fool and juggler

I Fantasmi di Pietra, di Mauro Corona

2011-11-01T00:00:00.000+01:00

The rooves are collapsed, the floors stacked one upon another, some of the stone walls of the dwellings still resist gravity. In the ghost town of Erto, high in the Dolomites, there is a curious wall, imbedded with some dozen of hooks. It is where the 3000 former citizens used to kill and hang their fat hogs, cattle, goats.

And dogs. No, they didn't slaughter dogs. But if one died by misadventure, they hung it, for the skin.

Dog skin, it seems, makes a drum twice as loud as goat skin. News to me.

Vittorin was the town skinner. Coincidentally, he led the 80-member troop of drummers in the Good Friday procession. His drum, not surprisingly, could be heard above all the rest.

Vittorin was small of stature. He was a shrimp. Not surprisingly, he married an amazon. Not too surprisingly, she beat him daily. Not her fault, she suffered from indigestion brought on by overeating, so naturally she had to vent. Not her fault at all, never is.

The beatings went on for many years. Every Ertano knew about it. Every Ertano looked down on Vittorin. Literally and otherwise.

Finally, Vittorin's luck changed. His big giant female ran off with another man. Peace at last!

At first, some catty neighbours surmised that Vittorin had pushed the behemoth into a fast moving stream, during flood time. But that dog wouldn't hunt. For if Vittorin was famous for anything, except his skinning and his drumming, it was for his pusillanimity.

30 years passed, 30 Good Fridays.

Vittorin, age seventy, felt Death Most Holy approach. He called for the priest and a couple of his best friends.

Confession. Sort of.

"I want y'all to do something for me. There under the cattle trough, you will find . . . ."

Well. He had, in fact, ucciderated his big giant wife. Pressed a hay fork through her goozle while she was napping. Skinned her. Cured it in the attic. Did you know what with a round of her dried skin, burnt the rest. Tucked her flesh and bones under the cattle trough.

"You all knew how she beat me. None of you lifted a finger to stop it. Not even you, Reverend Father." Then Vittorin croaked. "Then," in story time, in fact he dragged on for days and weeks. But bimeby, yes, he did croak.

The friends and priest disbelieved, like the Apostles. But sure as the world, there she was, much of her, under the cattle trough. Obedient to Vittorin's last wishes, they took her bones, and Vittorin's prized drum, and buried the lot next to Vittorin.

The moral, of course, is Waste not, Want not. Or Recycle. Or something, bound to be a moral.

This story, so much more richly told, and hundreds of others as juicy or juicier, are to be found in Mauro Corona's I Fantasmi di Pietra.--Giac.

Il Pranzo di Ferragosto

2011-09-01T01:00:00.000+02:00

Il Pranzo di Ferragosto. Il Pranzo di Babette.

Cioccolato. Schegge di April (“use your words, Leon”).

Food flicks specialise in happy endings. Unless, perhaps, Eating Raoul or La Grande Abbuffata.

Throughout August I et pumpkin babies.

Take one infant pumpkin, about the size of a softball. Wash, trim the ends. Slice thinly. While butter is melting over medium heat in a skillet, slice some green onions, some sweet red peppers. Crumble feta or mozzarella. When butter is sizzling, arrange the pumpkin slices as for Pommes Anna, or just dump them in, if that is the sort of person you are. Layer with vegetables and cheese. Salt and pepper. Cover. Ignore for fifteen minutes. Uncover and serve. Don't forget to turn off the burner, probably that's just me.

Pranzo di Ferragosto. Ripe olives. Pumpkin Baby. Tuscan bread from the one bakery in Overton that does it right. Cantaloupe, sweet and musky, with fat blueberries to counterpoint. Pecans and gorgonzola to finish. (Or organic goat gouda, no animal rennet.) Prosecco to downwash.

From the garden, organic it goes without saying: pumpkin baby, red peppers. Organic, but storebought: butter, green onions, cheese, pecans (regional), blueberries.

Immigrants from the bel paese: olives, gorgonzola, prosecco.

How come I have pumpkin babies? Last year's jack o'lantern's guts survived the winter in the compost heap, sprouted, ran 40 feet in every direction, and right now are dangling green and ripe pumpkins 8 feet up in the boxwood hedges.

Happy ending for this summer.--Giac.

Signs from Above?

2011-08-24T13:49:00.001+02:00

Early reports from the earthquake zone indicate fissures in the highest levels of the Washington Monument and of the National Cathedral.

Signs from Above?

Signs, maybe.

News, alas no.--Giac

John Paul Getty

2011-02-08T00:51:00.003+01:00

In Paradisum, G P. Ci vedremo, Giac.

l'Incantesimo

2010-02-14T00:13:00.004+01:00

ATTIVISTA MISTICO CERCA CHIACCHIERONE PRIMORDIALE Eccomi! Sceglimi per la tua crociata impossibile! Eccomi! Sceglimi per aiutarti ad assediare il Regno di Cielo! Ognuno è il giulare di qualcuno, fammi essere il tuo! Non ho vergogna, non ho degli scrupoli! Non do finché non mi faccia male, do finché mi faccia sbalzare il desiderio. Sii scaltro, fammi insegnarti il mio metodo matto! M'elettrizza nel santuario, bel affascinante! Sorprendimi nel labirinto! Spogliami sul altare! Fammi inturgidire alla stazione secondaria! Io ti farò risorgere dovunque ti piacerà!--l'Incantesimo per la Festa di San Valentino, dal libro Pronoia di Rob Brezsny.

l'Ometto dell'Anno

2009-12-19T15:00:00.002+01:00

° Un solo peccatore distrugge un gran bene: Ben Bernanke, l'Ometto dell'Anno.

Why I Do Not Hate the Rich Folks

2009-10-14T19:09:00.002+02:00

°°° My little cousin, astonished at the selfishness of the Healthcare Haves directed towards the Healthcare Haven'ts, proposes a solution. A solution the Rich Folks wouldn't like at all. It is as if he hates his betters.
°°° No use my hating the Rich, I don't know but two of them, unless you count F T. I call "rich" someone who can count on the income from an estate of at least $100,000,000. And even then, I may be lowering the cut-off a bit much. Grandma Agnelli, with a pension of 700,000-odd euro the month, for life, plus, I suppose, a palace or two thrown in--Grandma Agnelli I call rich. She doesn't have to trouble herself with the family business, the checks clear, a million bucks a month.
°°° I wish her well.
°°° And no, I don't hate the Rich Folks.
°°° First of all, I was brought up Francescan. That means that I think a banquet is 1500 calories of firm but still chewable pugliese bread, and the day's nutritional balance made up in local ripe olives so abundant nobody else has wanted them. A feast is the same, except the bread doesn't have so much sandy grit ground into the wheat that it makes my teeth sore.
°°° Possessions enslave. Even benign possessions enslave by symbiosis. It's not just a Truthy Truism, it's Truly True. Slaves are forever getting under foot, not to mention their spitting in our lemonade behind our backs.
°°° Second, Do Not They Bleed, If We Prick 'em? Don't Rich Folks die? Don't they be dreadful parents? Don't they grow old and have to stuff their faces with cow goo, till their eyebrows climb halfway up their foreheads? Don't they make fools of themselves over slimy married jerks? Don't they snort the coke just to get through the day? And F T even has to work, like Anna Wintour.
°°° Third, the wealth of the Rich Folks doesn't amount to a hill of beans. Suppose Bill Gates got religion, and distributed his entire wealth to his grateful and worthy fellow citizens. If Microsoft is in a bubble, he has $60,000,000,000 to spread around. If Microsoft has had the air squeezed out, he has $30,000,000,000, a wife, chirren, and a palace or two. He can keep the wife, the chirren, and the palace, nobody else wants them.
°°° But, 300,000,000 American citizens dividing $30,000,000,000. Yes folks, that's only 2 zeros extra.
°°° 2.
°°° Ergo, each of us grateful and worthy fellow Americans would receive a fabulous legacy of $100. One time. Then Bill Gates would have nothing, except the wife chirren and palace, and how would he pay the heat bill? And after one trip to the grocery store, the entire body of worthy and grateful fellow Americans would have nothing too.
°°° I guess you really have to be a selfmade trillionaire, like Bernanke, S. p. A., to have a red cent nowadays.--Giac.

Double Feature

2009-09-27T19:15:00.003+02:00

I like Anna Wintour. She describes herself as "decisive." She appears so to be. Therefore, she possesses an abundance of a quality I lack practically altogether.
I like Grace. I like the luckless Italian fotografer. I like the little muscle-guy who knows how to print out fotos. I like the models, the designers, the slaves, the vassals.
For, they're all wholeheartedly in pursuit of an ideal, il bello.
I never knew before, for I've never had a copy of Vogue in hand.
They're painters, artists. They take young flesh and brilliant costumes and distinctive settings, and create foto-paintings.
God bless their hearts, one and all.
Besides, The September Issue was so much funnier, and so much more suspenseful than advertised, I was delighted to have bought the ticket.

Meanwhile, down the hall, was Lord, Save Us from Your Followers. Always glad to see Jon Stewart, that handsome dog. And Senator Franken, that--er--entertaining dog. And Bono's hair.
And so very many Uncle Toms, wherever did the presenter find them?
And the self-confessing, self-forgiving presenter. How pat he has it down. A little lipstick on the pig, no need for a change of heart. Or self-examination. Or a sense of justice.
A most disheartening movie, so glad I didn't buy the ticket.--Giac.

home economy

2009-06-21T16:27:00.003+02:00

I was searching for an old recipe for pâté de fruit.
I didn’t find it.
Instead, in a 1929 cookbook published by the Woman’s Missionary Society of the Pope First M. E. Church South, I came across this recommended budget for household expenses:

36%--Operating Expenses (rent, utilities, ecc.)
24%--Food
10%--Wearing Apparel
6%--Advancement (education, donations)
5%--Health
12%--Investment
7%--Amusement

Well.
Health insurance costs so much nowadays that a family of four would have to have an after-tax income of $200,000 in order for medical expenditure to be only 5% of the budget. Something has to give. I hope it won’t be Amusement.
As for the perpetual harping on Americans’ refusal to save “12%” of their annual incomes--pish tush. Social Security deductions do that for us.
Only, the deductions stop before they get to the CEOs.

§§§

And just God bless the Woman’s Missionary Society for slashing the tithe, doubtless they knew best.--Giac.

Yes, I Did

2009-01-20T23:59:00.000+01:00

Am I old enough to know better?

YES! I! AM!

Yet, during the Inauguration this morning, did I grow misty-eyed, did I chortle with glee a dozen times, did I jump up and down like a grunge-boy at Kurt Cobain's mausoleum?

YES! I! DID!
Auguri, America.--Giac.

pax hominibus bonae voluntatis

2008-12-25T00:01:00.003+01:00

Buon Natale!
Which, do you think, pleased la Guadalupe? The zealot who hanged her child in Iran? The Bishop of Rome who, under the cover of protecting mixed-sex marriage, opposed the French initiative to condemn the murder of that child? Or the French who, thanks to Napoleon's rationalistic code, would've embraced that child?
Et in terra, pax hominibus bonae voluntatis.
La Madre Vergine di Guadalupe giudichi.
Buon Natale hominibus bonae voluntatis!--Giac.

§§§

Buon Natale!
Alla Guadalupe chi sarà piaciuto? Il bigotto zelota che l'ha impiccato il Figlio persiano? Il Papa che, sotto la maschera del Protettore del Sesso Sposato, ha condannato la proposta francese all'Onu, la proposta che avrebbe condannato l'uccisione del Figlio? Ossia i francesi, davvero francescani, che, grazie alle leggi civili, dote dal trisnonno corsicano Napoleone, avrebbero abbracciato il Suo Ragazzo?
Et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis.
Giudichi la Madre Vergine.
Buon Natale, hominibus bonae voluntatis!--Giac.

(Foto e servizio: Oggi, No. 51)

No Wonder It Was Dull

2008-10-09T00:45:00.003+02:00

° The audience at Belmont University was trying not to doze off, so were the candidates.
° Why should Obama or McCain be enthusiastic? After all, neither will be President of the country that existed two or more years ago when the campaign began. That was a country whose economic system, though abused and weakened by years of drugging by the Federal Reserve and flogging by the Administration and Congress, was not known to be on its last legs.
° At least, Obama and McCain didn't know it.
° Cheers to Obama for showing the first signs of awareness, in his assertion that energy independence would take precedence over the other items on his wish list.--Giac.

It's the End of the World As We Know It, One Month Later

2008-10-07T01:58:00.004+02:00

° As I said a month ago, not a forecast, just observation.
° The S & P 500 closed Friday (3 ottobre) exactly on the optimistic longterm trendline. (Today, 8% collapse in Milano, not so jolly 4% in New York.) What does breaking this trendline tell us? What we knew already, that the financial climate that has prevailed since the mid-nineties no longer obtains.
° What would it mean if the S & P retreats another 20% or so to the conservative longterm trendline in the 850ish area? (Well, it would mean some very very unhappy investors, that's for sure.) If the S & P reaches 850, and holds, it means that the secular bull market, that America's economy, can revive and grow from a lower level. If the S & P reaches 850, and falls through, it means . . . .
° I've about given up on that condo in Ecuador. Now I'm more thinking a trip to the Mexican Market and a Boone Pickenslike investment in dried beans.
° Though my friend at the Y is clearly wiser, he plans to fill his closets with nutritious and heartwarming scotch.--Giac

Chart drawn with software from Ultra Financial Services

Mikhail Sharkov

2008-09-16T23:26:00.001+02:00

° Chi è questo bel ragazzotto? Si chiama Mikhail Sharkov, è ballerino col Bolshoi da molto tempo. You can google him all you like, you'll find a series of "empty" biographies. And these fotos, taken from the 1989 dvd collection The Bolshoi Ballet (Arthaus Musik, Euroarts Music International), are the only ones I have found on the internet.
° Why am I such a fan?
° First, I'm a sentimental fan of the Bolshoi. The Bolshoi has survived everything so far: tsarism, revolution, Lenin, Stalin, Cold War, dissolution of Empire, rebirth of Empire. And it has survived without any great cross-pollenisation with Western dance. So it remains pure at best, idiosyncratic at worst. Idiosyncratic’s good too.
° One might think that 1989 was a particularly harsh time of transition. But it doesn't show.
° True, there're barely any sets in the Swan Lake, just immense darkness outside the spots, even the principal dancers are often only slightly illuminated. But what rich costuming! Alla Mikhalchenko, Yuri Vasyuchenko, the outrageously sinister Aleksandr Vetrov.
° And whirling across the stage like a perpetual motion automaton, the scene-stealing Court Jester, il nostro Mikhail Sharkov.
° An old-fashioned Nutcracker, with Clara dancing the Sugar Plum Fairy numbers. A proto-Nutcracker, perfect for children forever. Enchanting use of that oldest of special effects, the trap door. Natalya Arkhipova, Irek Mukhamedov. Mikhail Sharkov billed as Devil (with Witch), don't blink or you'll miss him.
° Sleeping Beauty. Sets, costumes, dancers--I can't imagine a more perfect production, down to the original Petipa special effects for the boat trip. The dvd notes, by the way, are the freshest and deepest I’ve ever come across. Nina Semizorova, Aleksei Fadeyechev, Nina Speranskaya, the perfect Carabosse of Yuri Vetrov. The erstwhile sinister Aleksandr Vetrov all glamoured up as the lithe and elegant Blue Bird.
° Mikhail Sharkov unbilled, except in the final credits. But I recognised his legs. You will too.
° Romeo and Juliet, with more of Prokofiev's music than we hear in the West. Natalya Bessmertnova, Irek Mukhamedov, and a pugnaciously swaggering Aleksandr Vetrov as Tybalt. Hard to seduce on stage the boss's (Yuri Grigorovich) wife. Hard not to be Nureyev and Fonteyn. Nobody's fault, unless Nureyev and Fonteyn's. (The very first well-mounted ballet I ever saw was the 1965 film version of MacMillan's R & J, screened at the British Embassy in Rome. Tea and scones afterwards.)

° Mikhail Sharkov, as Mercutio, steals the show. Just watch it and you'll see.
° So yes, a fan.
° What has become of him? No bios, as I say, but he danced Petrouchka with the Bolshoi tour this year. And is apparently a "trainer" at the Korea Ballet.
° An athletic guy, with huge charisma, and easily the handsomest of the lot, has he never been used as a danseur noble?
° I noticed in Sleeping Beauty that Puss was possibly shorter than White Cat. Probably, in fact.
° So what. Worth breeding up some short prima ballerinas if that was all the problem.--Giac.

solidarietà con federico e cristian

2008-09-12T23:33:00.000+02:00

° Not my solidarity, that goes without saying. Practitioners of aggres- sive violence disgust me.
° I refer to the solidarity shown by the Mayor of Rome and by so many provincial department heads, who all immediately denounced the cowardly attack on two men holding hands in the moonlight near the Fori Imperiali, early the other morning. Ten or more ruffians spat on the lads, pelted them with stones and bottles, and assured them, in best Jim Crow style, “We don’t want your kind in Italy.”
° The same attack, in an American city, would go unreported, lest the victims be abused by the police in the very act of reporting. Indeed I recall reading this warning from the D. A. in Pope, Piers’s former home: “Same-sex hand-holding may go over out in California, but it won’t fly here.” The law enforcers are as lawless as the citizenry.
° My brother and I weren’t permitted to join the other kids in our neighbourhood in rocking, as we called it, any Negro so bold as to walk down our hill. We were told it was wrong so to do.
° Why did Daddy know it was wrong? Because he and his brother once hid in a culvert and stoned the children of their black cook. What a beating Granddaddy gave Daddy and Uncle when he found out.
° Worse than that, Grandmother said she was ashamed of them. So they grew up then and there.--Giac.

Hugh Jass

2008-09-10T23:14:00.000+02:00

° This is a close-up foto of Hugh Jass. I realise it looks something like a watch. But just look at the face, look at the flawless precision of parts, look at the rock-solid reliability.
° Don't look at the price, Hugh's worth far more than that.--Giac.

Foto from AD Orologi

It's the End of the World As We Know It

2008-09-04T01:35:00.000+02:00

° Not a prediction, just a big If. The upper trend line rises from the 1994 bottom that led to the great Greenspan blow-off; the S&P can fall another 15% from current levels (127) without interrupting the secular bull market. The lower trend line rises from the 1982 secular bottom; the S&P can even fall to this level (85 something) without terminating the secular bull market.
° But if the S&P should eventually rupture even the lower level, it will set up a secular double top at 155.
° It would be the end of the world as Americans know it. Time to relocate to that $30,000 condo with maid service and Quechua organic veggies in Ecuador.--Giac

Chart drawn with software from Ultra Financial Services.

Sugar Teat

2008-03-20T16:20:00.000+01:00

° Did you know that if you give birth to your baby under water, he doesn't breathe for several hours, not till the umbilical cord stops pulsating?
° Well I didn't know it.

° On the other hand, the midwife didn't even know how to make a simple sugar teat.
° Take a fairly clean tea towel, dump a cup of sugar--brown is so very tasty--into the center, tie the corners as tightly as possible, handform the confined sugar into a sort of pointed teat.
° Then whenever Baby cries, just hand him the thing.* He'll suck contentedly for hours and hours on end.
° Those first teeth aren't permanent anyway.

° The midwife was less impressed with my observation that cows eat the afterbirth as a quick pickmeup.
° Natural childbirth, it seems, only goes so far.--Giac

*Nota bene: not medical advice, just a record of an actual country custom.

La Rondine

2008-03-11T16:11:00.000+01:00

° Had the sala all to myself for a matinee projection of San Francisco Opera's La Rondine. Hadn't so much as heard the thing in decades, had never seen it.
° Excellent sets, costumes registering a bit chintzy on the big screen, singers less aggressively miked vis-à-vis the orchestra than their Met Live counterparts.
° That aria, thrown away so early in the day, able to express all of Room with a View in a few measures.
° Act III did not tug my heartstrings. If Magda had been a trollop and was still a liar, what of it? She's a good egg.

