat is not as sought after as that of ducks.[2]
Much research has been done on the breeding habits of American coots. Studies have found that mothers will preferentially feed offspring with the brightest plume feathers, a characteristic known as chick ornaments.[5] American coots are also susceptible to conspecific brood parasitism and have evolved mechanisms to identify which offspring are theirs and which are from parasitic females.[6]
this metaphor could fuck up a two-car funeral, such are the folks down the street (my street, right next to Jimmy Swaggart and Donnie Swaggart's Bible College (where I have to take Kelly Hali Chelette), Republican (go south at human, then when you can't go no further, just keep-a goin'), self-aggrandizement by proxy their favorite disputation against niggling proven Science for the literal word of God who never mentioned it.
It assumes that what took a billion years of Goldilocks-luck and real estate mantra, which goes, "Location. Location, Location), and which turns a rundown shack with a view which happens to include the thinnest piece of prosciutto sliver of silver San Francisco Bay, from the kitchen sink window straight to the bank, making this house, normally listing at $1,500 a square foot, into a quaint bungalow with a magnificent view of the Bay for a staggering extra 100% markup (and you probably won't even be doing the dishes).
Yeah, Don Bergeron's City Market staff has finally received a phone call from the 1600s letting them know that they may need to let people in town know that the pile of Bubonic Plague victims has been moved across town and buried in the bad area with the high Mead traffic, which is rapidly turning it into one hell of a last place on Earth in which to party like it's 1699. "If player wants to act like a chump, let him act like a chump!'-- Barbara Billingsley in 'Airplane': 'Stewardess, I Speak Jive' they must have advised him that the quarantined people overburdening the electrical grid which runs the computer which hosts the Internet which connects the hungry shut-ins with the last meals of which they shall ever dine, ensuring two things when discovered, prodded and poked 1,600 years from now ca. 3520-19 (they won't know why we added that, but I guarantee you someone will come up with a theory and the date will in fact have the addendum -19 suffixed onto it like a little caboose for no reason whatsoever) aC-19 (after COVID-19)
So anyway, now I don't have to post it, you can drive there and pick up your to go order or have it delivered to your car. And help out his lovely employees who we must all remember in all seriousness, are suffering just like us all except for the paycheck part which they are short of.
i suggest the meatloaf.
-Tuesday-
Home-style Meatloaf
Chicken Piccata
with Lemon Cream Sauce
Grilled Pork Chop
with Apples & Cranberries
Dessert:
Bread Pudding
with Whiskey Pecan Sauce
Red Velvet Cake
Ode to a Four-Letter Word
‘They
fuck you up, your mum and dad,” the poet Philip Larkin declared in
“This Be the Verse.” Maybe so, but Adam Mansbach would like to point out
a corollary: The kids return the favor. Mansbach is the father of an
apparently insomniac toddler and the author of five books, including the
fake bedtime story Go the Fuck to Sleep. That book, which began
life as a jokey post on Facebook, won’t be published until next week.
Nonetheless, it has topped the best-seller list on Amazon (not
Amazon>Children’s Books>Satire>Profanity—all of Amazon). It is
being translated into more than twelve languages. Fox 2000 has acquired
the movie rights. It all but begs for sequels—having spent some time
taking care of a three-year-old this winter, I’d like to nominate Put on Your Fucking Boots—and
it makes an ideal gift for the infinitely self-replenishing population
of new parents. In short, I suspect it will be with us for a while.
Why
has the world gone gaga (so to speak) for this book? Part of its appeal
is the barbed send-up of a normally saccharine genre, but Go the Fuck to Sleep is not, at base, a parody. It’s more like what Wicked is to The Wizard of Oz—a
book that tells a familiar story from the perspective of a previously
marginalized character. Bedtime, like a lot of modern parenting, is
organized around the child (the thirsty, hungry, OCD child); Mansbach
shows us the parent’s side, and despite some charming lion cubs, et al.,
by the illustrator Ricardo Cortés, it ain’t pretty:
The flowers doze low in the meadows
And high on the mountains so steep.
My life is a failure, I’m a shitty-ass parent.
Stop fucking with me, please, and sleep.
This is not a spoof of Goodnight, Moon. This is Battle Hymn of the Tired Father.
Unsurprisingly,
plenty of commentators are using Mansbach’s book to reflect on the
state of modern parenting. You’ll forgive me if I use it for a different
purpose: I’d like to talk about our culture’s bipolar relationship with
the word fuck.
That
word—which appears, like a crude jack-in-the-box, in the last line of
every stanza—is why the book works, both creatively and commercially.
Yet this popularity was not a foregone conclusion. Like sex, alcohol,
nudity, and drugs, swearing sets off the great American seesaw of
schoolmarmish horror and schoolyardish glee, and it can be hard to
predict whether a writer who curses will wind up exalted or excoriated. I
know, because I wound up on the wrong side myself.
When
it comes to profanity, I hail from what you might call a mixed
background. My father swears freely and exuberantly—although, when I
was a child, he did so exclusively in Polish. In moments of paternal
irritation, an entire shtetl sprang to life in our suburban home. Psia krew, cholera, curwa, szmata: excrement,
cholera, whores, rags. (Predictably, that gritty archipelago of my
father’s native tongue is all the Polish I ever learned.) My mother, by
contrast, swears approximately never. Moreover, some years ago, she
confessed that she hates it when I do so. I was startled and abashed,
and cleaned up my act immediately—which is to say, I stopped swearing in
front of her.
As
that concession suggests, all cursing is contextual. My mother’s
aversion to profanity has everything to do with being born female in the
forties, and her primary objection to my own occasional expletive was
that it seemed “unfeminine.” (In context, speaking of context, that
objection struck me as faintly comedic and overwhelmingly kind: This is a
woman who didn’t miss a beat when I first brought home a girlfriend.)
My father, meanwhile, reverted to Polish to swear because he knew that
imported expletives lose their shock value—which is, of course, almost
all the value they ever had.
In
addition to this mixed family background, I also enjoy a mixed
geography of profanity. Like Mansbach, I live in New York, which surely
deserves the prize for most foulmouthed city in the nation. (You
Chicagoans can go fuck yourselves.) Profanity flows from New Yorkers as
the East River flows into the sea: constant, filthy, strangely
magnificent. It’s not just our ability to cuss each other out; it’s the
blasé and cheerful vulgarity of everyday speech. I was once in a packed
midtown crosswalk at rush hour when a guy next to me retrieved something
from the street and sprinted ahead, shouting, “Yo, lady, you dropped
your fuckin’ wallet!”
This
endless, extemporized profanity has had an unmistakable effect on my
own speech. Before I moved to New York, I lived in Oregon; nowadays,
when I go back to visit, I feel like a sailor on shore leave at a Raffi
concert. On the other hand, I blush when I return to Chile, where I also
once lived, and where the locals speak a famously profanity-happy
version of Spanish. You know those nice respectable Midwesterners who
say “sugar” when they mean “shit”? Nice respectable Chileans sit down at
the breakfast table, look at the sugar bowl, and say, “Pass me that
shit.”
Despite
New York’s impact on my speech—and this particular article aside—my
prose remains relatively Oregon-friendly. Or so I thought until last
year, when I published a nonfiction book and reader reviews started
appearing on Amazon:
“Unfortunately the author calls upon profanity. That alone is worth a one-star deduction.”
“I do not think the author should have used profanity.”
“I removed a star for profanity.”
Docked
a star for profanity! This was Amazon as elementary school: no swearing
allowed, gold stars for good behavior. It was also a nice illustration
of the American hypersensitivity to swearing: Of the 117,000 words in my
book, just fifteen are expletives—0.01 percent—all but three of which
appear in quotations.
At
first I assumed these comments were the work of some small, strange
prisserati, feverishly hitting SEND on several hundred censorious
reviews per day. I began to reconsider, however, after a host of
otherwise ordinary-seeming readers e-mailed me to express the desire to
wash my book out with soap. Something was bothering these people, and,
while I can’t say for sure, I suspect it was this issue of context—the
presence of a so-called bad word in the middle of serious nonfiction.
Maybe they would have docked Elmore Leonard a star, too, but I doubt it.
For
as long as some people have fretted about expletives in literature,
others have seen fit to laugh at them. Here is Cole Porter,
mock-lamenting the profanity of writers back in 1934: “Good authors,
too, who once knew better words / Now only use four-letter words writing
prose / Anything goes!” That was sometime after James Joyce and D. H.
Lawrence, and sometime before Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, and Erica
Jong. Yet the idea persists that the use of swear words by writers is
fundamentally uncreative and indolent—that the lazy man’s “Every unhappy
family is unhappy in its own way” is “Fuck this shit.”