° Afterwards, in the car--New York's governor was confessing himself a trollop and a liar.
° Yea verily, he was an ass to persecute prostitutes in the first place, the quintessential Amerarabian vice. The persecution of Venus, I mean to say.
° But my goodness, if he'd only taken millions of dollars in bribes from special interest groups, Mr. Spitzer could still be neckandneck for the Democratic nomination.
° Nobody's perfect.

Manca

2008-02-23T01:10:00.000+01:00

Un anno è passato.
E' passato un anno.
Ed una manca.

How to Marry a Millionaire

2008-01-03T12:39:00.000+01:00

° Santa brought Leggero a pair of glasses for Christmas, the same prescription Marilyn Monroe wore in How to Marry a Millionaire.
° Do they work?
° Well, they've sharpened my vision.--Giac to Maurizio

Wifey Dearest

2008-01-01T12:39:00.000+01:00

° If Socrates was so allfired smart, why couldn't he get along with the irascible Xantippe?
° Or rather, why would he try?--Giac to Maurizio

Pan de los Muertos

2007-11-02T16:15:00.000+01:00

° Qui mi siedo per dire niente a nessuno. S'intende.
° Stamattina, mentre Quezelcoatl e Sorella Luna condividevano il regno del cielo orientale, mi sono alzato, ho fatto il caffè, ho ascoltato la Suor Angelica, ho offerto un piccolino pan de los muertos alla tomba della mia bimba Asia, ho detto la Messa omnium defunctorum.
° E poi--qui mi siede.
° E' apparsa la morta durante la Semain? Sì. L'ho sognata due volte, l'ho vista viva nella loggia.
° E' miracolo?
° E' cosa tutta normale?--Giac a Maurizio

Popping the Question

2007-09-20T23:41:00.000+02:00

° No sooner had little Akbar shown me the fotos of his brother's wedding, and of himself dancing, stripped to the waist, through the fountain jets of the plaza later that evening, than I popped the question.
° Well, it wasn't that question.
° Said I to little Akbar: "To whom did the oil belong, in Goin' to Town (Paramount, 1935)? To Buck, the cattle rustler who'd parlayed other folks' critters into a gigantic Wild West ranch? To Mae, the danseuse who'd won his spread fair and square, by losing at craps? To British Petroleum, whose employee had discovered and drilled the oilfields? To Taho the manservant, whose ancestors had owned the land for millennia, till it was stolen from them by the application of Chinese gunpowder and European steel? To all Americans in common? To all humans in common? To all generations of all humans in trust? To the timber rattlers and scorpions too?
° He was too wise to answer such a mug's question, and reran the flicklet.--Giac to Maurizio

Guys Not Getting

2007-09-02T23:33:00.000+02:00

Caro Maurizio,
° Non scrivo da molto tempo. Perché?
° Perché. Capito?

° I was tucking into some very munchy asparagus and feta with ripe olives and sweet peppers when in he came. I stared rudely and appreciatively. He stared back. Twice.
° All I could think was, "Where's Caravaggio when he could be of some earthly use?"
° Prince Romolo's face really appeared to have been drawn by an artist, not conglomerated from semen and eggyolk. Every feature as perfect as could be, and the chin, just onequarter inch short, an act of genius, it suffused the entire design with Venus. When he sat between me and the glass, I measured his eyelashes against those of a very attractive female at the next table. She came off like a plucked and singed chicken.
° Of course, Prince Romolo is the norm in Rome, or, at least, is always just around the corner. But in America, in Overton?
° He seemed melancholy, peoplewatched, left as alone as he had entered.
° Because, of course, no local male and very few females could appear with him as a plausible couple.
° Poor Prince Romolo.

° Later, at the Y, I was directing healing hot jets of water at my sore spots, and noticing that the muscleguy opposite was doing likewise, though the spot at which he was directing the stroking currents--.
° In he came. Old King Zophuktup. Seventy if he was a day. Obese by American standards, grossly obese by mine. And his ankles--my goodness, they were purple clear around from his heels to halfway up the calves.
° I considered how quickly I could exit the whirlpool without appearing--though there was not broken skin, I reckon his disease was not contagious. I hope not.
° And then the steamroom. And here came King Zophuktup. And I tucked my legs onto the bench, lest he play footsie. Meanwhile everyone else fled. And then I was too tenderhearted to flee. And then King Zophuktup began to play with himself. And then I fled unseeing to the showers and home and hope to goodness my ankles don't go gangrenous.

§§§§§

° Moral of the story? Well there isn't any.
° Except--that it's better to be isolated from humanity because you're too phine, than because you're too phat and phuktup.
° Though how do I know? Or you either?--Giac to Maurizio

Bottom and Tops

2007-06-20T15:58:00.000+02:00

° I turned aside at the last minute (the car in front led the way, a Crazy Radio New Dimensions leading) to Café Cocco. For Killer of Sheep was showing across town in 20 minutes.
° And there he was, the one to whom led. Ynaq.
° Ynaq with his hair all trimmed into a mohawk, but not waxed up. Just a soft and inviting trickle of soft tan fur from forehead to nape.
° It was Midsomer, my submind had been whistling Mendelssohn, and I just popped out the first thing that came to my tongue: "Bottom, thou art quite translated!"
° Whereupon Ynaq retorted that--well I blushed clear to the roots of my own hairy ass's ears. Curse Shakespeare.
° "Right-ho," I replied meekly.

° In my coffee scum a perplexing figure: an extraordinarily mishapen sheep? I put it down to inept wizardry on Ynaq's part.
° But lo and behold, it was the dogmask the daughter wore in Killer of Sheep.
° So as wizard, at any rate, Ynaq is tops.--Giac to Coz

Horsing Around

2007-06-10T18:55:00.000+02:00

° Zoo.
° When a woman goes through her guy's wallet and finds a foto of his preceding girlfriend, she should definitely write Dear Abby.
° When a woman searches her guy's wallet and finds a nooner motel receipt, she should definitely write Carolyn Hax.
° When a woman rifles her guy's wallet and finds a foto with phone number and rates of some 18something poxyassed hustler, she should definitely resort to Amy Alkon.
° But when a woman investigates her guy's wallet and finds an intimate foto of an Arabian stallion's--
° --well, she may as well just pout and ask pathetically, "What can he give you that I can't?" for all the good it'll do.--Giac to Lad

Holster

2007-05-24T23:14:00.000+02:00

° Cornelia reminisces about her grandfather, back in West Arkansas.
° "He was considered very genteel. Not only was he an Episcopalian, he actually went so far as to remove his gun-holster before going up for Communion."--Giac to Piers

Let 'er RIP

2007-05-17T22:30:00.000+02:00

Falwell was a remarkably gifted demagogue who never let Jesus stand in the way of the pursuit of fame and power.--Giac to Piers

Less of It

2007-05-16T19:33:00.000+02:00

° "Whatever happens, I know I'm exactly where God wants me to be." So said the fixingtobe second runnerup in the Regional Metropolitan Opera Competition, just before her kindly judge made mincemeat of her. On international HD big screen broadcast.
° Peace be upon her. But every scalawag scoundrel running for president, congress, or ghetto pimp will be quoted as saying the exact same thing repeatedly till election day.
° Humanists are too polite to label this speechifying the hubris it is.
° Deists are too gutless to label this speechifying the blasphemy it is.
° Only Bertie Wooster had sense enought to retort, "Less of it!"
° So why should the Fool hesitate to reply to the hopeful, "Ah but dear, when you come to think about it, how else could it be?"--Giac to Piers

All Akbar, All the Time

2007-05-13T22:05:00.000+02:00

(For one reason or another I never posted these echoes of the progress of my friendship with Akbar--Giac.)

24 settembre mmvi--"Outpoped"

Dear Akbar,
° You may've forgotten, but I haven't.
° "You have done been outPoped," said I as you approached with an offering of bubbledancing chai. You didn't believe me then, and that's how come you didn't spill it and scald us both.
° It was the occasion of the Holy Father's casually and IAmSoVerySure unpremeditated characterisation, during a scholarly lecture on SomebodyNobodyEverHeardOf, of Islam as--well, let's leave the exact quote to Don Imus.
° In one corner, a 79yearold professional religionist who grew up under the tough Roman Imperialism of the preSweetPopeJohnXXIII Council, singleminded, “God’s rottweiler,” in possession of the best and most ancient pr staff money can buy.
° In the opposite corner, a bazillion individual Muslims (and two or three turkeygobbler Congresses, no savvier than our own), each reacting without premeditation or coordination or central leader.
° And who scored the tko?

§§§§§

The reaction to disturbance is the disturbance.

° Itoldyouhowitwouldbe, Giac.

26 settembre mmvi--"Rubbing It In"

Dear Akbar,
° I am gratified that you acknowledge that I was right, but it distresses me that you were surprised that I was.
° Here are your questions for the day.

1. Did the Bishop of Rome Reaganly misspeak himself? (Or was it intentional?)
2. What did he hope to achieve?
3. What did he achieve?
4. Do you have any further questions?

1. No. (Yes.)
2. “Evangelical parity” in Muslim majority nations. Cioè, the right to send missionaries to Saudi Arabia, ecc., build churches, extend his own empire.
3. So many things:
a. Turkey can just give up all hope of entering the European Union.
b. The European Union is now united (the Left has joined the Right) in considering itself fundamentally and historically Christian, cioè, nonJewish, nonMuslim.
c. “Muslim leaders” are expected in Rome any day now to “renew dialogue.”
d. Every nonMuslim throughout the world has been invited, almost instructed, to increase his or her fear of Islam.
4. No, you don’t.

° Butifyoudojustaskme, Giac.

12 ottobre mmvi--"Wave of Christian Terrorism Sweeps Nation"

Dear Akbar,
° Have you ever noticed that if a Tasmanian astonomer who has published a learned article on the star Aldebaran should happen to squash an insect on the windscreen of his miniCooper, his face will be plastered across the evening news as “Islamic Terrorist”?
° On the other hand, if half a dozen baptised Christians take assault rifles into the nearest schoolhouses and rape and murder schoolgirls, their faces are plastered across the evening news as “Man” or “Teenage Boy”?
° Why is this?
° Because your generation has not yet risen through the American news organisations, so that you can ask your own colleagues, "Why?"
° And because your parents' generation has never perfected the art of writing charmingly funny yet hardasnails letters to the editor, to suggest “Why not . . . .?”
° For “Islamofascist,” why not “fascist”? ((You know why not.))
° For “Jihadist,” why not “self-styled ((or)) so-called Jihadist”? ((You know why not.))
° For “decorated veteran,” why not “mass random murderer of civilians”? ((Even I know why not.))
° The hardasnails is easy. It’s the charmingly funny that takes the effort.

° Effortlessly, Giac.

12 ottobre mmvi--"Curds and Whey"

Dear Akbar,
° You missed the Festival of Cultures last weekend. There were Masai dancers, Chinese Lion Dancers, Cajun zydeco dancers, Caribbean steel drums accompanying Island dancers, Mexican pole flyers, Celtic reelers, Burundi drummers with spearwielding dance troupe, Tahitian hula dancers, Hindu kuchipudi dancers, Latin tango, Greek pastries and boys frolicking in kilts, European ballet dancers in tutus, native American tribal dancers, even Apalachian folksingers a'cloggin'.
° The entire white black yellow tan Christian Buddhist Hindu Confucian Pagan Witchdoctor--everybody was there.
° And lonesome as could be, Kurdistan represented the entire Islamic universe.

° Do you love to rate folks on the Internet? I do. But I feel bad when I give them low numbers, so I puff them a little.
° Can you rate by somebody else‘s standards? I mean, can you rate these folks from the standpoint of The Average American? Favourable, Neutral, Unfavourable.

Saudi Arabian
Arab

Kuwait

India
Pakistan
Bangladesh

Iran

Persia

Kashmir
Sri Lanka
Ceylon
Indonesia
Algeria
Morocco

Nigeria
Sudan
Ethiopia

Libya

Sunni
Shiite
Wahabi

KURD

° Yes, Grasshopper, you have achieved perfection.
° The very word “Arab” makes Americans see red. This is because Saudi Arabia has singlehandedly made possible our economic expansion and prosperity ever since we used up our own oil.
° Kuwait is a happymaking term. It represents the only War (outside Grenada) the U. S. Army has won since WWII.
° Akbar in Pakistan is a harbourer of the Taliban. Akbar a mile across the border in India is a fellow former British colonist. Akbar in Bangladesh is a posterchild for Tsunami Relief Efforts.
° Iran bad. Persia magnificent.
° You mean they don’t call it Ceylon anymore? You mean there’re Muslims in Kashmir, fancy that.
° AIDS FAMINE MALARIA MACHETES AFRICA.
° Libya--I’ve heard of it, but can’t quite remember why.
° What? Who?
° Kurds? We ought to make them our 51st state. Kurds are brave, efficient, nonterrorist, handsome, good--and it’s just mean of Turkey and Iran not to cede them giant hunks of territory. Maybe the Pope can make Turkey do it.
° It’s all pr.
° All.

° Sitting on a tuffet, Giac.

15 ottobre mmvi--"Dioses"

Dear Akbar,
° We have agreed that the rise of China to world dominance means one thing above all others: you and I both will starve, for there is no hope of learning such a squiggly language (even if you have already mastered Arabic, Urdu, a smattering of Hindi, and Spanish).
° Imagine then my surprise to behold the following headline in La Voz::

Cancelan opera por miedo
a Islamistas
Se decapita a Mahoma
y otros dioses

° It seems that Mozart’s Idomeneo has been cancelled at the Berlin Opera. Why?
° Not because the operahouse has received threats of violence, but because the director suddenly noticed that the staging (debuted 2003, Hans Neuenfels) has Idomeneo offer to sacrifice his son, to obtain safe passage home from the Trojan War, to Buddha, to Jesus, and to Mahomet. And it occurred to her that this might could offend Muslims.
° Well Idomeneo must’ve had right smart foresight ca. 1000 B.C.E. to’ve thought of these “dioses” instead of his own Poseidon.
° Germans are outraged.
° But not at the director, not at the designer, not at Mozart, not at Idomeneo, not at Buddhists, not at Christians--but only at the target of the headline. Figurati.

° In any language, Giac.

15 aprile mmvii--"301"

Dear Akbar,
° It was bad enough your being outpoped last autumn, but it's really too much that now you've done been outXerxesed.
° On one side, a bazillion of Sunni Muslims and Tony Blair, on the left one tenth of a bazillion of Shia Muslims under the baton of Iranian President Aminm-Bign-Bad.
° How did he do it? President Aminm-Bign-Bad?

° a) He consulted the playbook. He saw that the Seize the Hostages gag back in 1981 had made the U. S. tremble like an ill gelled shape served as pudding in unairconditioned Punjab.
° b) He weighed his enemy. Why shame the U. S. when he could make the same point by shaming little Britannia?
° c) He counted the costs. Bush and Blair already were idly threatening to invade Iran, "idly" because the two of 'em together hadn't a spare platoon to their names. The worst B & B could manage would be a few missiles, and even if they accidentally hit their targets, all Persia would be suddenly united as it hasn't been since--since Xerxes.
° d) He improvised in front of the cameras. As soon as all the news media were convinced that there would be no resolution of the crisis before Blair stepped down--as in the previous outing with Carter-Khomeini-Reagan--President Aminm-Bign-Bad announced that he was ready for his closeup, Mr. DeMille, and said to a stupefied Christendom: "I freely restore these captive soldiers to their native land, as an Easter gift to the people of Great Britain."
° Whereupon the collective bazillion Sunni jaws joined the collective bazillion Christian jaws around the world in dropping, while eyes goggled in a display of unusual ecumenical amity.

° And he got what he wanted, President Aminm-Bign-Bad.
° "Britain acknowledged that numerous diplomatic lines of communication have been opened with the government in Teheran." From pariah to undisputed leader of the Islamic world, in a single play. Wow!
° Just let me see can I find a link to Handel's most famous aria from Xerxes.

° Unstupefied, Giac.

15 aprile mmvii--"Burr under the Saddle"

Dear Akbar,
° Yes, you're right. That's what alerted me to President Aminm-Bign-Bad's pr genius. A throwaway line on NPR: "The U. S. State Department is at a loss to account for Saudi Arabia's recent behaviour, which it characterises as that of a horse with a burr under the saddle."
° For it must've been mighty hard on the Saudi Sunnis to see Bush's strategy come out right after so many reverses.
° For we must suppose that from the beginning Bush intended to partition Iraq, with both oil regions coming under the suzerainty of Persia. Which will then be in a position to detach all the Shia oilfields of the Persian Gulf from Saudi control. And together with Shia Syria (thank you, Nancy Pelosi), to emerge as the ageold Persian Empire, ancient boundaries restored.
° And then the U. S. and Persia--o wait, isn't Persia still part of Bush's Axis of Naughtiness?
° So no oil for us?

° Restupefied, Giac

Ripe (Piers)

2007-05-10T00:13:00.000+02:00

Dear Piers,
° The other day was one of those ripe ones that will sometimes fall off the tree into one's lap.
° 1. I didn't get lost. I mean, while searching for a new local foods store in West Overton.
° 2. Not only that, I found a full dozen heirloom varieties of tomato plants, I'll feast this summer till I break out in hives.
° 3. Moreover, there was a stand of the juiciest primrose yellow oleanders, that I hadn't even been looking for.
° 4. Steamed with Steel and another very newsy guy. After Steel left, it turned out that the newsy guy speaks, but does not understand, plain English, to wit, "No, grazie."
° 5. Pizza with Steel and daughter. Candied ginger for the sourmilk gingerbread. Hari, in tiedyed t, spitcleaning the tables.
° 6. Il Trittico, live from the Met. So, the flashlight they used to use at the end of Suor Angelica (in the days before religion was stylish) finally ran out of batteries. Poor Rinuccio, poor contestants, reality tv comes to Lincoln Center.
° 7. A quick espresso and lo, there it was, rosemary flatbread. (A food critic had recently praised Pink Pony's antipasto starring fig jam, arugula, and goat cheese on rosemary flatbread.) It proved to be such foul tasting glop I'm afraid to throw it on the compost heap, might drive away the field mice, and then the kits would have nothing but moles to torment.
° 8. La Tourneuse de Pages. Loved every moment of it. Nothing wrong with it that Jeanne Moreau, a just balance between the crime and the punishment thereof, and a sort of loony irreality about the savagery couldn't've cured.
° 9. And then, just on the way to the Sri Lankan Mexican Bakery, whom dost thou think I beheld? Xak, that's who whom whose I beheld. So a ripe night was had by all.

° Sucked dry yet still somehow ripely juicy, Giac.

Belt Buckled

2007-05-02T22:31:00.000+02:00

Dear Piers,
Ever since you moved to godless Virginia, you have, no doubt, longed for your youth in this, the very buckle of the Bible Belt.
Here are this year's Easter stats (the percentage of the County's population that actually darkened various churches' doors on Easter Sunday 2007):

Muslim--nary a one
Jewish--.01% (if she drove her pekingese up to Overton for the art glass exhibition at the Temple)
Anglican--.66%
Catholic--1.16%
Presbyterian--1.33%
Church of Christ (not affiliated in any remote way with the United Church of Christ)--4.87%
Methodist--8.17%
Southern Baptist--10.03%
Loony and, in the main, Heretical Sects--Lord only knows

Simple addition gives us a grand total of 26.23% of nonheretic locals who actually bestirred themselves to enter a church, synagogue, or mosque on Easter Sunday.
Let us round it off to a ripe 25%, here in the very buckle of the Bible Belt.

Conclusion?
The conclusion is that there's right smart lying going on when Americans brag to religion pollsters.
Unless it's the pollsters who're lying.

With my belt unbuckled and my pants barely covering my butt, Giac.