Writers don’t use expletives out of laziness or to shock. We use them because sometimes the four-letter word is the best one.
This
idea rests on the assumption that “bad” words really are bad—and ditto
writers who use them without exceptional justification. In crime
fiction, foul language is justified on the ground that it is lifelike.
(Art just imitates that shit.) In Go the Fuck to Sleep, foul language is not simply justified but justification: The whole book is about the taboo status of the word fuck. By contrast, outside of books like Jesse Sheidlower’s The F-Word or Harry G. Frankfurt’s On Bullshit, it’s difficult to justify profanity in serious nonfiction.
But
do we need such a justification, beyond the one a writer might mount
for any word—i.e., that it works? There is, after all, no such thing as
an intrinsically bad, boring, or lazy word. There is only how it is
deployed, and one of the pleasures of profanity is how diversely you can
deploy it. In The Mother Tongue, Bill Bryson argues that okay
is “the quintessential Americanism” and “the most grammatically
versatile of words.” Okay. But surely it has a rival—or a compatriot—in fuck. Wherever it originated (the jury is out), the F-word has flourished in our adolescent American soil. And pace
Bryson, its grammatical versatility cannot be topped: You can use it as
noun, verb, adverb, adjective, or interjection, not to mention in any
mood whatsoever, from exultation to rage.
I
know of no better rebuttal to the “bad words are bad writing” equation
than film critic Anthony Lane’s brutal 2005 takedown of Star Wars in The New Yorker.
Listen to Yoda for a moment: “Mourn them do not. Miss them do not. The
shadow of greed that is.” Now listen to Lane demolish—with awesome
precision, as one demolishes a single building in a city block—that
mangled syntax and ersatz wisdom: “Break me a fucking give.”
Bad?
Boring? Please. Pulitzer him a fucking give. Writers don’t use
expletives out of laziness or the puerile desire to shock or because we
mislaid the thesaurus. We use them because, sometimes, the four-letter
word is the better word—indeed, the best one. In The Debt to Pleasure,
John Lanchester provides an astute breakdown of three words that, at
first, might seem interchangeable. “Compare,” he writes, “the
implication of mismanagement, of organization going wrong, in the Gallic
debacle with the candidly chaotic, intimate quality of the Italian fiasco,
or the blokishly masculine and pragmatic (and I would suggest
implicitly reversible and therefore, in its deep assumptions,
optimistic) American fuck-up.”
Here’s the thing: The book I wrote was called Being Wrong. It
is entirely about fucking up, with all those optimistic American
undertones emphatically included. I knew, when I chose to use the F-word
in it, that some people would have difficulty reading past it, for
moral or cultural or religious reasons. But why shouldn’t reading
sometimes present such difficulties—not even but especially in serious
literature? Surely one of the chief pleasures of literature is that it
urges us into unfamiliar terrain, through both the stories it tells and
the language it uses to tell them. Context might be everything, but we
read, at least in part, to slip its chains.
Not
that this is always easy to do. Literature also offers us the pleasure
of identification, and it is as comforting to feel at home in a book as
in a locution or a location. Case in point: Last year, I gave a reading
at a bar in the East Village—which is, along with a few select mountain
ranges, the closest thing I have to a spiritual home. I took the
opportunity to read aloud all the passages in my book that contain
profanity. I did this partly as sideways homage to my more squeamish
readers: Ever the polite kid, I was swearing out of my mother’s earshot.
Come to think of it, I probably also did it in homage to my
multilingual father and his unbounded, irreverent eloquence. “You taught
me language,” Caliban says to Prospero in The Tempest, “And my profit on ’t / Is I know how to curse.”
Mainly,
though, I did it as a kind of love letter to New York. At this point
I’d been on the road for months, giving G-rated talks and generally
doing whatever I could to make Mom and Miss Manners proud. I missed my
home, my friends—even, strangely, my book: the way it felt to me when,
like a toddler, it was still keeping me up at night. I was bored by the
grown-up version of it, or maybe by the grown-up version of me. The New
Yorkers assembled for my reading—bless their dirty, nerdy hearts—did not
seem inclined to dock me a star for my use of profanity. There are
other ways to say this, but none so exactly right: I was very fucking
glad to be home.
Go the Fuck to Sleep
Adam Mansbach.
Akashic Books. $14.95.
Adam Mansbach.
Akashic Books. $14.95.