The Wind that Shakes the Barley (Akbar)

2007-04-23T00:15:00.000+02:00

Dear Akbar,
° In this symbolic (miao!--English teachers never give it a rest, do they?) prefiguring of the Bush-Saddamite War of the Century, two oathtaking, uniformwearing, welldrilled armed forces are depicted: the British Army, which is fighting and bleeding and dying in order that British plutocrats may continue to lord it over Ireland (and over the British tommy's kith and kin back home); and the Irish Republican Army, which is fighting and bleeding and dying in order that Ireland may be lorded over by Irish plutocrats.
° The only other thing the two armies have in common is that neither has yet heard of "collateral damage." Consequently, both armies murder civilians in plain English.

° Meanwhile, as I assured an unbelieving you three months ago, the Bush-Saddamite War is over. Just this morning I heard on NPR that General Betrajus had fluttered the white flag of unconditional surrender. Quotha: "The Surge is not working."
° So now the U. S. Army joins the American people in begging and beseeching the CommanderinChief to bring back what's left of our defeated forces while there're still some forces to bring back.
° I know you think this reflects badly on the military acumen of our CommanderinChief. The utter, Viet Namlike rout, I mean.
° But no. This too is all part of the Master Plan, and bimeby I shall astound you with the cunning thereof.

° The Scots Knew What to Do with Barley, Giac.

Bargain Babies (Lad)

2007-04-15T18:39:00.000+02:00

Dear Lad,
° Did you ever buy you that Chinese baby? (I know folks call it "adoption," but that's like Don Imus's calling "young women" "---------------.") What did she set you back?
° I only ask because Marcello tells me that there's a 5-star hotel in Guatemala City with a room all fitted out like an animal adoption pen, or an alligator pit. Guests stand around and coo to the babies and select the one that comes when called, or whose markings strike the fancy.
° Costs $10,000 per baby.
° But $9000 goes to the middlemen, only $1000 to the mother.
° So the true fair trade cost of a beautiful, healthy, partMaya baby is $1000. Plus air fare. (Though if all nations abided by NAFTA's Infant Free Trade Treaty, of which the U. S. is a founding signatory, the fair trade cost could be expected to plummet to bargain basement levels.
° And at that point it will be vastly cheaper for the Government to outsource the production of American babies rather than to continue to subsidise our native labouresses.)

° But don't feel cheated. At least you have the satisfaction of having rescued one little Chinese baby from the agony of memorising all those heiroglyphs.

° Sincere as always, Giac.

Digging It (Sandy)

2007-04-01T18:55:00.000+02:00

Dear Sandy,
° 3 in the afternoon. The phone rings. I listen in case it's not vinyl siding.
° "Giac, this is ----- at the Chamber of Commerce. I have a tour group headed out your way. If not convenient, give me a call right quick."
° So that's why there was a Trained Seal in my coffee scum this morning: I immediately fall into line and make a list of mostneeded tidyingsup. As I have about 30 minutes to put the plan into place, and as the first Spring mowing is top of the list, I throw away the list and fall back.
° Fall back position is to sham animal cunning.
° And just in the nick of time it comes to me. I grab a spade and am molesting a stray viburnum as the van pulls up.
° I freshen up that vacant expression that so naturally adorns my face and let them begin.
° "Mr. McLey?"
° "O no, I live down the road a bit. Mr. McLey disappeared sometime during the winter, nobody knows where. That's why the gardens are such a shambles."
° "My goodness! Have the police--? Well the woman at the Chamber--."
° "O go ahead and ramble through, I'm sure he wouldn't mind."
° I noticed they were all staring at the uprooted plant.
° "O this? I'm just digging up a few plants I know he would've wanted me to have. Before somebody else gets to them."
° They moved on down the path right fast.
° And as they went googoo over the spicy scent of the burkwoodii viburnum hedge, the complementaryscented Actaea, the Orchard and its mixed daffodils, the redbud alley, then disappeared behind the evergreens, I hightailed it into the house and lowered the roman shades.
° That was a close one.

° Lilywhitehanded, Giac.

Asia (Foto)

2007-02-23T02:43:00.000+01:00

Oggi il 22 febbraio mmvii alle 15:45 morì Asia, diciannovenne.

° This morning I said rosary for her, but when I brought in the cat carrier, she dragged herself away from it. So I cancelled the appointment.
° At 14:30 she moved a few feet, and began to cry. So that was that. By then she didn't object to the trip to town.
° Back home at 16:30 I lit candles before la Guadalupe, and bathed Asia, as Muslim women would not be too good to do. I thought it would be creepy. But no, it just seemed respectful and loving.
° The grave--deep and round, for Asia was a creature in perfect balance--I had dug 10 days ago. I filled the bottom with pine straw, as being softer than wheat straw. I placed Asia, enclosed in a damask shroud (in a colour called 'Asia,' I use it for bookbinding), facing East, as she used to bask in the South window. Water and food dishes, a can of tuna. Fragrant winter honeysuckle, cheerful winter jasmine, a twig of heavily berried chinese holly, a bouquet of daffodils. More pine straw, interment.
° The Sun was almost set before I finished reading the Missa pro defunctis in die depositionis and chanting Dies Irae (though the bits about sin were inapplicable).
° I had not made a complete spectacle of myself in the veterinary. I was composed as could be during the burial.
° But when I reentered the house and realised that she wasn't there . . . .
° And then later, as I was removing soiled rugs and blankets and bedspreads--there under two thicknesses of carpet remnant was a large pool of dried cream. The one big meal I'd gotten into her by means of the medicine dropper, she'd thrown up and it had soaked clear through.
° So the futility finished me off.

° Why did my neighbour name her Asia? Because she had on one side the map of Arabia, India, and Indochina in jet black on snow white.

° I don't remember how to wake up without Asia perching on my chest and sucking my breath till I rouse.

° Giac.

Babel (Piers)

2007-02-01T17:22:00.000+01:00

Dear Piers,
° Did you get it?
° The snow of your childhood dreams?
° We did. Drifts of 1.5 inches in the sheltered Winter Garden. China and Bandit were aghast, Sugar began to bat it about the minute he set foot in it.
° And it cohered! I wouldn’t even have tried it.
° So I made a 3 roll snowman in front of the South wall. Only, he sort of leaned back against the stones. But that was fine, because his face looked more like the backside of an ewok’s hooded head anyway, so I say it’s It, counting to 100 for a game of hideandseek.
° Then Sugar and I went to the Croquet Lawn and played Juggernaut. That is, I rolled a couple of dozen 2foot diameter millstones, and he threw himself in front as a perpetual sacrifice. Though sometimes he just tried to grind meal off his shoulders by leaning into the sides.
° I was going to make Castel Sant' Angelo. Then, bimeby, I decided to make the Tomb of Cecilia Metella. Then, bimeby, sweaty and buttsore, I decided to call it an igloo.
° Well it's not quite up to the standard of Nanook of the North, but there's plenty of room for Sugar inside. And I reckon he can dig out when the whole jerrybuilt mess collapses.
° (Is "jerrybuilt" a racist term nowadays? If so, Thesaurus suggests "slapdash" or "cheap and nasty." I lean toward slapdash.)

° Frozen arctic vegetariansealblubberchewing love, Giac.

50 Cent Piece (Piers)

2007-01-14T15:09:00.000+01:00

Dear Piers,

° I had just left the Live at the Met transmission of Tan Dun's The First Emperor--I was whistling the only musical bit I could recollect, "Will our sufferings have no end?" Couldn't help but compare how many musical remembrancers I took home with me from I Puritani the preceding weekend. Still, an aural spectacle, the stone drummers alone were worth the price of admission. And to see the Met Orchestra chanting! Where was the Musicians' Union? Of course, Gone with the Wind. And though I felt right bad for the Chinese conscripts longing for death, I couldn't help but notice that their longing could've been selffulfilled, had they really been as miserable as they claimed--I'd left the Colliverdi Cinema and here walks up to me a very handsome, wellgroomed, welldressed, very nearly natural blond, and he says, says he:

"Can you help me? I'm short 50 cents for the bus to downtown?"

I, of course, still thinking of the Chinese taxed half to death, and having just seen a lame man to remind me of Francesco, replied:

"I'm sorry."

And walked on into the mall.

° I was sorry to be heartless.

° But it was the victim's fault.

° He asked for too little, and he didn't look the least bit pitiful. He didn't fit my parameters for almsgiving.

° But it does nag me.

° I mean, that I didn't find out what he was fixing to do when he got downtown.

° Ever tenderhearted, Giac.

Eid Mubarak! (Akbar)

2006-12-31T15:39:00.000+01:00

To Little Akbar, Greetings:

° From Piers and the Anglos, "Rejoice and be merry!"

° From Giac and the Latinos, "Eid mubarak!"

° From Marcello and his nonna, "Mangia, mangia, mangia!"

° Psychically crunching a cardamom seed in cool, smooth Delhi rice pudding, Giac.

How to Have a Merry Little Christmas (Piers)

2006-12-24T16:00:00.000+01:00

Gnädiges Pierschen (o tannenbaum o tannenbaum),
Caro Piersolino (gesù bambino),
° Shall I tell you

How to Have a Merry Christmas?

Well I will.
° Christmas Day minus 1278: calculate that your 15yearshingles will expire in August 2006. Set up a trust fund (in the amount of the expected cost times 3) for make benefit glorious roof.
° Christmas Day minus 132: notice that your roof has expired. Coincidentally notice that it doesn’t leak, that there hasn’t been rain in 3 months, and that it’s way too hot for roofing.
° Christmas Day minus 86: observe from the almanac that the pleasant and sunny month of October has arrived. Phone roofers.
° Christmas Day minus 55: comment that this was the only entirely rainy October in the history of the Valley. Blame Global Warming. Phone roofers.
° Christmas Day minus 40: smile grandly when the bid for standing seam steel comes in at just under twice the anticipated cost.
° Christmas Day minus 17: mention casually at the lumber store that one’s roofers have forgotten one.
° Christmas Day minus 14: greet roofers, give updated peptalk (I used to say, “Lads, safety first, no job’s worth an injury.” But now it’s, “Lads, if ye must fall off the roof, at least fall headfirst and break your neck clean through, that way ye won’t be a care on wife or mother or child or American taxpayer.” Pepped ‘em up right smart, especially the two apprentices who‘d never ascended a roof as steep as mine.)
° Christmas Day minus 7: start devoting the hours between 2a.m. and 4:30a.m. to trying to work the geometry in time to impart same to head roofer. Reserve some of that wakefulness to worry about leaks.
° Christmas Day minus 6: foment rebellion among the apprentices.
° Christmas Day minus 5: rejoice in the successfully applied geometry, deplore the walking off the job by the rebelled against contractor.
° Christmas Day minus 4: admire my handsome new roof (which after 8 days’ labour extends over almost half the house, minus the porch, minus the kitchen). Await rain confidently.
° Christmas Day minus 3: write Christmas cards, eat fruitcake, stage the baking of the panettone, wrap gifts, listen to the gentle rain pittypatting on the metal.
° Christmas Day minus 2: faint dead away when I discover a deep pool of water in the SE corner of the hall, just exactly under the most leakprone and complex geometry. All those sleepless nights for this?!
° Christmas Day minus 1.995: dance a gigue of gioy when I dip my finger into the pool and find it’s only cat urine. What a relief, nel senso doppio!

° Speaking of relief, I know you’ll feel it when you’ve finished playing the 7 Masses facing you between now and midnight.
° I believe I would just skip that second cup of coffee at breakfast.

° Drily, Giac.

Taxi Driver (Sandy)

2006-12-05T16:11:00.000+01:00

Dear Sandy,
° Aren’t we fortunate in our taxidriver? (I say “ours,” because the County boasts only one cab.)
° The other day Friggitore was reminiscing about his childhood, and explained, very clearly,

How to Know When to Quit Smoking.

° Friggitore smoked his first cigarette when he was 5 years old. Before that he had been too clumsyfingered to roll them for his older sister (she used to wrap the papers around a pencil, tongue them shut, then try to poke the loose tobacco down one end--a very bad job).
° And he continued to smoke throughout elementary school.
° “How in the world did you buy the tobacco at that age?”
° Well he used his noggin. On the way to the store to buy lard or sugar or whatever the family had sent him to get, he kept his eyes peeled for Coca Cola bottles. When he’d found 5, he turned them in at the store for the penny refund, and used the nickels saved to purchase a pouch of tobacco. This was before inflation became the only way the American economy could pretend to be growing.
° O by the way, he was held back in first grade for being such a runt. But I’m sure it wasn’t the smoking.
° Things went on this way through junior high and high school. But one day his father caught him smoking. And he beat the living tar out of Friggitore. That was fine with Friggitore.
° But since Friggitore was smoking every day, and his father only caught and beat him every few days, Friggitore was troubled in his conscience. So he started confessing every afternoon when he got back from school. Much tar was beat out of him.
° The moment Friggitore turned 18--and I’m amazed there were any regulations in those days on child labour--he quit high school and found employment in a local factory. And every day when he returned home from a hard day’s work and a relaxing puff of smoke, he confessed and was beaten the tar out of.
° Then the paychecks began to come in. And Friggitore began to see that he had more cash money than his father.
° And pretty soon the fatal day of destiny arrived. It was a hot and sultry day, and Friggitore had sweated clear through while walking home. Confession and execution. But this time, the belt buckle reacted with the thin cotton sticking to the skin, and blood was brought.
° This offended Friggitore’s aesthetic sense. And ruint the shirt.
° So next day, when Pops prepared to beat the tar out, Friggitore grabbed the Dad’s right hand, looked Padre in the eye, and said, “We not gonna do this any more. I seen you smoke plenty of times back when, you as guilty as I am.”
° “Lad ((though Friggitore had outgrown his runtiness some years since)), I admit I used to smoke. But I quit.”
° “Yes, Paw, and when I decide to quit I will. So that be that.”
° And that did be that.

§§§§§

° Why did the father quit? Was it because of Big Brotherly health warnings or common sense?
° Well it was because--”I quit when tobacco went from 10cent to 12cent a pouch.”
° And when did Friggitore quit, and why?
° 35 years ago. “I quit when cigarettes went from 25cent to 30cent.”
° So yes, common sense.

° Phoning for Inch right now, Giac.

Pink Sugar (Foto--Coz)

2006-11-02T15:13:00.000+01:00

Dear Coz,
° Do you know how I learned how the Resurrection of the Dead is worked? It was Mother’s cook, Mandy. Her second favourite daughter died, suddenly, but not unexpectedly. The very next night Mandy waked to see her “sweet big fat Bessie Mae” standing at the foot of her bed. The vision affected Mandy right smart.
° So that’s how Jesus did it, or rather, how Mary Magdalene did it.
° My friend Ella never did resurrect her Daddy. But six months after he died, her buddy in Japan did. The General was sitting there chatting with Jesus. So the story goes. But I doubt it, because Jesus wasn’t tearing his garments in blasphemed dismay. The General’s vocabulary was salty Government Issue.
° My friend Lettye dreamed repeatedly that she was encountering her father on the streets of Overton. Both were repeatedly delightedly surprised.
° And this Semain I dreamed that Mother was playing with Sugar, Slash’s favourite and softest kitten. Sugar was purring, Mother more or less was too.
° So that’s how Heaven is worked.

° Diviningly, Giac.

Civics 101 (Sandy)

2006-10-22T17:18:00.000+02:00

Dear Sandy,
° I’ve done my civic duty, I’ve voted. Early voting, at the Courthouse, because without Mapquest I will never be able to find my own gerrymandered voting site.
° On the DifferentSex Marriage Amendment, NO. Not because I desire to subsidise the sexcapades of samesexers, or because it is reasonable that I continue to subsidise the sexcapades of married differentsexers, but because the Amendment takes advantage of the gullibility of the Christianists, by pretending to give them dominion they didn’t already have.
° On the Senile Property Tax Freeze, YES. Not because it will freeze my property taxes anytime soon, but because it is a pathetically inadequate and accidental step in the right direction, of letting parents honestly pay for the educations of their own children, without forcing nonparents to subsidise the products of the parents‘ sexcapades.
° As for the offices, it was easy as pie. Where the Democrat was crazymeaner than the Republican (and that was the case in most of the races), and there was no Independent, I withdrew my governed consent from the filling of that office. That is, I didn’t vote for either.
° But where there was an Independent, I had to update my traditional method of deciding. I used to vote for the betterlooking candidate, but our Independents are so povertystricken, they can’t afford fotos. So I just ran down the list and picked the bestlooking name. One, for example, appeared to be a Cherokee, so I knew he would be sound. In another case I voted for a man whose Christian name was “Christopher,” because in my experience men named “Chris” tend to be decent sorts.
° So I’m satisfied I chose wisely and well.

° I did take under consideration your plea in favour of yellowdog Democrat voting (that is, to vote for the crazymeaner than a Republican candidates--as if one could purge a poisoned well by adding more poison--because “Bush trumps everything”).
° I asked myself, “Am I better off, or worse off, than I was 4 years ago (or 6 if you focus exclusively on Bush)?” I am way exceedingly doubleplusgood better off. Mostly not Bush’s doing, but on the tax question, yes, Bush’s doing.
° I continued asking.
° You are better off (Bush non c’entra).
° Piers is better off (Bush non c’entra).
° Little Coz, Nathan, Leggero, Julja--all better off (Bush non c’entra).
° Lettye is worse off, she faces surgery, but I’m pretty sure Bush didn’t cause her condition.
° Really only the 600,000 innocent Iraqi civilians Bush’s Army (with full Democratic support from the outset) has slaughtered at random these last couple of years--well they are in the hands of God, and so even they’re better off.
° And while I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t vote for Bush, I equally doubt if they’d vote for Bush’s enablers, viz., the crazymeaner than Republican New Democrats.

° As always, correct me if I’m wrong, Giac.

Slops (Sandy)

2006-10-12T15:00:00.000+02:00

Dear Sandy,
° Did you receive in yesterday’s post the competing menus for this next legislative buffet?
° Let us see what delectable slops are on offer.

Protect Traditional Marriage (Republican)
Protect Sanctity of Marriage (Democrat)

((Linguistically the Republican is more correct. The Democrat is injecting denominational religious views into the Civil Law.))

Stop Illegal Immigration (Republican)
Stop Illegal Immigration to Protect American Jobs (Democrat)

((If the border States can’t and won’t stop illegal immigration, I really don’t know that the interior States can and will. The Democrat is both more truthful and more potentially racist.))

Voluntary School Prayer (Republican)
Ratchet Up the Drug Wars (Democrat)

((Republican disingenuously supports the status quo, Democrat signals addiction to Magickal Thinking.))

Anti-Abortion (Democrat)
Pro-Guns (Democrat)

((Republican silent as can be. Since your contributions to the State Democratic Party are supporting these two stances that you most abominate, you’re not only silent, you’re beating yourself on the head with the soup ladle you paid for yourself.))

Eliminate Sales Tax on Food (Republican)
Freeze Property Tax for Seniors (Republican)
No State Income Tax (Republican)
Lower Drug Costs (Republican)
Enhance Seniors’ Access to Healthcare (Republican)

((The frosting on the cake. The Democrat offers no frosting, hence no taste comparison is possible.))

° Who will win?
° Well, the Republican looks like Uncle Fester, and couldn’t win if unopposed.
° The Democrat looks fit and tough and Bushlike, and would win against sissy Thomas Jefferson.
° And anyhow, by your yellowdog contribution, you’ve already voted.

° Tastes a little off to me, Giac.

Hard Driving (Sandy)

2006-10-10T19:13:00.000+02:00

Dear Sandy,
° You recollect Megalomane’s woes a month or so ago? Well he was just like a concussion patient. At first, after the recoverydisk intervention, he was normal as could be. But then his mind developed kinks.
° Takes forever to boot up, occasionally vomits recent memories.
° And now I know whycome.
° “Does your processor make woodpecker sounds?”
° “Yes, exactly.”
° “Did you buy Megalomane about a year ago?”
° “Yes, exactly.”
° “Does he have a Maxtor harddrive over 80G?”
° “Yes, exactly.”
° “Well, those harddrives have been going bad like crazy. I’ve replaced 30 or 40 myself, at a single office.”
° So that’s it. [And yes, two days later, that WAS it: “Failure of harddrive is imminent. Backup data files now or exit.”]

° Who gave me this justintime advice? Not our local technogeek, that’s for sure. He’d never heard of the woodpecker sound, thought I was making it all up.
° The advice came from a waitor at Trattoria Coloreproibito. Well, not my waitor. Not even one at the neighbouring tables. It was the guy who was refilling the lemon slice well.
° And why he should be moonlighting when our local ignoramus . . . .

° Illserved but served, Giac.

Atlanta Symphony Orchestra (Foto--Piers)

2006-09-24T16:17:00.000+02:00

Foto: Sala Quayle--Shermanton's Dream or . . . .

Dear Piers,
° Do you require our little Gipsy Cousin’s occult skills to interpret this design? No, a 93yearold woman in a nursing home can deconstruct it, ‘cause she did just this very morning.
° It’s a man’s shirt collar (the prissy kind that the Beatles used to wear, them and Orrin Hatch), a neck, another collar blown upwards by the wind, and--
° --and what looks to be a pheasant’s tailfeather where the brain ought to be.
° You are too young to remember the Golden Age of the Republic, before Vice Presidents were either giant balding bags of ineffectual buttwind or amateur military martinets.
° La bellezza maschile di Dan Quayle.
° Whom Doonesbury, wickedly, always represented--to save ink--as a talking Feather.
° Auguri, Shermanton!

° Purringly, Giac.

P. S. E per lo più il soffitto si alzerà e scenderà per “accordare” la sala. Domus Aurea di Nerone, Pit and Pendulum di Poe.

Yankee Trash Talk (Foto--Piers)

2006-09-20T17:12:00.000+02:00

Foto: Domus Aurea--Theseum

Dear Piers,
° Overton’s Skirmisher Hall has had its gala opening--though Keith and Nicole weren’t there, so how gay could it’ve been?--and the reviews are in. Vuol dire, the feelings are hurt.
° Leonard Slatkin said, most unfeelingly, “it’s a welcoming space, and the acoustics are good.” Of course he will’ve been thinking of the ineptitudes of Lincoln Center that cost so much effort to paper over. But locally, I’m afraid folks expected him to say that he was going to break his contract with the Ephaistionton Filharmonic and petition the Overton Symphony to permit him to revel in the todiefor acoustics of their new hall. He will’ve meant well.
° The WSJ was kinder, because grounded in economic reality. “The designers gambled a lesser number of sellable seats against a vibrant acoustic. . . . This is a hall where every sound is not only heard but felt.” The antithesis of the sterile ipod experience, a genuine reason to buy a ticket.
° The Commercial Appeal suspects the WSJ knows what it’s talking about. “Frank Gehry’s new postmodern concert hall in Los Angeles is said to be the second coming of the classical experience, a hall that is as much a part of the event as the music. . . . But perhaps the Skirmisher’s is truly the revolutionary ideal: perhaps what the next generation of music lovers will want is not a hip place to go, but a time capsule to the era when music was one of the greatest luxuries.”
° The Journal-Constitution was just asking for it (and if I live and nothing happens, I’ll give it them in the next post). “The Skirmisher is a masterpiece of friendly civic design. Its predigested, retro styles complement . . . the honkytonks . . . .” Well that was so greenwithenvy it didn’t even hurt folks’ feelings.
° But then came the galumphing Yankee. “There is quality to admire here, but it is still a hall about other people’s halls. It has no point of view.” This because the designers visited certain renowned European halls (and an American one somewhat north by northeast of Appleton Magna) with a view toward learning what worked in the past, when Mahler and Debussy and Vaughan Williams were masters, and a hope that the same acoustic principles would work in the present, when John Cage and some other John are masters, and the future, when, no doubt, a new MozartcumBach will arise to reengineer the human ear, I am so very sure.

Tootleloo, Giac.

P. S. As for me, the first time I saw it, still in scaffolding, I said to myself, “It looks like it’s always been there, and they‘ve just finished restoring it.”

Anglican Communion Saved! (Piers)

2006-09-03T20:39:00.000+02:00

Dear Piers,

° Such good news in the Pastoral Letter this morning: the Archbishop of Canterbury will be paying his New Year's visit to Sant' Ephaistiano after all, the Unity of the Anglican Communion is saved!

° The Little Pope (for Canterbury is no Rome, it's not even Newark) dictates only that "Christian poofters must change their practises." Then he cites that famous prophecy from Isaias:

The serpent shall dwell in the nest of the Basilisk,

The little lion shall lie down with the lamb,

The first shall be last,

And the tops shall be bottoms.

° Well, it's in the Bible.

° Betwixt and between, Giac.

Quaesivi (Piers)

2006-08-15T17:15:00.000+02:00

Figliolino,
° While it’s true that you’ve landed in high cotton, and higher to come, it must be acknowledged that the field itself lies so very low that tidewater laps its very edge.
° So you’d better just slip inside Sant’ Ephaistiano while nobody’s looking--you know how intolerant infidels are--and celebrate the Dormition of la Guadalupe. The Tournemire would do just fine . . . .
° And then why not hire Joel (“ah Joel”--yes, Tex Tyler was entertaining at Trattoria Coloreproibito the other night, no Cowboy in sight) to set the proper Lectio?

In omnibus requiem quaesivi . . . .
Qui creavit me, requievit in tabernaculo meo . . . .

((Nota bene: here’s the entire dispute between Rome and the da Vinci Codesque Gnostics. They claimed that Σοφια, having emanated from God, gave Virgin birth to the deficient tribal god (JahwehSabaoth) of the Jews. While we Americans affirm with Rome that Σοφια, aka la Guadalupe, gave birth to the allsufficient Sun.))

Quasi cedrus exaltata sum in Libano,
et quasi cypressus in monte Sion.
Quasi palma exaltata sum in Cades,
et quasi plantatio rosae in Jericho.
Quasi oliva speciosa in campis,
et quasi platanus exaltata sum juxta aquam in plateis.
Sicut cinnamomum, et balsamum aromatizans odorem dedi;
quasi myrrha electa dedi suavitatem odoris.

Joel nothing--any cottonpicker in any field in the world could set those words to fragrant musick.

° Though yes, certainly Joel. For if you use the infidels’ money to pay for a platinum setting, how sweet that would be.
° Not at all as our rulers use our own tax money to pay for cheating us at home and for murdering babies in Libano and points East.

° Picking big green worms off the flowering tobacco, Giac.

Rip-oso

2006-08-13T15:13:00.000+02:00

Fool and Juggler--in riposo.

° And not on account of Ferragosto.
° Megalomane, my 2 year old HP thoroughbred (fast and big and strong), is in R(equiescat) I(n) P(ace)-oso. Yes, he lost his thread and died.
° At least, Microsoft said he lost his thread. Don’t see how, I know I don’t have it.
° And Symantec swears a Trojan silkworm didn’t devour his thread; but you know what the fake Lorelei Lee said to the French judge, “But your Honour, I never swear.”)
° And HP has moved to India, and wisely and timeously so.

° So, Megalomane died. And the computer geek resurrected him, at the cost of all my recent files.
° And I spent a day restoring all the files and programs and settings.
° And then he died again.
° So I resurrected him by appealing to the Recovery Wizard that dwells across the Great Partition. And just before Megalomane dies again, I did think I would post this summary notice.

° As we prepare to celebrate the great Summer Festival of la Guadalupe, we find that my beloved Piers is in high cotton, with every expectation of next year’s crop being even higher. So there’s my retirement all provided for.
° We find my little gypsy Coz hoeing that very long row called wedded bliss.
° We find the little Lad pursuing his B.A. in Art, minor in Starvation. And yet I do not think he will starve.
° We find Sandy mired down in the molasses of wealth.
° We find Lettye bleeding from her heart like the Pelican, niente da fare.
° We find Julja having done the one thing the French do better than be Rational, but I’m too polite to call its name.
° And Leggero is off to Charleston, for good, in senso doppio.

° Megalomane’s last movie, before he began to make those clicketyclack sounds of incipient cybermadness, was Room with a View.

Truth! Beauty! Love!

If there is Truth, we hominids are too mentally deficient to apprehend it; if there is Beauty, it lies in the eye of the beholder; and if there is Love, it’s worthless in comparison with Lust, with Liking, or with Parental Duty.

° My most recent movie, that made me cry and salt up the inside of my glasses, was Gone with the Wind, on the arthouse bigscreen. For I’m a lot like Scarlett, all Southerners are, even Tonio Scalia. And I wasn’t crying at the end, because I know Scarlett got what she wanted and what she needed and what she was capable of appreciating.
° Namely, she got a Cat and its Kitten to rear (Ashley and Beau), she got Tara (and the money to maintain it), she got a hobby (eating beignets and costillas), and she got rid of that codpiece of a Rhett.
° Who went off to Charleston, for good.--Giac, lo Sciocco di foolandjuggler

Triple Your Money (Lad)

2006-07-30T15:39:00.000+02:00

Dear Lad,
° Leggero and I have suffered simultaneous and, as it were, reciprocal disappointments.
° He was mortified that he only brought in $2500.00 for the NEAC (Non Evita Approved Charity) benefit bachelor auction the other night (the crowd had been bled dry in an endless succession of Spring Benefits, and the auctioneeress was inexperienced, in auctioneering at any rate).
° And I was mortally disappointed that I didn’t foresee how it would be, get dressed, attend, and buy him for immediate resale on eBay. Quick triple of capital, NEAC happy with its $2500, Leggero happy with his, Giac happy with his plus vigourish.

° Splitting money better three ways than one, Giac.

Cum puero bello praeconem qui videt esse, quid credat, nisi se uendere discupere?

I’m just saying . . . .

Imagine (Foto--Lad)

2006-07-09T15:39:00.000+02:00

Foto: Adamo mangia la Mela--ossia, Leggero lecca il Cocomero

Dear Lad,
° Just imagine . . . .

° “Woody, Muskrat! Y’all breakfusses’s gittin’ cold.”
° “Here I am, Mom, Dad. What a bodacious stack of pancakes, lions ‘n‘ tigers ‘n‘ elephunks, Gosh!”
° “Watch your language, Son.”
° “Gee, Dad, I’m awful sorry. What a bodacious stack of pancakes, and waffles, and sausages and bacon, and french toast, and scrambled eggs just the way I like ‘em.”
° “Wonder what’s keeping your brother? Woody!”
° Silence.
° “Slow down, Son, chew each bite 30 times, that way you won’t ever get indigestion.”
° “I know, Dad, but it’s all just so darn--I mean, Gee, it’s good.”
° “Did you finish your book report before you went to bed? Didn’t misplace it? Got all your books? Well your Father and I are just so proud of you.” Beamy smiles all around.
° “Woody, you’re going to be late for the school bus, don’t make me have to come up there after you.”
° “I’m coming, Ma.”
° “Come to think of it, you’re up mighty early this morning, Muskrat, you’ll have plenty of time to floss and brush your--you didn’t skip any of your chores this morning?”
° Silence. Guilty, shamefaced silence.
° “Son, your mother asked you a question.”
° “O, aw, er--.”
° “Did you come down for breakfast again without finishing your masturbation? Answer me, young man.”
° “O Ma, I get so sick of masturbation.”
° “Don’t use that tone of voice to your mother, Theodoric. We’ve had this discussion before, we‘re not having it again. Now go on upstairs and don’t come down till you’re done. And don’t be late for school either. What was that? Do you want me to take my belt to you?”
° “No, Pa, I’ll masturbate all right. Mornin’, Woody.” Exit.
° “What’s up with the Muskrat, Ma? Looks down in the dumps.”
° “The same old story. I’m thankful there’s one of my sons has an obedient disposition.”
° “Thanks, Mom. Sorry I was a little late. Couldn’t decide between videos of Angelina Jolie--I know you think she’s too old for me, but she’s really hot. Isn’t she, Dad?”
° “Yes, Son, age isn’t everything, lips have to count for something too.”
° “It was between her and that old internet video of Tommy Lee and--boy o boy, I just wish my penis was half his size.”
° “I heard that,” replied Mom.
° “Humph!” snorted Dad.

§§§§§

° Imagine . . . no more desperate, pregnancydriven marriages; no more AIDSy lastcall “well he’s starting to look halfway doable now that the bar’s fixing to close;” no more Ennis del Mar Presidents . . . .
° No more war.
° For, as the bibles do say,

Train up a child in the way he shall go, and when he is old he will not depart therefrom.

° Seeing it all now, Giac.

P. S. If you want to see the expurgated lyrics, click here. Wonder who granted permission to censor this song?

66% (Coz)

2006-07-02T15:06:00.000+02:00

Dear Coz,
° I’d just finished bushhogging the Downs, newly sharpened blades, slick cut. I’d reset the mowing height for Path maintenance. And I was cutting and tugging and unwinding the tough stalks of fescue and orchardgrass that had entangled themselves about the pto shaft. All neat, all clean. I moved to replace the secateurs in the toolbox and--
° --and found myself rooted to the ground!
° No, I hadn’t had a stroke. Instead, the hydraulic system had slowly and naturally bled and had gently settled the edge of the halfton mower onto my right foot. What a place to be marooned, no one ever comes to this barn, I could call and call and only the North Hill would echo me, and--well what a place to be marooned, is all.
° So I decided then and there that it was time for me to pass down to you all my lore.
° And here ‘tis:

How to Predict the Future with Unfailing Accuracy

° Simple as pie. Whenever a Plan of Action is presented to the American People by the American Media on behalf of the American Ruling Class, watch for the poll numbers. If 66% of the American People favour the action, you can not only predict eventual disaster then and there, you can, Rhett Butlerlike, buy the appropriate contrarian futures.
° Moreover--and this is just cream--you can also predict with unfailing accuracy that within 5 years 66% of the American People will not only oppose the Plan of Action, they will everyman Jack of ‘em swear they always had opposed it.
° And that is all I know, Daddy taught it me, I teach it thee.
° (The theory is, of course, that 33% of the American People have so little prudence and foresight that they will keep on hammering their own thumb forever, once they’ve started, they don‘t connect the pain with the metal; and that 33% of the American People have so little prudence and foresight that they can only recognise pregnancy after the delivery of a squalling infant; while the remaining 33% of the American People have so great prudence and foresight--no, it must just be simple contrariness.)

§§§§§

° Yes, you might object that no sooner had the Media announced on behalf of the Ruling Class the Plan of Action to attack Iraq than precisely 80% of the American People were polled as favouring the Action. 80%, not just 66%.
° Well I reckon you see what that portended.

° Would it be a good idea to take an opinion poll as part of the electoral process? So that any voter who supported a Plan of Action that subsequently led to a VietNamlike disastrophe would be disenfranchised for life?
° Couldn’t hurt.

° Prognosticatorially, Giac.

Ventil 8 (Foto--Lettye)

2006-06-11T15:39:00.000+02:00

Foto: Don't Try This at Home--L'Orgue Mystique, Communion (L'Ascension)

Dear Giac,
° The wedding countdown is going about as expected. The caterer hasn’t declared bankruptcy, the seamstress hasn’t cut up the gown irreparably, and the church hasn’t fallen into a black hole, but otherwise . . . .
° And then there was that late call, and I found myself playing Sunday, times 2. I felt a little stupefied that morning. But everything went pretty well until I got to the offertory in the 11:00 service. I didn’t push the piston. So after the 2 clarinets started and it was time for me to come in there was no sound. I had the wrong number in mind and pushed the piston for the sortie (loud trumpet blast) instead of the quiet accompaniment I should have pushed. But I still had that number in mind and just thought that I’d mispushed. Another push of Gen. 8 elicited the same trumpet blast, and finally I looked at my notes. By that time I was so aghast I hardly knew what I was doing. Fortunately the choir sang faithfully along and the clarinets were undeterred, and we got through it somehow. Believe me, I didn’t listen to the tape of that service!
° Well here comes the bride, clarinets by her side, the choristers hide, the organist’s fried.

° Ingemisco tamquam reus, culpa rubet vultus meus, Lettye.

° Ah that could never have happened to me.
° Once upon a time I was unwisely selected to turn pages for Laine’s graduate recital. And no, I didn’t turn two or three at once during the 50page 5/4 vivace. She was still officially in warmup, the sprightly opener was yielding to the lyric mood piece. Peeters. A mountain evocation, mists, shepherds’ horns, bleating. I set the music on the stand. She gazed upon it. She pressed the correct general piston.
° And I stood in wonder as the Tuba Mirabilis popped out on the Choir. Surely the Cor de Nuit, said I to myself. What can she have been thinking? But who am I to interfere?
° Now the Oxy Wesley Tuba Mirabilis is not one of these modern lavenderpantied English Tubas, nor one of those pale pansyassed French trompettes en chamade. Oxy Wesley’s Tuba Mirabilis was in fact the discarded prototype for the Last Trump of the Apocalypse, discarded on account of the harshness of its tone.
° Well the effect was just astonishing, kind of cleared up the mists with one blast. Laine handregistered.
° And ever since then, so have I.--Giac.

Girl or Girlyboy (Foto--Piers)

2006-05-25T21:22:00.000+02:00

Foto: Girl or Girlyboy?--The DaVinci Code

Dear Piers,
° I knew that Leonardo invented the helicopter, wrote in mirror code, and devised multiple means of mass destruction, all the time whiling away his spare hours with cute young men, but when--after seeing The DaVinci Code--I reexamined La Cena Ultima I was surprised to find that he’s also the father of the foam "We’re Number One" prosthetic hand. Or else the stiletto shoe. Can’t say for sure which item little girlyboy John is kissing.
° ((Of course, it’s all naked plaster. Scarcely any of Leonardo’s paint remains on the wall, restorers can make John into Mary Magdalene or Minnie Mouse equally plausibly.))

° I know nearly as much about Mary of Magdala (22 Julii) as I do of Leonardo.

1. Jesus healed her of seven devils (meaning, she had been severely emotionally disturbed, perhaps manicdepressive);

2. She was one of three named women of wealth who paid for Jesus’s ministry and managed the daily household details for him and his male followers;

3. She was the founder of the Catholick Church; for it was she alone who missed Jesus enough to “see” him after his death, as one does see the beloved dead (Luke, completely dickwhipped by Paul, ergo Peter, tells what would be a baldfaced lie if he’d told it convincingly enough to fool a fiveyearold child).

° Missale Romanum notwithstanding, she was not the sister of Lazarus (Oratio: . . . cujus precibus exoratus, quatriduanum fratrem Lazarum vivum ab inferis resuscitasti. Qui vivis.), and therefore not the woman who anointed Jesus’s feet with perfumed unguent and her own tears (Sequentia sancti Evangelii secundum Lucam. Cap. 7), and therefore not “peccatrix.” Though Luke’s transition to Mary of Magdala in Chapter 8 is so abrupt, that nobody can blame the Church for her mistake.
° You may think that what Mary of Magdala really was and really did is more distressing for Petrine Christianity than any marriage she might have made with Jesus, any children she might have borne.
° I may think that that’s why she disappears without a trace. Saint Luke had the writing of the Acts of the Apostles, and Saint Paul will've hated the woman’s guts.

§§§§§

° And when did albinos stop having pink eyes?

° Angelicly, Giac.

Piers Speaks (Foto--Piers)

2006-05-14T15:09:00.000+02:00

Foto: L'Orgue Mystique--Cycle de Paques

Dear Giac,
° My sortie on “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf” with a counterpoint of “Ancient of Days” was a big hit on your halfName Day (1 maggio). Miao! Woof!
° Hope you are doing well. I had a wonderful few days in NYC, my young choristers did a great job of Evensong cum Benediction at Santa Maria Verginissima, and I was very proud of how well they sang AND behaved on Sunday.
° Saturday, Bastien and I were walking down the street and we happened to see Mark Consuelos (Regis’s Kelly’s most attractive husband). He was driving a black Volvo SUV with New Jersey plates and the windows rolled down. 42d Street indeed.
° On Sunday morning I heard Mass at St. Bartholomew's (Bastien was sleeping in), the Rt. Rev. Gene Robinson was the guest preacher. He delivered a marvelous sermon based on the Gospel for the day. The church was PACKED. At the conclusion of the service there was an extended receiving line so I wandered around St. Bart's for a while, and then came and got in line. This guy in front of me turned around and introduced himself. He had "the look" of either being a model or an actor. We talked about music for a while and then I asked him what he did. Well, his name is Steven Fales and he's the writer and lone actor in Confessions of a Mormon Boy which is currently getting great reviews running off-Broadway. He was very affable, and we had a great conversation as we proceeded closer to Bishop Robinson. When I finally got to Bishop Robinson he extended his arm to me and said, "Hi, I'm Gene." I introduced myself and then said "Yea, UMHM's ((University of the Mighty High Mountain)) Right." He smiled and proceeded to give me a big hug, asking when I graduated. We talked about some of the people we both knew there. He asked if I was aware of the controversy brewing on awarding him an honorary degree. I told him I was aware of it, and in fact had signed on to a letter circulated a year ago asking that the University honor its custom of awarding honorary degrees to any UmHm student that becomes a Bishop. He didn't seem to be too bothered by it, fortunately. I guess he's used to it by now.
° Anyway, last night was Uncle Princeton's birthday bash that was fabulous. Great fun and met some great people, saw Bastien off on the redeye.
° Then, this afternoon, on my flight back home, I was at the gate, went on to the plane, settled down and a few minutes later I happened to look up and lo and behold, entering the plane like Queen Elizabeth entering Parliament was none other than Hillary Clinton!!! I proceeded to call friends from the plane to share my excitement. She was sitting in the front row and I was about 1/3 of the way back. She never got up for the flight, and had several people in her entourage sitting around her. She was reading the New York Times for the entire flight. I had my camera with me and was seriously considering taking a picture of the back of her head--but given the fact that I had been reading an excellent book on Lincoln's assassination (entitled Manhunt -- I HIGHLY recommend it, great read), I was nervous about taking something out of my backpack and pointing it in the direction of her head, out of concern that some Secret Service person possibly sitting behind me would have proceeded to plant a bullet in my brain (and life has been too great of late to risk death for a picture of the rear of Hillary's head). When we landed, I popped out of my seat as fast as I could and made my way to the front of the plane. Alas, it was not meant to be. They held up the line and allowed her to depart before the rest of us. I saw no signs of her in the airport either, so she missed out on a great opportunity to meet me.
° Anyway, all was very exciting. Headed back to NYC next week--looking forward to it!

° Perpetually obedient to thy wishes, I be, Piers.

((Okay, I altered that close. And yet it’s true. Everything I always wanted to happen to me, every experience I missed and longed for--you have them, it’s your nature to have them. And if they happen to you, they happen to me.--Giac.))

Senator Pfister von Pfristelfokker (Foto--Sandy)

2006-04-30T15:09:00.000+02:00

Foto: Prince Pfister von Pfristelfokker, et ux--ossia Lotte Lehmann et Leo Slezak

Dear Sandy,

Frankly Scarlett, I don’t give a care.

How do you use the birds?

Use your words, Leon.

° I, who tend to play with my words as if they were the Juggler's own golden balls, gaze in awe at economy of means in expression.
° And I give you full credit for your own brief response to a Senatorial mailing:

YOU ARE A PISSANT, SENATOR PFRISTELFOKKER!

In blue blue ink.

° So how dismayed was I to learn that you yourself have been gulled by the Senator’s latest ruse, popularly known as Divide (your subjects) and Rule (ineptly).
° For you are as resentful of our brother and sister Mexicans, who work and slave that you and I may lie on soft couches and have Beulah peel us grapes, as Pfister himself.
° He, at least, has something to gain.

° Using my words, Giac.

Hobby Lobby (Foto)

2006-04-06T18:39:00.000+02:00

To the Honourable L------ D----:
° I am in receipt of your slick mailer, for which, many thanks.
° You ask me, the American Taxpayer, what I think.
° I am too busy scraping together my contribution to your salary to think, that’s why I voted for you in the first place.
° But here are three things I observe.

° 1. I observe that Congress acknowledges absolutely no financial responsibility toward the American Republic, which you are pushing into bankruptcy as quickly as you can.
° 2. I observe that Congress acknowledges absolutely no oversight responsibility toward the American Republic; FEMA, Social Security, Medicare, the Armed Forces must all fend for themselves.
° 3. I observe that Congress greatly enjoys bullying first one segment of the American Republic, then another; what have y’all got against our hardworking Mexican brothers and sisters?

° Course, as I gaze at the slick foto, and think that there are 34,000 handsome males (mostly) and lovely females (a smattering) constantly inviting Congress out for coffee, lunch, drinks dinner and a show, maybe breakfast in bed, for all I know--well I think Congress is doing the best it can with the spare time it has to do with.

° Yours till November, The American Taxpayer

Wifey Dearest (Foto--Lad)

2006-03-12T18:13:00.000+01:00

Foto: Christ Transgressing YMCA Wet Area Commandments--il Battesimo di Cristo

Dear Lad,
° Time was, if the Village People can be believed, that YMCAs were little more than male brothels.
° And you yourself remember the lean years, when Pope’s handsome Y degenerated into a flophouse cum steamandmasseur.
° But the dechristening and castration of the Young Men‘s Christian Association into the Your Family Y (YFY, pronounced “Wifey“), and a more aggressive dipping into the public tax monies via taxexempt bond issues, has brought a resurgence, just one gigantic new facility after another. Tennis, pools indoor and outdoor, weightrooms, babysitting stations, personal trainers, racketball, basketball, walking and cardio--how the nontaxpayersubsidised Gold’s gyms survive is more’n I can say.
° But even if the Ys are no longer male brothels, they can’t help, by their tasteful spickandspanness, but attract a sizable percentage of samesexers. And excluding any general class of members, even secondtier citizens like Jack and Ennis, might jeopardise taxexempt status. Then too, samesexer money spends the same as differentsexers’.
° But clearly, Something’s Got to Give.

° Astonished as I was a couple of years ago to see a sign in the over18 male dressing room at the Colliverdi Y--well I was shocked that agesegregation was thought necessary or legal--a sign stating that

The management cannot tolerate inappropriate sexual behaviour in the dressingroom,

which begged the question,

Exactly what sexual behaviour is appropriate in the dressing room?

Astonished as I was, it was nothing to the amazement I felt upon seeing a sign in the over18 male dressingroom at the Baltimore Villa Wifey stating that

Out of respect for those uncomfortable with nudity, members are asked to remain covered at all times in the dressingroom and wet area.

I like to’ve never got dressed out, showered, redressed. Just try it yourself. And I couldn’t help but notice that the towelwrapped Wifey Dearest male is about ten times more blatantly gay (I blush to say plainly how one erects that statistic into a tower of hard fact) than Fatass Cartman himself.
° ((I was thrilled to see, in fine print, that this branch of the Y possesses a document that defines, in plain English, “inappropriate sexual behaviour,” and I long to find somebody fool enough to ask to see it and tell me what it says.))

§§§§§

° Has it come to this?
° Must American men wear burkha?
° (For that is the justification of burkha, lest arab men, unable to control their animal impulses, should be victimised by being induced by an oppressor female not under wraps to rape her.)
° “Why should I have to watch tv shows like --------- ----------?” Even Ellen Goodman, ablebodied as far as I know and probably possessing a tv channel selector, asked this inane question, and failed to recognise the whiny neoNazi subtext of her own query.
° “Why should I be forced to gaze upon hairy flabby wrinkled manass and floppy flaccid weeny mandick?”
° Why indeed?

° Forced by some unspecified Forcer to close now, Giac.

A Sailboat in the Moonlight and Who (Foto--Piers)

2006-03-02T01:30:00.000+01:00

Foto: Moonlight--The Pillars of Herakles

Dear Piers,
° The other day my brother innocently erred in saying, “If I get to Heaven, I hope I’ll meet up with D------, and we’ll fish and hunt rabbits all day everyday.”
° “Erred,” for he said it in front of me.
° “Won’t be much of a Heaven for the fishes and the rabbits,” wiseacred I.
° He thought, he amended, “Maybe up there we wouldn’t kill them.”
° Good save.

° My mind flashed back to my grandfather’s famous lecture on the Immortality of the Soul. He used to deliver it to captive audiences of public school children, this was back in the days when such audiences were homogeneously WASP, the only sectarian division being between English Relaxed Episcopalians and Scottish Haemorrhoidal Calvinists.

The Indian has his Heaven. When he dies, . . . he expects to go to a land of swift flowing, beautiful and mighty rivers, teeming with fish, where throughout all eternity he can indulge in one of his favorite sports.

° But I am a vegetarian, so that’s no good.

The Mohammedan when he dies looks for a Heaven where he can enjoy every sensual delight. In this world he has many wives, but in the next world he is to have many more.

° Not to mention the nonstupefying wine, the baklava, and the prettyboys. But there’s no promise of cats, so that’s no good.

The truly Christian man or woman has an altogether different idea of Heaven. He believes in a higher and better life--a life of service free from sin and the triumph of his soul and spirit over his lower and animal nature that he has here.

° So Heaven is to be an eternity of emptying bedpans with a cheerful disposition. I pray it be not so.

§§§§§

° I’m in the living room, I’m lolled on the sofa. The day is sunny and warm, and the breeze through the open dormers is caressing. From the South I can smell the Gulf. To the North I can see the converted storehouse in which Nathan is kilning bowls glazed jewelly in jade and turquoise. Coz is down in the cabin, he’s dandling his firstborn, He Born with the Caul, He Born with the Gift Entire. From the Terrace comes the hectic thwuck! of Leggero’s backhand, as he prepares for the Games. Downstairs, at the keyboard, you’re entwining themes from Palestrina’s Canticum Canticorum with Dupré’s, nero e bello davvero.
° A pot of steeping strong tea releases the scent of orangeblossom and passionflower and jasmine while Yucatan buttons melt in my mouth (though there’s a platter of costillas in the hall, and the lingering scent of the morning coffee grinding). On the page before me Fanny Assingham has just said ‘”This”--?‘ and Maggie is just fixing to reply ‘That!’
° She’s done it. I pause. Silence. Footsteps.
° One of you is coming up the steps.

° And that, my beloved Piers, ever forgotten so as to be ever newly experienced throughout the splitsecond that Eternity lasts, is Heaven.
° Contentment Surprised by Joy.

° All aboard as the Moon rises, Giac.

Puzzling (Foto--Leggero)

2006-02-14T23:00:00.000+01:00

Foto: Bareback Hillock, First Cousin Twice Removed of Brokeback Mountain

Mio caro Leggero,
° Here is a puzzle for little Pirelli. Recite thou him (clue) these two passages:

For man can be bought with woman’s beauty, if it be but beautiful enough; and woman’s beauty can be ever bought with gold, if only there be gold enough.

Of course you wouldn’t marry a man because of his money, any more than you’d marry a woman because she’s goodlooking; but my Goodness, doesn’t it help?

° See can he tell (he has a 50-50 chance of guessing right) which of these speeches was put into the mouth of the female lead character by a male writer.
° If that he can, nay even be it but guesswork (clue redoubled), then we’ll discuss Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain.

° Riddled, Giac.

La Morte Santissima Se Ne Va (Foto--Piers)

2006-01-21T06:00:00.000+01:00

My dear little Piers,
° Slow motion. Thank goodness there was time for slow motion. Plenty of time.
° Tuesday afternoon I satinstitched over the mousebites in a silverblue damask tablecloth of Mother’s. It was the right kind of occupation.
° A phone call to her cousin, warned Sunday. More reminiscences. It was just the right thing.
° By nightfall, though I was still weepy, I had the sense that the invalid, dying Mother was now out of the way of the vital, beautiful Mother. For Time really is just a notion we have.
° Slept soundly.

° Wednesday I printed the fotorich bio, for the service. Her parents when young, the early deaths, the college days, the young mother, the musician. I cut the fotos off at age 30, folks’ memories can fill in after that.
° Headachy, from the eyestrain. I even took an aspirin next morning.
° Mother’s temperature, toward the end, had soared to an astonishing 107°. Hospice packed her in ice, the charge nurse administered tylenol by enema. Nobody remembered a worse fever. So that’s why the alertness last November, it was the beginning of this final infection, that’s why all those tests we just found out about two weeks ago, when the Medicare statement came.

° Dreamed of two chimneys floating over the house, my task was to carry masonry up the ladder to fill in to the ground. And yes, one of the chimneyshaped fotos in the bio was “floating” by a line; fixed it. Also dreamt erotically, there was a map of Lazio handinked inside my underwear. Normal dreams about normal, ordinary things. Good sign. No rattlesnakes, no dinosaurs.
° The difference between shock and surprise. My father died the third day inclusive after a fall; we were surprised, shocked, stunned. I remember that my sense of smell became so acute I could analyse the breath and sweat of all the visitors and tell what they’d eaten earlier in the day. It was incapacitating, it was appropriate to the level of the shock. Lettye had dizzy spells for years, fell into many a bush. Others just buy golden Cadillacs and get it over with.
° We were surprised by Mother’s death, but not shocked, or so it seems today. Nor had Daddy lost control of his investments and the conditions of his daily life--though it was imminent.

° The casket opened briefly--they’d remade the body to look the way she did before she began those last hard few days of fever and drought, I wonder if any of us is mentally strong enough to behold Death unmadeup?--and the family service done, the casket reclosed--my mother used to cringe at the comments she heard the old folks make after a viewing: “My, didn’t she look bad!” or “My, didn’t they fix her up like a picture, but that dress!”--the Visitation began.
° My father’s Visitation nearly sank me. I hadn’t slept for two days, my nerves and temper were not at their sweetest, and the stench of folks’ breath and bodies, not to mention their ideas, was unbearable, if they just knew what cats know.
° My mother’s Visitation was so pleasant, it was only five hours later, as my stomach began to gripe for lack of food, that I realised it was all over. And, having stood the entire time, all my blood was in my feet.
° Reunions with cousins not seen in twenty years. Reunions with good friends. A steady stream of folks I didn’t know from Adam. Confidences piled upon confidences: confessions of misdeeds in elementary school, unburdenings of caregivers at the nearend of their ropes, recollections of the physical details of parents’ deaths, garden talk, software talk. No backhanded slaps at Mother (this is unusual, funerals mark open season on the Dead). A forehanded slap at me for having alienated Mother’s patronage from a local store. Sorry, better avocados at the chain.
° Tired, calm.

° Friday, another warm and sunny day, unnaturally warm and sunny. The jasmine, autumn cherry, parrotia, hazelnuts, hellebores, all the little late winter weeds are blooming. I sit still all morning and satinstitch the last napkin of the blue damask set. Fold the bios. Time to make crescents, but time better spent in not making them.
° Car wash down--but there is the couple that backhanded me last night, I’ve forgotten, they’ve forgotten, the social fabric satinstitched over.
° Noon dinner at the church. Everyone sunny and chatty. The funeral. I tremble a little at the first notes of “Ich ruf’ zu dir”, then I settle into a voluptuous appreciation of the chiffing rohrfloete, the remarkably lovely oboe (this addition was thanks to your timely advice). Lettye sings “Michael.” Charlene accompanies anglican style (this too recalls your influence, though you never knew it). Very decent homily. "Beulah Land," that spaced out text from the brief period of Relaxed Episcopal mysticism at the turn of the last century. Lettye sings “Repton.” I had forgotten the bit about “our right minds,” but very apt. Surpassingly sweet. I remember the first time I heard you play it. I remember a ferocious female afterwards affirming that “that’s what I want sung at my funeral.” Another victory of yours that meant everything to me.
° The sabreslash that is the first statement of the Louis Couperin Chaconne, then off to the cemetery. Clouds and a whippy wind for fifteen minutes during the interment, then sun and calm again.
° The Aftervisit with Lettye’s aunt and sister, more happy past.
° Then my friends were gone, and I was out of my element, “Leggeroless,” as someone once remarked, and eventually I went home.

° Mother was almost entirely absent from her funeral day, we were all too busy and chatty to think of her. And that was a good thing. For Time, as I do say, is only a notion we folks do have.

° With love, affection, and gratitude, Giac.

Mors Sanctissima Non Stupuit, Day Five (Foto--Piers)

2006-01-17T17:30:00.000+01:00

Dear Piers,
° I slept so well last night. At two I wakened from a dream of a mother and son, tenants on the farm, who were washing clothes and hanging them on the outside of a barn, under the roof overhang, to dry. And yes, the rain had picked up, was actually a downpour. Well we need it. Of course the washing dream was preposterous, such a thing never happened. I was just dozing off when I recollected that the mother and son were dead.
° My waking dream was me at the threemanual console of a pipe organ. All the keys were level, I thought it would really strain the hands to play it. The keys were painted over with a thick middarkblue paint. The stops were in no sort of order at all. I tried the cornet, it turned out to be a very acute, very thinnish sort of cymbel instead. I tried the trompette, it was very fine indeed. But I gave it all up when I noticed that the bench was tottering backwards, and that there was enough fall behind to give one a concussion. I thought about gmailing you, thought you’d be interested that some church had so feckless an instrument.
° It’s so disrespectful to feel any normal feelings, any normal interests at a time like this. But I did forget everything yesterday while I was gardening. I do feel the lure of the Bouvier gossip. I feel normal.
° The lower Terrace is flooded, such a rain. Crook has thrown up on the porch. Asia’s toilet needs cleaning, in the worse of two ways.
° No light is flashing, no phone call. No panic, no rush. I’m writing to you.

° The phone rings, I rush to save the document, but pick up while my brother is still talking. There’re two messages on the answering machine, it was while I was emptying the litter box.
° At 8 o’clock this morning Mother died. My brother and sisterinlaw had spent the night in the room, had been home for about an hour when the first call came to them.
° The paperwork begins in earnest at 11 o’clock, then the “closure” service and family viewing, then casket closed forever, then visitation off and on till Friday. Phone calls, gmails, food.
° How do I feel? I don’t know. At 8 o’clock I felt fine, I didn’t even feel so very guilty about feeling fine. At 8:15 I feel fine, or maybe numb, which is also fine.
° I didn’t know the morphine would still leave Death looking like that, I didn’t want Mother to continue to look like that.
° It’s 8:30, and I’m not feeling fine at all, my eyes are welling up. I love you and all my family and all my beasts.

° Giac.

Mors Sanctissima Non Stupebit, Day Four (Foto--Piers)

2006-01-17T15:00:00.000+01:00

Beloved little Piers,
° It was that flashing light just before bedtime last night. My brother transmitting a call from the charge nurse: “Your mother’s breathing has become very light, she’s gone down ‘a lot’ since y’all were here ((only a few hours ago)).”
° At 2 o’clock I awoke, not from a dream, with a sense of profound insecurity, of light panic. My legs began to ache, as they used to do when I was a child. And I was bigeyed, no drowsiness promising a quick return to sleep. A few avemarias, the only prayer I know that has any real point, a brief preamble, then cut to the chase: ”I’m frightened, comfort me.”
° But I was still frightened.
° So I used all the popquantum physics I know to summon my beasts. Panama, the magickal and magnificent Panama, to guard the window. Tira the wolfhound to guard the foot of the bed. Octavia the Siamese to drape herself on my neck. Asia, to cramp my legs the more. Whip and Crook, too young to do anything but get underfoot. Artemis the Unlucky I sent into the Breakfast Room to eat her fill of Asia‘s kitty numnums. Then I remembered she had no teeth. So I felt bad about that too.

° Got up at dawn, walked, dashed off the requested obituary--the new dominy never knew Mother as a person, he wanted some anecdotes, some sense of her active life. Was rushing out the door--everything to escape before the phone could ring--when I remembered I’d left out something very important, a Freudian slip. Supplied it hurriedly, reprinted, no harm done, no offense given. Out the door, no flashing light.
° Mother’s head was still visible through the window of her room, so she wasn’t dead yet. The tv was off, the roommate watching and waiting, she’s seen so many roommates die in her time; young as she is, she may see many more. Christmas carols on piano were playing softly by Mother’s bedside. I opened the blinds, spoke to her, her eyes opened and stared full through me. Then I put on the Mozart, then I yammered and yammered and yammered. The morphine took over, she closed her eyes.
° The lids are swollen, red, itchy. The eyes themselves seem to have shrunk, the blue much paler. She has supplemental oxygen through the nose, but breathes through the mouth. The tongue is crusted with yellow mucus or--. The nurses swab the interior of the mouth from time to time. I just pour a bit of water onto the side of the tongue, catch the dribble with a towel.
° But I never stop yammering. I tell her I’m sorry I wasn’t a better caregiver. I tell her all the tales of her childhood I can remember. I rub her feet. I’m horrified at what her appearance will be if this goes on and on, like Terry Schiavo.
° The dominy comes in, he was alarmed by the urgency of my obituary. I yammer at him. He listens like Leggero, like the charge nurse. He plans a moment of “closure” for the family at bedside, perhaps this afternoon.
° I thank Heaven we’ve got a Protestant. He’s dressed like a normal human being, he has normal human feelings, he’s free of that insane institutional sense of mumbojumboist selfimportance.

° That afternoon I rake the sheared and strimmed trimmings from the Terrace. It’s warm, I have a vague sense that folks might be coming to the house this week, better prepare. For the last half hour it rains, but I finish the job. It’s a warm rain, it won’t kill me.

° Indoors I remember that Sister Death is close by. I fidget, can’t concentrate on the text in front of me, can’t concentrate on the monitor either. I visit your new website, your staff foto won’t download. Don’t care, I know what you look like better than they do. I visit your old website, no sign of a successor, news of Pietro Bouvier.
° I search out Mother’s living will. I read it word for word. “No artificial means of providing food or water . . . . terminal condition as determined by the attending physician.” That is what it says, that is what it means. This is it. My brother and I have done what she directed us to do.
I just didn’t know it would look like what it does.

° By bedtime I feel okay, I mean, I fall asleep with no trouble.
° The answering machine light isn’t flashing.

° Love, Giac.

Mors Sanctissima Non Stupebit, Day Three (Foto--Piers)

2006-01-16T03:00:00.000+01:00

My beloved Piers,
° I thought I couldn’t stand it when you were gone. Until I finally found that you aren’t gone. If you so much as prick your finger, I bleed.
° And this morning I found that you already knew--had you read labuonastella?
° My coffee scum--still the Christmas gift Starbucks Blend--immediately settled into an arrow piercing a body; later, when it had run and dried it was the Pelican pecking her breast to feed her single chick her own sustaining blood.
° But it wasn’t dry when I drove in to the nursing home.
° I had to see for myself.
° Mother was very alert, trying but unable to speak, reaching feebly with her jointfrozen arms, obviously conscious that something was bad wrong.
° Of course, by now the tranquilliser is nearly out of the system. Forehead not hot, unable even to develop a fever now.
° I repositioned her, raised the bed, offered her water. Two or three times her lips moved to sip, one time she even bit the edge of the cup. In half a dozen tries I got perhaps a tablespoon of water into her mouth. It all dribbled back out, sometimes fast, sometimes slow. Wet her tongue.
° The roommate’s tv blaring (why was I so prudent, why not a private room? My brother’s reminder: Mother actually benefited from the oversight of her more mentally active roommate. But why didn’t we ask for a private room six months ago, when we signed onto Hospice?
° Again, not a rhetorical question. But this time I know the answer. After 3 ½ years of Medicare and Medical and Blue Cross Insurance shiftings and dodgings, after 3 ½ years without any meaningful information, I mostly and my brother partly had lost all faith in the Medical Establishment. Remember FEMA, remember Katrina? That’s how our rulers do things. American health care is just Katrina FEMA on a giantly wasteful and mentally deficient scale. And doctors are too busy. And doctors are too omnipotent. And medical science is too backward.
° And in the end, the doctor was right and I was wrong. But up till then the Mexican Medicine Man in Overton had been ten times righter than the Gringo Medicine Men in Kosciusko.)
° No chance of a private room now. Mother must die listening to the braying of game show hosts and network hucksters. The charge nurse offers to play Mozart cds quietly at bedside.
° The charge nurse listens listens listens--”As soon as your mother’s agitated spells last more than a few minutes, we’ll start placing the morphine drops under the tongue.”
° Brother and sisterinlaw come in. I fall through the floor when the undertaker is mentioned. I say nothing. No dying patient will ever hear me admit it, if I have to yammer and yammer till I blither.
° But they’ve been gathering pallbearers--every male family friend of Mother’s age is either dead or weakly--and relatives’ phone numbers, and sorting fotos for the display table.
° And freshening up the dress.
° And arranging for the last hairdressing.
° And selecting the casket.
° Lord help us all if I had to do those things.
° But if anybody can out cheerful yammer me, I’d just like to hear it.

§§§§§

° In the back of the mind: why not IV antibiotics?
° In the back of the mind: are we murderers to follow the advice of everyone who’s ever said yes to them, are we murderers for drawing the line absolute at the feeding tube?
° All decided negatively years ago. Let it go let it go. Too late soon.

° Your Giac.

Mors Sanctissima Non Stupebit, Day Two (Foto--Piers)

2006-01-15T15:00:00.000+01:00

My beloved Piers,
° Slept well, rose before dawn, ate, washed, dressed to drive up to see Leggero. If I could just get out that door . . . .
° But, can’t leave the house without passing the machine, the blinking red light.
° The Call, from my brother. Doctor, Hospice, Charge Nurse, the daily attendants--all agree. Mother is dying rapidly. Inevitably.
° Phone back. Well there it is, no denying, all the animal panic of the Wolf smelling his own species’s blood and hearing the specific whimpers of terror and pain.
° No denying. Rehearsal over. Live audience.
° (How many times over the last 3 ½ years has Mother been at Death’s door? Not a rhetorical question, but I myself don’t know the answer. Emergency Room, Intensive Care, some newer and fiercer antibiotic, some gentler and less distressing psychotropic. Ever and again at Death’s door, but escaping so many times that by now, who would believe it?
° On Hospice for the last six months, but who would believe it? That flareup of being at herself last November, complete sentences, smiles of recognition--didn’t I gmail Lettye that I hoped that wasn’t what it was in her own mother’s case, in so many cases anecdotally, the last flareup?)
° Gmailed Lettye. Prepare those two hymns (you know the two I mean).
° Phoned Charlene: Prepare those two hymns.
° Went into shock, drove up to Overton, smiled more than usual, jollied folks more than usual, was just a bundle of good cheer. Even more fake than usual.
° I didn’t feel a thing. It had been for real there for a few minutes, but now it wasn’t either real or not real. It was just locked in that compartment way back.
° And I felt the whole day as if I were fixing to jump out of my skin.
° Leggero offered what he could, said what he could.
° Vic catches me up on his own situation. Takes me back to those dreadful days of athome caregiving. “O how I suffered.” (To the extent that I’d rather Nathan paint my tonsils with toadstool juice than for me dementedly to give another human that same trouble myself. If not demented, I can prevent myself giving that trouble all by myself.)
° “O how I suffered.” The violence, the stench, the overwhelmedness.
° Only, Vic, who works fulltime, has not only his mother, but a physically helpless sibling as well, and not only does he not have the help my brother and sisterinlaw gave me, he faces the more normal situation of genuine obstruction and carping from his ablebodied kin.
° So I’m just shutting up. How easy I got off, as a caregiver. Barely a couple of years, really.
° Slept soundly till the Cat clawed my ear. Six o’clock sharp.

° Love, Giac.

Mors Sanctissima Non Stupebit, Day One (Foto--Piers)

2006-01-14T15:00:00.000+01:00

My beloved little Piers,
° This morning I had a comparatively brief visit with Mother. I yammered and yammered the way I yammer and yammer; bimeby I blithered. Mother opened her eyes once, did not recognise me, did not speak, closed them again. All about as usual.
° And yet animal panick kept building inside me the whole time. Why?
° I returned to my car, parked conveniently in the fire lane just outside her window. The charge nurse came in to medicate, the customary little plastic cup of pseudo milkshake laced with tranquilliser, antibiotic, thyroid extract, I don’t know what all.
° She tipped part of the viscous fluid into Mother’s mouth, then stroked and chopped her throat, massaged vigorously her cheeks, just as you would do to trick Jackson Ng into swallowing a hated worm capsule. She added water, then dashed to the bathroom for towelling. For it all flowed back out.
° So I knew.

° I knew why I’d had that same dream three times already this week. Mother and I are out walking through the neighbourhood, the day is sunny and pleasant, we encounter her friend Jan (she was her classmate, then neighbour all her life in Kosciusko, is now her neighbour just down the hall at the nursing home). All so pleasant, all so normal.
° Only, atop every wall we pass, and in writhing masses underfoot, are countless rattlesnakes.
° I knew what it meant. And I denied what it meant, till I saw the charge nurse’s failed efforts.
° The throat muscles have lost their coordination.
° Mother cannot swallow anything, no liquid, no medicine, no food.
° I gmailed my cousin up North, reported the dream, suggested that Mother might be getting a little worse.
° For I was back in full denial. But I did sleep without the nightmare last night.

° Love, Giac.

Goons (Foto--Leggero)

2006-01-08T15:01:00.000+01:00

Foto: Perchè?--Le Catacombe di Santa Priscilla, Profeta

Mio caro,
° As you know, I’m only 100 pages from the end of the 12th (and last) of the Peter Wimseys (I count the Peterless toadstools), so I’m just murderridden.
° A woman goes to her 5th floor window in Gotham to investigate gunshots, a drunken U.S. Army soldier shoots her through the--well, she dies. But he was drunk, so it doesn’t count.
° In Overton a friend of yours pauses at an intersection (he was too conscientious to use my habitual California stop), an intenseeyed lateteen approaches him from the right, a surly extremely mentally deficient (I use my own eyes on his foto) midteen approaches from the left. The teens demand his car, your friend accelerates, the surly midteen shoots him. Your friend drives a block or two, pulls over, dies. (Within the hour the teens successfully steal a car from another guy just down the way.)
° And now everyone is looking for The Reason.
° I mean, The Reason it couldn’t happen to you or to me. As we do in the face of every violent crime or natural disaster. (My hilltop house’ll never be submerged as a result of a broken levee.)
° “Thank heavens it wasn’t a hate crime.” That is the commonest selfcomfort one hears from his associates.
° And yet I think Peter Wimsey would notice, and indeed a fiveyearold child would notice, that the window of the car was not shattered. There was the opportunity for reply. There was the opportunity for the surly extremely mentally deficient midteen to perceive the murderee as a faggot. The surly extremely mentally deficient midteen in any case must’ve perceived the murderee as a honky.
° For, the surly extremely mentally deficient midteen did not, in fact, slaughter the hispanic guy in the successfully stolen car. What else was different?
° Of course it could happen to you or to me, California stop or fullstop. Of course it could happen to you or to me, ground floor or 5th floor.

§§§§§

° That there is a subspecies of hominids born with the love of shedding blood is as obvious as the rotty stench of their underfingernails. The Talmud has known this for millennia, these are the guys “predestined by God” to be the village butchers.
° But the reason this subspecies--no doubt there’s a genetic marker--is so socially disruptive, the reason that even the extremely mentally deficient ones can blow up 30 women and children at a time, or blow through one woman or man at a time, is because they can so easily obtain the “powder” to do it with.
° Where do those boys get their guns?
° Where do those boys get their explosives?

° And by the way, Peter Wimsey finally asks, “How long did your friend survive in that car?”
° That is, did he survive long enough to have been saved if a single one of the multitude of neighbours who heard the shot had phoned E-911?
° No, mio caro, stay out of that neighbourhood. The lawabiding are as dangerous as the outlaws.

° On my Busman‘s Honeymoon, Giac.

Route 666 (Foto--Coz)

2006-01-01T09:01:00.001+01:00

Foto: Wyrd--Le Catacombe di San Sebastiano, graffiti antichi

Dear Gipsy Cousin,
° The other day I was tooling down the autostrada when what did I behold?

SBC--666

is what I beheld. Was it a Sign from above, a dire prophecy of Apocalypse? (If so, Wyrd must have time on her hands, to warn of a mosquito and ignore the stampede of crazed elephants trampling humans flat as flivvers.)
° It was on a license plate, so it definitely was a sign of Dorothy Parkerism in the State Pen.

° Never knowing it all, Giac.

Christmas Present! (Foto, Urbi et Orbi)

2005-12-25T09:01:00.000+01:00

Foto: Christmas Present--Chiesa sconosciuta vicino a Atene

Urbi et Orbi:
° “Christmas Present!” We used to strive to be the first to shout it to anybody we encountered on Christmas Day. What did it mean?
° It meant our parents and grandparents had used to engage in the same contest, whatever it meant.

° Dasn’t say “Happy Holidays!” nowadays. Might say it to a Christian Pharisee, who’ll boycott your business and sue you to boot.
° Dasn’t say “Good Yule!” nowadays. Might say it to someone of coastal European descent, for whom greatgreatgreatgreatGranddaddy Olaf is a reminder of opportunistic rape.
° Dasn’t say “Happy Christmas!” nowadays. For that is a slight against our British forebears.
° Dasn’t say “Io Saturnalia!” nowadays. For that involves too many calories and far too much liberty.
° Dasn’t say “Quasi Kwanzaa!” nowadays. Though otherwise one scarcely knows a catchy way of saying it.
° Dasn’t not say “Merry Christmas!” nowadays to one and all. For otherwise it looks as if you think your listener is some swarthy terrorist.
° So I just say “Merry Christmas!” right and left. And if the response is, “I don’t celebrate Christmas,” then I put a pitying tone into my voice (for folks hate to be pitied) and reply, “O I am so very sorry. Katrina.” And exit before they figure out I don’t really think they’re cajun.

§§§§§

° But the best thing is just to shut up, which I am now doing, click on this link, listen, lie back and think of Lord Peter, the cherubim roof, the fens, the flood . . . .

° Buon Natale! Feliz Navidad! Giac.

Haga su Peticion (Foto--Piers)

2005-12-12T21:00:00.000+01:00

Foto: Haga su Peticion--Le Catacombe di Santa Priscilla, Guadalupe e Bambino

Mio figluolino dilettissimo Piers,
° La candela accesa, preghiamo:

Oh, Virgen de Guadalupe sin mancha, modelo acabado de Esposa y de Madre, imploro tu socorro en mis necesidades y las de mi familia, recomendando a tu maternal Corazon a mis pobres hijos; cuidamelos y formales su corazon en la humildad. Oh, Maria de Guadalupe, yo te lo pido con piedad que tengamos la felicidad de encontrarnos todos juntos en el cielo para contemplar la gloria de Dios, bendecirlo y alabarlo por toda la eternidad. Amen.

° Adesso, mio cucciolo, richiedi . . . .

° Abbracci tanti, Giac.

How to Unplug Giac (Foto--Coz, Lad, Piers)

2005-12-01T16:06:00.000+01:00

Foto: A Noi Si Schiude il Ciel--Tarquinia

Dear Kiddypusses,
° How to unplug Giac?
° You just put your two lips together, and blow.
° No, that’s kissing, no, whistling, well, anyway, something Lauren Bacall knew well how to do.
° You unplug Giac by--
° --well I don’t know that either. I always thought feeding tubes were rubber hoses inserted down the throats of Irish prisoners on hunger strike. A funnel was placed on the outside end, British gruel was poured down, and after the rubber had galled the throatlining a few times, the patient was invariably healed. Of his political protest.
° And even this last Spring, the nonNazi Bishop of Rome had a “feeding tube” inserted through his nose. Slick vinyl, lubricated I suppose, nonchafing--still grosser than all getout.
° But when I saw a diagram of the modern, surgical, Schiavo version of a feeding tube, I like to’ve fainted.
° So as to the howto of unplugging, y’all’ll just have to consult Google.

° The whento of unplugging is way easier, Giac doesn’t even need the advice and consent and shamelessly selfaggrandising authoritarianism of the U. S. Congress to know the timing.
° Neither do y’all.

° Just before folks are strapped to ventilators or punctured by feedingtubes or plugged into some other extraordinarilyoffensivetoDeathMostHoly contraption, they are most generally in one of two states.
° Either they are a going proposition, able to selffeed, selfclothe, selfexcrete, selfclean, ecc. ecc. (even if they’re slow as molasses at Christmas)--
° --or else they are a wellnigh collapsed corporation already, unable to selffeed, selfclothe, selfexcrete, selfclean, ecc. ecc. Nor is the almost entire lack of a mind--not that any of us is all that bright to start with--to be ignored. It’s all a natural part of that living rotting process known as aging. It‘s a towering rottentothecore maple tree waiting for the next windstorm..
° If one--before the car accident, for example--was a going proposition, it is possible one may become so again.
° If one--before the stroke, for example--was already a terminally collapsing bankruptcy, the jig is already up, whether one likes it or not.
° Unplugging dilemmas arise from HopeSpringsEternal, from MedicalMagickalThinking, from TheosophicalButtinitism terrified by Death Most Holy in person.
° “Giac may recover, I’ve seen bigger miracles.”
° If the doctor says that, it’s time to pull the plug.
° “Many patients in Giac’s condition come around, with minimal brain damage, bimeby.”
° If the doctor says that, it’s time to mark off six weeks on the calendar, then pull the plug if Giac doesn’t tell you otherwise from his own lips.
° “Giac’ll never have any mind again (semiparalysed, incontinent, helpless and absent), but with ((y’all’s)) tender care and patience he can look forward to many years of ‘quality life.’”
° If the doctor says that, pull the plug, then sue the quack for violating the Geneva Accords regulating human torture.

° Yet y’all see the problem: no living will can foresee the exact degree of debility encountered, the exact point at which yes shades into no.
° Although, apparently, Congress thinks folks believe it can.

§§§§§

° Keep in mind two principles.
° 1. Division of Labour.
° 2. Provision of Banana.

° Provision of Banana.
° See to it that there is a banana (I prefer them on the slightly green side, no squishy brown rotters stinking of nail polish remover, please) beside Giac’s bed at all times. If one of yez proves to be a tenderhearted, nambypamby, sweetiepie girlyboy of a man, peel the banana. If even that doesn’t keep Pansyass from calling, in a shrill Senatorial schoolgirl tone of voice, the rest of you “Murderers,” then break off bits of banana, mash with molasses, and apply to my lips.
° Even a sulling Cat will choose Life under those conditions. If said Sullen Cat is still capable of Life.
° As for the sheets, don’t trouble yourselves. Think of Nanook of the North, where the Inuit mothers, to conserve moisture and nutrients, licked their infants’ little beehinds clean.
° Think about Nanook, then do the exact opposite. Rubber sheets, perfumed cat litter.
° Not y’all’s mess, mine mine mine.

° Division of Labour.
° Piers will be off somewhere occupying himself with la Guadalupe and the deathchants.
° Coz will be bedside to invoke Death Most Holy, and he well knows what that means.
° While my affectionate little Lad, legalistically disabled from obtaining a merciful and humane ampule of morphine at the local pharmacy, will paint the backside of my tonsils with the juice of the same mushrooms Agrippina used on Claudius--though hellebore or jimsonweed would do as well in season.

° Testamentarily, Giac.

° O terra, addio, addio valle di pianti, Sogno di--what’s that caterwauling out in the hall interrupting the angelic voices in what’s left of Giac’s mind, why it’s, why it’s--
° --why it’s our beloved Piers and our belovable Leggero quarrelling over the funeral music.
° “I’m sure I don’t need you to tell me what to play for the funeral, I know what Giac wanted. Howells. Duruflé. Improv sortie on Michael.”
° “Yet, strangely, I don’t need anybody to tell me what Giac wanted, dead or alive. Besides, he wrote it down in plain English: Falenyam Diaz’s transcription of Gianni Schicchi for harmonica trio and bagpipe chorus.”
° “O screw!”
° “No fooling.”

° Then behold the clouds part, the beckoning tunnel of white Swan Lake happyending light, “I’m coming Elizabeth,” Te Deum laudamus alla Floria Tosca Alighieri, the fragrance of rotted tuna fish--uh oh, the Cat‘s sucking my breath again!
° Sogno di gaudio che in dolor svanì.

We Call Our Act "The Congress" (Foto, Lad)

2005-11-27T19:01:00.000+01:00

Foto: Fiery Furnace, Down Below--Le Catacombe di Santa Priscilla, I Tre Giovanotti

Dear Lad,
° Ask your grandparents. 45yearolds can ask their parents. 65yearolds are being asked. And 85yearolds, even those past being asked, are unanimous.
° Whatever else can be said*** about the new Medicare Plan D drug “benefit,” it’s certain that it is the legislative product of a diseased, mentally deficient institution.
° Puts me in mind of this quote from The Aristocrats:

Remember, the average Joe is pretty stupid; that means half of us are really stupid.

° Caught in the middle, Giac.

***Videlicet, that it is engineered to raise drug prices through demandpush inflation, that it is engineered to pay off the healthcare industry for bribes received and promised, and that it is--and this is the only clever part--the first successful move Cheney has been able to make toward privatising and abolishing Social Security.

More Food for Less Sex (Foto, Lad)

2005-11-23T15:50:00.000+01:00

Foto: l'Ingresso--Le Catacombe di Santa Priscilla

Dear Lad,
° Six weeks and no results yet from that righteous raping big Whip visited upon little Crook. I said at the time Crook wasn’t in heat.
° And I was right. In fact, taming has proceeded sufficiently for me to be able to determine that Crook is a tom, and was, most likely, all along. He still makes overtures to Whip, but with no sweet return of love. The fazzolettino syndrome, I reckon: nose blown, tissue discarded.
° When love goes wrong, nothing goes right.

° Don’t I know it, Giac.

The Resurrection of Piers (Foto, Piers)

2005-11-10T15:09:00.000+01:00

Foto: Sogno di Gaudio--Villa Giulia

My beloved Figliolino,
° Life in the end was kind to Norma Desmond.
° The other morning I saw you in a vision.
° The toowise Greekpaganists would’ve said it was a dream issued from the Gate of Horn, a false dream.
° The toowise Judaeochristianislamists would’ve said it was the Resurrection of the spiritual flesh, same as Jesus.
° The toowise Freudiopsychists would’ve called it wishful thinking.

§§§§§

° But the Fool didn’t absorb What the Bleep Do We Know? for nothing.
° The Fool knows that Time is as illusory as Reality. What was done in the vision was done chemically in my brain, the memory is as real as Real can be.
° Life in the end was kind to Norma Desmond.

° Crying you a river, Giac.

Foto: Sogno di Gaudio che in Dolor Svanì--Tarquinia

Jackpot Undeleted (Foto, Julja)

2005-11-10T15:00:00.000+01:00

((As a result of an unfortunate altercation between me and the Edit Button, this letter, 18 ottobre mmv, was inadvertently deleted.--Giac.))

Foto: La Ruota della Fortuna

Dear Julja,
° I face an ethical dilemma, one which only instinctive French gametheory can resolve.
° Leggero, on a whim, gave me a lottery ticket, my very first, and I am terrified that I shall win.
° In the first place, the back of the ticket suggests that everybody will win $599 or less. Well, that won’t purchase the gas to go claim the prize.
° Amounts between $599 and $199,000 may be claimed by mail. So that’s worth a 37cent stamp.
° And though amounts between $199,000 and the jackpot of $340,000,000 must be claimed in person, in Overton, I reckon it would pay to do so.

° The delicate moral question is, Just how much of the jackpot--for I am confident of success--am I to share with Leggero?
° Put another way, Just how little can I share with him and still retain his friendship?
° You see the problem, Zero is such a cold number.

§§§§§

° In fact, it’s only as the prize approaches $100,000 that I become tempted to stinginess. For the interest on that sum equals weekly 90minute Swedish massages for an entire year. So the lucre is capable of producing real value, not just a trinket like a car or a year’s tuition at Alma Mater.
° And it’s only when I see his net worth surpassing mine that I become truly wary. The word “allowance,” with its parental implications, comes to mind.
° But if, as I fear, I win the jackpot, I’ll cheerfully split it straight down the middle, onethird for me, onethird for Leggero, and onethird for the Giac & Leggero Foundation.
° Whose mandate will be to--well, it wouldn’t have a mandate, it’d just be taxfavoured mad money, like Bill & Melinda’s.

° Well that’s a load off, Giac.

Village Semain (Lad, Foto)

2005-11-03T15:09:00.000+01:00

Foto: della Morte Santissima l'Angelo Blu--Pantheon, Bernini

Dear Lad,
° What an idyllic Hallowe’en! Clear skies, moderate temperature, a school night--I never fed so many trickortreaters in my life. A classic village Semain.
° Yet, just a few blocks away, there was an incident.
° Overton man, seventysomething, arrested for DUI and for soliciting a fiveyearold girl with a view towards “kidnapping.”

° The true, nonmedia, nonpolice, version of the story differs richly.
° Siouxsie, who lives not a block from me, was just fixing to go pick up her daughter, who had toured the main street with her playmates, when the phone rang: “There’s a man parked out in front of my house, and he’s been asking every child that passes for ‘help.’”
° Siouxsie burnt rubber. Moments later she was banging on the guy’s window: “What the--((I mean to say, whatever)) are you doing here?”
° He roused, responded in kind, and made as if to get out of the car. “You open that door, I’ll kick you in the ((knees)).”
° He did, Siouxsie did, and as he fell to the pavement, his wallet ((fell out)).
° He had four different id’s. I mean to say, fotoidenticards establishing four separate names for him.
° There was no alcohol on his breath, just woozy stupor.
° And there was a loaded revolver on the seat, and another in his holster.
° And a stash of “drugs.”
° And--well that’s all.
° Village Souxsie 5--Overton Dotard 0.

§§§§§

° And o yes, he’d ruptured his oilpan or fuel line or--don’t ask me, I wouldn’t’ve known even if I’d seen it myself--and Souxsie was standing in, and he wallowing in, a puddle of gasoline.

° Tucked away safely in the idyllic countryside, Giac.

Poor Souls (Lettye, Foto)

2005-11-01T08:59:00.000+01:00

Foto: Della Morte Santissima l'Angelo--Pantheon, Bernini

Dear Lettye,
° None of this ((ecclesiastical fundraising)) in any way affected life at St. Dolores, for she is so very poor the congregation would commence a deathrattle at the first mention of so much as a nickel. So St. Dolores was free to progress to the one great pleasure of the ecclesiastical Autumn.
° Not Halloween, which always falls a little flat liturgically, though folks’d give a pretty to see the Altar draped in black and orange, and candy corn handed out as jujube on the way back from Communion; not Ognisanti itself (though Maury’s reading of the Poulenc g-minor Organconcerto on the neverneurotic Beckerath came as near to catharsis for Holy Cross (("9/11")) as anything was ever like to do), but All Souls, and the consequent monthlong celebration of Sister Death.
° Here ‘twas at last, comfort from Mother Church. Holy Cross comfort. For Fr. Gaffering, after reminding us who the Poor Souls are--for some of us slept through Catechism Class and thought they had to do with Ralph Cramden and The Honeymooners--urged each of us to adopt one as a sort of Afterlife Buddy, whether we rightly knew his name or not. The deal was this, we pray for our (possibly unknown) Buddy all during November, and when we finally get him bumped from Purgation--how times have changed, it seems we are no longer so much as to form the word Purgatory on our lips, so desperate is Mother Church that we not mistake Dante’s monumental artistic Truth for the truth--and then he, or perhaps it might even be a she (for Mother Church, breaking lockstep with certain other religions one could name, considers that Women, too, have souls, like Men, Cats, and certain species of Birds), will, once in Heaven proper, help pray us out of Purgation. So my question was naturally, how many Buddies is enough?
° I could really only think of one, a neighbour whose pastlife was so colourful folks still talk about it after her death (she was the live girl the unruint politician was anecdotally caught in bed with), nor could I suppose that anybody else on Earth would bother to pray for her, for probate had closed on her estate. (Bimeby I bethought me of others, for one can never have too many Buddies.)
° And I still, occasionally, though Semain is long past, implore the Saints to release M----- and J----- and the other P--r S--ls from their Sisyphean efforts. And it will be Hell to pay if they renege on their end of the contract--albeit like God’s contract with the Jews, I can’t exactly produce their attested signatures--later on, in the sweet by and by.
° Almost better, there were specially marked envelopes inviting one to donate unspecified amounts--this is where St. Dolores could learn a lesson from Tex’s Tip Jar, always best to suggest a figure, folks are so easily led--for Altar supplies in exchange for indulgences for any of our family members currently doing time in Purgatory.
° So I slipped in a tendollar bill for Daddy. Now I know you like a book, I know exactly what you are thinking. “Ten dollars, how much relief could ten dollars buy?!” And you are exactly right. As I sealed the flap I thought to myself, at Oxy Wesley I’d automatically have put in a twenty, and at Assumption I’d’ve been mortified to donate less than a fifty (although U.S. Grant taints that denomination mortally). But so it is, the Poor get poorer. Still, if the envelope’d said, Tex’s TipJarily:

100 years’ indulgence, $10
1000 years’ indulgence, $20
10,000 years’ indulgence, $50
Plenary indulgence, $100

well I just bet St. Dolores’s take would’ve skyrocketed. Ask, says Jesus, and ye shall receive. Don’t ask, and be lucky to get a tenspot.
° I didn’t write Daddy’s name on the envelope. I thought it best to let the Virgin Mother of God determine the recipients of the indulgence, like Angel Tree at Christmas. And I did think that all those thousands of folks burnt to death, crushed to death, fallen to death, smothered to death ((in the World Trade Center))--I did think that all those thousands of Poor Souls could’ve used a little indulgence right about now, and I was sincerely grateful to the Roman Church for being the only religious organisation that offered to provide it.
° For yes, as Catechism so truly says, Purgatory is “a consoling and reasonable doctrine.” Reasonable in that it seeks with Thomian ((Aquinas)) tooclevernessbyhalf to make sense of one of the bizarrest passages in all religious literature,

He preached to the souls in stir,

and consoling in that it relieves the average Joe from any concern with Hell at all. Like that refreshing sign in front of the anaBaptist Church north of Polk:

Remember that Christ died to save Sinners,
good ones and bad ones.

I’d like to see Thom Aquinas himself boil that one down into orthodoxy.
° Yet we know what it means. It expresses the Ripleyism that is the true Faith of all average Joe religionists. Hell is for ‘em. Heaven is for ‘Em. Purgatory will suit us just fine. (For polls, indubitable polls, tell us that while nearly all Americans profess a belief in Heaven, only a hardcore bare third retain a functional belief in Hell. So Purgatory must be the stopgap that fills this discrepancy.)
° And it is consoling to think that our unknown Buddies will accidentally pray us into some diminution of the billions upon billions of years we most likely are scheduled for on Monte Purgatorio.
° And it is consoling to think that though we could do nothing for those of our number about to be blown to smithereens, now that they have been, we can be of assistance.
° And it is sad to think what a loss of peace of mind and of reasonable consolation it is to the schismatic and the heretical branches of the Church that they should deny a reasonable and consoling dogma simply because they have not the least shred of evidence that it is true, or even True.
° For Lord knows, that never stops haemorrhoidal folks from embracing loony and deforming doctrines.
° As witness Timmy McVeigh and the Holy Cross Badasses.

° Well anyhow, I say, Tex’s Bach healed me, the Poor Souls consoled me.
° But what comforted me the most was the certainty that if They ever bomb Kosciusko County, They’ll sure be hurting for a target.
° Nor did I ever once hear of an airplane crash, during fiftyfive years of childhood, without at once hearing the Retort of Common Sense: “Well if they hadn’t gone up in it, they wouldn’t’ve gone down with it.” Which is closely kin to the Retort of Sense of a Guinea Hen: “If God’d meant Man to fly . . . .” And certainly if I ever lose my mind to such an extent that I voluntarily set foot on one of those godforsaken unnatural monstrosities--!
° And even the anthrax held no terror for us countryfolk, for from childhood on we’ve inhaled so many dormant spores of every possible strain of that disease from dusty corrals and barns that if we’d been gonna die from it, we’d’ve done so long since. And had we succumbed, we’d’ve been no deader nor no less dead than anybody else in the fullness of time.
° As Francesco so truly said,

Exspecta modicum et videbis.

° Love, Giac.

Excerpted from Piers trinitatis, iii, ((c)) 2004, Meloncord Press.

Van Buren? (Foto, Coz)

2005-10-15T06:00:00.001+02:00

Foto: Leggero e Lieto--Tarquinia, Tomba del Triclinio, Danzatore (Micky Friedmann?)

Dear Coz,
° You know exactly how free of superstition I am.
° And you know exactly how many U. S. Presidents there have been. No, I don‘t either, but enough to stretch from then till now, with plenty of spares.
° And you know that every village in America that has a townsquare has a Washington, a Jefferson, and a Madison Street. In the North they might could have Lincoln Streets, dunno.
° And you well know that some Presidents are so obscure, a town had to be growing mighty fast, mighty early to need their names.
° So imagine my surprise when I discovered that during the exact same week our beloved Piers and our belovable Leggero both moved onto the exact same obscurePresident street. One in Hephaistionton (the one in Parthenia), the other in Overton.
° It was a sign.

§§§§§

° Only, I already had come to the exact same conclusion, the sign was a month late.

° Ever on my divining toes, your Cousin Giac.

Food for Sex (Foto, Lad)

2005-10-02T18:56:00.000+02:00

Foto: Sacrum Convivium--Le Catacombe di Santa Priscilla, Fractio Panis

Dear Lad,
° Little Whip has developed into a true gentlecat. This morning a yelloweyed jetblack with tiny white medallion on the inner throat joined him for a meal on the porch. Not a hiss, not a fiss.
° Afterwards Whip raped her (for she was neither crooning nor presenting, that is, was not in heat) repeatedly, intermittently, persistently all the blessed day long. From the East, from the West, from the South, and finally from the North, he never relaxed his jaws’ grip on the back of her throat.
° All in vain, little Whip’s kama sutrics. For his girlfriend is so immature and tiny that bend as he would, he couldn’t achieve vital contact and still keep her in his bite.
° Intelligent Design.

§§§§§

° If Thomas Aquinas had ever once looked up from his dusty books, he’d’ve imposed less John Roberts style Natural Law sexual silliness on Judaeochristianislamism than he did.

° Ever versatile, Giac.

King of Hearts (Foto, Coz)

2005-09-29T18:29:00.000+02:00

Foto: Body Language--Basilica San Sebastiano, dettaglio
Caro Cugino Gitano,
° Leggero and I have flirted with the appearance of disagreement.
° He has entirely abandoned human language, that is, as a device that could possibly convey the truth. Instead he focuses on body language: eye contact, armcrossing, hairstroking, angle of body presentation, and the like.
° While I, as you know, have abandoned both words and actions in favour of coffee grounds. (I speak generically. Recently I felt adrift, too much gardening in 99° prehurricane weather I shouldn’t wonder; so I consulted the tarocchi: L’innamorato nel presente, La Temperanza nell’avvenire, La Ruota della Fortuna come consiglio. Res ipsa loquitur.)

° Have you seen the early Hitchcock silent The Ring? God bless Megalomane's dvddrive, I have.
° A gitana, in a reallife vardo, peeps out the window--just as I would--and sees Mabel accepting an armbangle and the longest deepest precode kiss you ever did see from a man who is not the man she is fixing to marry.
° Later Mabel, joined by the man she is fixing to marry, asks the Gipsy to tell her fortune: a few petty cards topped by the King of Diamonds and the King of Hearts.
° “O, that must mean you’ll win the boxing match and we’ll be married,” she gurgles to her fiancé.
° The gitana gazes at the cards, she gazes at Mabel’s hand hiding the bangle on her right upper arm from the sight of her affidanzato, she recollects the kiss--
° --and she shuts her mouth behind a sardonic smile.
° God bless the old gipsywoman.

° Walking like a bangled Egyptian, Giac.

It's Not the Size, It's How-- (Foto, Lad)

2005-09-25T21:13:00.000+02:00

Foto: Devil Down Below--Basilica San Sebastiano, dettaglio

Dear Lad,
° Yes, big old pusslegutted Katrina snapped two trees that had been half demolished in a windstorm the Summer before. She littered the gardens with so much deadwood, there weren’t enough marshmallows and weenies at BiLo to roast thereon. And she squawled like a banshee.
° But that skiiiiitcchh! and thudddd! a few minutes ago?
° It was delicate little Rita, dislodging a 30pound chimney pot, which sledded down the roof, skipped the gutter, and landed a full 14feet from the house.
° Which was a good thing, ‘cause the kitchen roof mightn’t’ve held.

§§§§§

° How many more weeks does hurricane season last?

° Noted for my gentle touch, Giac.

Pin a Medal on the Privates (Foto, Lad)

2005-09-22T18:09:00.000+02:00

Foto: Avenging Angel--Basilica San Sebastiano, dettaglio

Dear Lad,

° (So sluggish is our country's legal system, that this post is once again current.)
° I heard on public radio this weekend that Torturegate has pushed even rising gas and ice cream prices out of the minds of the American public.

° For “Torture” makes an arresting headline.
° Yet I thought of the first evidentiary foto I saw, of Private Madonna Sikkem teaching a blackfurred male Iraqi to heel, leash firmly around his neck. (For didn’t we all grow up on that video, of a nude Madonna lapping milk from a saucer?) And my first thought on seeing that foto was, naturally, “That’s what’s come of Clinton’s Don’tAskDon’tTell weaselling, our poor boys and girls in khaki aren’t allowed to watch Queer Eye.” For surely Private Sikkem would’ve known then to wax every last inch of that male’s furry back, tweeze his eyebrows, and peroxide peroxide peroxide. The tan was okay as was.
° But since it was the weekend, religious thoughts entered my head. And I had to say, as I did say to a couple of very large females at Corner Coffee, “Court martial!? They oughta pin the Medal of Honour on that dame. After all, for three thousand years JudaeoChristianIslamists have been stripping women of every last natural right and kennelling them as faithful, serviceable shedogs. So Private Madonna Sikkem’s just engaged the Golden Rule, email the Pope, proclaim her Beata!”
° The two very large females chortled.
° And I got back up off my all fours.

° Seldom the underdog, Giac.

P.S. Situational ethics, Liberation theology--such quaint concepts. And yet it's glorious to slaughter civilians, for the greater good, and inglorious to give an institutionally Established abuser a dose of his own medicine. Such times as we do live in . . . .

Και (Foto, Julja)

2005-09-18T16:35:00.000+02:00

Foto: Platytera ton Ouranon--S. Maria ad Martyres, icona iscritta da San Luca

Dear Julja,
° Pointless, and in these savage days dangerous, to mention Voltaire’s cavils against Judaeochristianislamist foundationalism. The Age of Reason, that is, the Age of Intuitive Observation, has lost its first flush of vigour.
° Yet suppose Earth were explored by little Green Men. Wouldn’t their anthropologists at once deduce (mistakenly, I hasten to add, as Voltaire so wisely would‘ve added) from the teachings and institutional structures of Judaeochristianislamism that it was a system devised by males for the benefit of males? If “devised” does not imply overmuch carefulness.

° So what a pleasure to enter the Temple of the Theotokos during the recent Family Festival in Overton. In the apse, the Mother of God shelters her tenyearold God in her arms. To the right an altar to the Sebastianlike, bound Christ. To the left an altar to the Sleeping, undying Mother of God.
° Parity.
° A sense that God had his eyes open when he founded Judaeochristianislamism.

§§§§§

° In the missal, the original Greek version, universally adopted, of the Nicene Creed.
° The infamous

filioque,

endless bone of contention with the endlessly contentious Bishop of Rome.
° The nevermentioned

εκ του Πνευματου αγιου και Μαριας παρθενου,

((incarnate)) by ((the agency of)) the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary.
° Not the barbaric Latin filioqueism

de Spiritu Sancto ex Maria Virgine,

((incarnate)) by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, id est, the action of One upon the Other.
° And so the West consciously--or illiterately--chose to reinstitute the ancient heresy, that

La donna non è gente.

° Ever uncertain whether to prefer Greek or French, Giac.

ΠΛΑΤΥΤΕΡΑ ΤΩΝ ΟΥΡΑΝΩΝ (Foto, Piers)

2005-09-16T01:14:00.000+02:00

Foto: Il Duomo dei Duomi--Pantheon

Dear Piers,
° Like Boccaccio’s Parisian Jew Abraam, I went questing for the true religion last Saturday.
° At the Haemorrhoid Festival admission was $25, there was a single booth where one threw balls at a largish disk with no other payoff than general laughter at seeing the afflicted homelessperson dunked by one’s skill in cholerawater, and the food tent featured warmedover bits of boiled sheeps’ lung in drammach.
° At the Uncle Thom Festival admission was a fierce asspaddling, but there were EveryKissIsaDollar booths manned by altarboys, some of them as old as eleven or twelve, still zitless, and for sustenance a sort of goulash of gnocchi, Uncle Benjamin’s oatmeal, and one’s choice of Polish sausage or Adolfwurst.
° At the Klingon Festival there was so much blood gushing across the highway from the hundreds of thousands of doves and kids being murdered to celebrate the invention of sharpened steel, the driveway was too slippery to ascend.
° At the Big Brother Festival there were luscious latkes in sourcream. But admission required a visit to the Dickclipping Clinick.
° At the Family Festival there were saganaki, spanakopita, tiropita, dolmades, gyros, mousaka, feta and ripeolive pizza, freshfried New Orleans loukoumades, amygdalota, baklava, diples, flogeres, folitses, kataiffi, koulourakia, kourambiethes, melomakarona, saragli, tsoureki, all washed down with ouzo or retsina or sweetspiced coffee. There were dancers, throbbing music, olive skin, and a crested chicken (head like a basilisk, feet like a hippie poodle’s) to pet.
° Sweet.

§§§§§

° But, providentially, on the way to Leggero‘s, I passed and looked in on the Oz Festival. The Ozzies donned tight nylon shortlets, rolled around in the mud and beat each other blackandblue with a football, then stripped to paleazzure speedoes, rolled up the fabric to bare their asses, and rowed out to the middle of the Millennium Park Lake, where they gave mouthtomouth to each other, then plunged into the duckexcrementrich water and raced to shore.
° It wasn’t as attractive as it sounds, but for $2 I got to pet a kangaroo, for $10 I could’ve sat in its lap and slipped my finger inside its pouch.
° Oz!

° Back in Paris and still unclipped, Giac.

Undicinove (Foto, Leggero)

2005-09-11T16:11:00.000+02:00

Foto: Bittersweet Couch--Le Catacombe di San Sebastiano, cubiculum

Caro mio Leggero,
° It was just like sinking into a cloud.
° But without falling through, plummeting a couple of miles, and going bloodyguts splat on the baked earth below.
° 80sqft of bittersweet orange suede, ellshaped.
° A sofa so selfpossessed, it could furnish an entire 750sqft Poeroom (“The Philosophy of Furniture”).
° A colour so allpossessing, it could warm up that same room if stonegrey from floor to ceiling.
° Just heaven.

§§§§§

° Though for sure, after I stood up I checked my suit to see if the colour had rubbed off on it.
° Though for sure, the application of sultry Southern sweat to the suede would be bound to transfer the dye.
° Though for sure, wolfhounds’ toenails and mainecoons’ claws couldn’t fail to pierce the tender leather.
° Though for sure, one spilled cup of tea, not to mention less genteel beverages, would mark its territory forever.
° Just hell to live with.

° So perhaps it was a matter of design that it was selling for eleven-nine. Undicimilanovecento, non undicicentonove.
° With sales tax that would come to an even, predictive, 13.

° Gasping, but not from stickershock, Giac.

Mixed Messages? (Foto, Coz)

2005-09-07T18:11:00.000+02:00

Foto: Le catacombe di Santa Priscilla, Ancora e Croce, Pisces

Dear Coz,
° The other day I was puttering up (so as not to waste $2.50 gas, that was a couple of days before it was $3.00 gas) McLin Hill, and even so I began to overtake an RV towing a diminutive SUV.
° The back of the RV had been painted Celestial Blue, and in the centre was a white Dove, ascending, emitting rays of glory.
° I was entranced. The Goddess of Desire sends a sign.
° And even if it was only the Holy Spirit (predicting the hurricane), I was entranced: Meg Tilly, Agnes of God, parthenogenesis . . . .
° And even if it was only the Dove of Peace, what planet could have more need of her?
° Entranced and ebullient.

§§§§§

° On the wheel cover of the petite SUV’s spare tyre was the rest of the message: a Tasmanian Devil shouting:

BACKOFF!

° Ah, so it was the Dove of Peace . . . .

° Your affectionate Cousin, Giac.

Quando Rotolavano i Tempi Buoni (Foto, Julja))

2005-09-04T18:39:00.000+02:00

Dear Julja.

° From what plague has New Orleans not suffered at some time or other?

° Typhus, typhoid, yellow fever, cholera, malaria, the French Disease . . . .

° Petrochemicals, radioactive wastes, human wastes, Arkansas chicken wastes, all courtesy of Ol' Man River . . . .

° Tourists, outlanders, furriners, stranieri, barbari, Conans . . . .

° But till yet she has never suffered a greater indignity than being sold into stripmaller slavery in 1803 by a particularly feckless French Gummint. For glass beads and a blanket, near enough.

° Miao in tutte le lingue, Giac.

P. S. If I were savvy I'd upload a file of "Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?" ca. 1955. Louis Armstrong sings the first verses to a quietly appreciative French audience. Then the combo does an exceedingly lengthy vamp. Bimeby a female voice resumes the verses. Five seconds later, the auditorium explodes with cheers and applause. For nobody knew Billie Holiday had been waiting backstage. Many, perhaps, didn't know she was still alive.

° Well, I'm not savvy. But I could still beg my savvy Cousin Gipsy to do it for me. Only, I can't seem to find the recording in the dark depths of my closet.

Katrina E' Venuta a Trovarci (Foto, Sandy)

2005-08-30T22:13:00.000+02:00

Dear Sandy,
° Hot sticky sweltering steamy sultry threebathaday Summers, like New Orleans without the beignets.
° Droughty dusty brownedged thriftless Summers, like Tuscany without the olives.
° Bonechilling icecrusted snowless bitter Winters, like Hell after the power was shut off.
° Spotty fever ticks, tartytongued vipers, tornadoes four seasons a year, like Kansas without Technicolour munchkins.
° The New Madrid fault just itching to rip open the Earth and drain the entire Mississippi into the Yangtze.
° Say what you like about our climate, from childhood on we were secure in one article of faith, to wit:

At least we don’t have hurricanes.

° Then howcome at 4 this morning I was awakened by rain blowing in ten feet across the porch and into my bedroom onto my face and pillow? With twigs, branches, trunks snapping like matchsticks? With the sound of somebody’s tin roof clattering down the pavement?
° Katrina, what a blow she was!

§§§§§

° Not but one thing to do about it. Senator Prissst and his minions, fresh off their Pyrrhic triumph over Death Most Holy (the Terry Schiavo affair), must pass a law against hurricanes.
° Childlike truths must remain sanctified.

° Swimming in my own element, Giac.

Ave atque Vale (Foto, Lettye)

2005-08-28T21:39:00.000+02:00

in festo ss. trinitatis, ad assumptionem

Dear Lettye,

Ah, that Rhapsody. In D-flat major, cognate key to the one Bach himself couldn’t compose in, indeed I wonder if he could even play it; I can think of a total of a baker’s dozen of measures that Couperin, Mozart, and Haydn cursed with all those sharps, and boy did they ever strip down the textures for safety’s sake. But Piers just glides through, even more slickly than the first time I heard him play it. Midway through there’s a registration, during the buildup, that “splits”, one can hear the octave magadising with the foundation, probably unavoidable. The conclusion grand enough for a basilica.
Bastien is lost in wonder and contemplation.
No, Bastien is simply lost en route to Mass this morning. I used to think he avoided Andrew’s voluntaries, and gave him full credit for his loyalty. But no--though perhaps he’s heard it rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed.
At least he’d have the decency not to mention those couple of measures of magadising.
I wonder if it is nervewracking to know that someone is listening so attentively, even if always listening only for confirmation of the player’s prowess?

“Reach me down that there box of shells, Aunt Tacky, the rhinoceros are loose in the back room!”
But it was no such thing. A surreptitious glance at the new stoplist confirms that when Piers swooped down on that HolyHolyHoly phrase so commandingly that first time, ‘twas not the Aeolian-Skinner Rinoceronte en chamade he employed, but rather the new digital 16foot Hippoposthumos straziato. So that the alarm one naturally felt at first hearing was translated into tender compassion for the suffering of the Attislike, callow steer.
During the Sequence I observe that Piers makes an error of taste. Just at the moment when the text turns Incarnationy, redolent with shepherds’ bagpipes and drones, he underlines the phrase with one of the multiple trumpets currently at his disposal.
Though perhaps it would have been a little tedious to reduce all the verse so that the new digital 8foot Corno di Copia could whine plaintively during the Xmasy phrase.
And it was the only quibble I had with his entire serviceplaying that Sunday, so perhaps it wasn’t up to much, as quibbles go.

Love, Giac.

((Excerpt from Piers trinitatis i, "Smudging"))

Urbi et Orbi (Foto)

2005-08-05T17:46:00.000+02:00

Suor Angelica a sua zia Principessa:

Mio figlio! Mio figlio, il figlio mio!

Figlio mio!

La creatura che mi fu, mi fu strappata!

Creatura mia! Creatura mia lontana!

. . .

Parlatemi di lui!

Giac Urbi et Orbi:

Perchè tacete?

Perchè? perchè?

Pietas Moram (Foto, Piers)

2005-08-01T01:59:00.000+02:00

Dear Deliciae Meae Lepores Mei Piers,
° Visit Netflix now, Desk Set.

BY the SHORES of GITCHe GUmee, BY the SHIning BIG-Sea-WAter
STOOD the WIGwam OF NoKOmis, DAUGHter OF the MOON, NaKOmis . . . .

° Thus Katharine Hepburn makes Hiawatha sing his singsong. An etude in iambic octameter.
° Of course, we hope that Longfellow intended the much less ludicrous

By the SHORES of GITCHe GUmee, by the SHIning BIG-Sea-WAter
STOOD the WIGwam of NaKOmis, DAUGHter of the MOON, NaKOmis . . . .

An experiment in dactyloanapestiferous trimeter, irresistibly subverted by the drumbeat ictus of the English language itself.

° Pietas moram.
° One day our professor, having just reread the complete practical works of the Marquis de Sade, decided we students should prepare and memorise and recite publickly some Latin verse. I reckon it was Horace, for I don’t believe Catullus was the type to use the word pietas.
° I didn’t do the worst of the lot; in fact, with a musical background, I did the best. Not bragging nor nothing.
° But my friend Becca did, by unanimous judgement, do the worst. (She was a genetic monotone, like the Music Stander in Les Choristes.)
° The first part of her recitation went badly enough, but then she concluded, in Hiawathan singsong,

. . . pieTAZZ moRAM,

and the entire class, instinctively channelling Mons de Sade’s teachings, just guffawed. It really hurt her feelings. So we guffawed some more.
° I plainly see you don’t get the joke. Becca had ought to have said,

pieTAS moRAM.

That is, a fifthtone (one guesses) higher on the accented syllables, and the GREEKLONG syllables (with long vowels or concluded by double consonants) held twice as long as the greekshort ones.
° Or to you, Choirmaster that you are, ictus and QUARTERNOTES and eighthnotes. ((Ever mindful that our English ictus is largely a matter of volume, the Latin ictus, perhaps, was largely a matter of pitch.))

° Is “Isabel” an anapaest or a dactyl?
° Poe calls it a dactyl, because the ictus is definitely on the “Is.” Isabel.
° Or is it an anapaest, because the English speaker rushes over the first two syllables, and rests on the “bel”?
° IsaBEL.

° As I mentioned to you, my Christmas CD of Orff’s Catulli Carmina (Act Two of the Ludus Scenicus beginning with Carmina Burana) is filled out with the, to me, completely unknown Trionfo di Afrodite (Act Three). Apart from a few snippets from Sappho, Sophocles, and Euripides, the entire text of Trionfo comes from Catullus’s epithalamia, 61 and 62.
Splendidly pagan as he is, Orff does not entirely resist--it is not just the fault of the singers--

pieTAZZ moRAM.

Teutonic Hiawathan commonmetrepsalter singsong.

§§§§§

° But Giac can resist.
° Look at Orff’s setting of the “contents execrable” Song 32.

A ma bo, me a dul cis Ip si thil la,
Me ae de li ci ae, me i le po res . . . .

Plainsong, even “eighth notes,” a natural singable accent falling three or four to the line. So near and yet so far.
° But look at Giac’s riff on Orff’s setting:

a MA BO, me a DUL cis IP si THIL la,
me AE DE li ci AE, me I le PO res,
iu B(E)AD TE ve ni AM me RI di A tum.

For, you see, the melody must be rejiggered, line by line, to make natural to the singer the melodic Latin ictus and the metric Greek syllablelength.
° Just as, last Holy Week, there were only two genteel solutions to Rockingham’s

When I survey the wondrous Cross
Where the young Prince of Glory died . . . .

((Either “Where the” goes onto upbeat eighths and “young“ gets a measure to itself, or “Where the young” makes a full measure of even quarternotes))

° And yet, for how many generations did congregations, meek as tinearred lambs, sing

Where the young Prince of Glory died . . . ?

For the waltz tune induced the pieTAZZ moRAM.

° What if you, Piers, took a glimpse at the ancient GrecoRoman metres? What if your sortieimprovs connected with the civilised lyreaccompanied songs of two millennia ago? What if you outCameroned Cameron with the Orffic splendour of a cockeyed beat?
° Phalaecean Suite in c-sharp major, di M. Piers Bellow.

° Fixing to dine, Giac.

P. S. Miao! NAM PRANSUS iace(O)ET saTUR suPInus/ PERTUNDO tuniCAMque PALliUMque.

Nota bene: For a distressingly deep discussion of metres, try Edgar Allan Poe’s The Rationale of Verse, but don’t forget your Beowulf. Assumption’s Anglican chant will never be the same again . . . .

Horses and Ass (Foto, Piers)

2005-07-25T01:30:00.000+02:00

Dear Piers,
° The other day I sat out the green arrow at an intersection, for I wished to defer to a cavalcade of three equines crossing.
° A big white gelding, draped in redwhitebluestriped blanket, led the parade, well isn’t that always the way.
° There followed a bigassed black mare, bearing a magickmarked posterboard placard: The Commandments.
° Prudent. I mean, not to waste ink on the word Ten. For all but one have been radically revoked.

Non habebis deos alienos--abrogated in the name of circling the wagons after 9/11 by the late, not yet sufficiently sanctified, Bishop of West Rome.
Non facies tibi sculptile--why Moyses himself worshipped a Serpent!
Non assumes nomen Domini Dei tui in vanum--Eric Cartman, 1990’s.
Memento ut diem sabbati sanctifices--cancelled by God, 33 A.D., and by the Church four centuries later.
Honora patrem tuum--or he’ll beat the crap out of yez.
Non occides--why Moyses himself occidised!
Non moechaberis--Billy Jeff Clinton, 1990’s, for sometimes a cigar’s just a cigar.
Non furtum facies--Enron‘s shareholders, following the teachings of Che Guevara, for how can you steal something from somebody who didn’t own it in the first place?
Non loqueris contra proximum tuum falsum testimonium--Johnny Cochran, if the glove don’t fit, you must acquit.
Non concupisces domum proximi tui--for the bank owns more of it than he does.

As for uxorem, servum, ancillam, bovem et asinum, can’t say for sure. The ink was blurred with horsefroth.

§§§§§

° And the Ass? Grizzled grey, sweaty and galled, astride the big white gelding.

° At your command, Giac.

Panama and the Prostitute (Foto, Lad)

2005-07-17T19:30:00.000+02:00

Dear Lad,
° The other day, a cool and pleasant morning barely into the 80’s, I went calling for Panama, to give her a snack. (“Her,“ although ever since you distracted her so that I could briefly peer aft, I have had little doubt why she hasn‘t come in heat these last six months.) She came running from behind Bouvier Hall the moment she heard my foodpromising voice.
° What a lovefest, for I hadn’t stroked her in two weeks.
° She followed me into Assumption‘s garden, I spread kitty numnums on the brick sidewalk, then settled onto a teak bench to read the Statesnamean. Chockful of chipmunk, Panama ate a few bites to please me, then flopped full length onto the warming bricks for a nap.

° I hadn’t gotten past Doonesbury, banished to the editorial page by the brownshirts a decade ago, before we were joined by Lena. Panama glanced at her, then dozed on.
° Lena, forty looking thirty, was dressed very conservatively, I noticed, and really only her stilettos, her redbleached jerricurled hair, and mauve and skyblue twotoned eyeshadow could’ve given the faintest clue as to her profession. She sat in the bench adjoining, smiled her toothless smile--actually, only the top four front teeth and two of the lowers are out, but the general impression is of toothlessness.
° “Are you a member here?” she asked. She had forgotten our previous encounter.
° “O, do you live nearby then?” She had forgotten that too.
° “So you live up to Overton?” Wrong again.
° “Is that your cat? I love cats. I just might take me some big black cat home with me,” she purred in Panama’s general direction. Though Lena was looking at me--I mean looking deep into my eyes, then south, then back into the eyes again, very competently done I may say--when she said it.
° I was a little alarmed. For Panama’s sake.

° But what did Panama do, la brava?
° She roused, sniffed the air, smelt something fishy perhaps, and began to junglecat stride toward Lena. I felt jealous.
° But you know what?
° The minute Panama got five feet away from her, Lena suddenly overcame her love of big black cats, leapt to her feet, and blurted out,
° “Well I reckon I be off now.” And so she did be, alla breve.
° Panama purred, unless it was a soft growl, then stretched fulllength on the snoozy, warming brick, curled her toes, dozed and dreamed.

° Pleasant dreams, Giac.

Susan Sought Desperately (Lad)

2005-07-10T23:28:00.000+02:00

Dear Lad,
° Have you ever tried to write a personal ad? One, I mean, without antlers?
° I’ve been trying off and on ever since Madonna was Desperately Sought as Susan. But I have failed so consistently, I almost begin to doubt my method. For though I can list several thousand things I like, I can’t successfully boil them down into an attractive appetizer.
° Blogger profiles seemed a breakthrough. Giac’s personal ad:

Io: mi piace The Bride Wore Black.
Tu: ti piace, uh, ti piace, uh--o Rats!

§§§§§

° But if I’m like the shoemaker’s children, I’m still a shoemaker.
° And Leggero’s personal (la sua foto, coi capelli matti, si vede oltre) is simple as pie:

Io: sono Leggero.
Tu: vuoi vivere felice.

O almeno contento e beato.

° Not that it’ll do him the least bit of good. For folks want to be popular, or rich, or important, or powerful, or goodlooking, or brilliant, or famous, or . . . .
° Nessuno, sembra, vuole vivere contento.

° Beato, Benedetto nonostante, Giac.

Leggero Does It Right (Foto, Julja)

2005-06-26T16:25:00.000+02:00

Dear Julja,
° Who says reading History, all bloodandgutsy and celebritymad, is a waste of time?
° (Well of course Victor Hugo does, says the only true history of humanity is the history of ideas; and just about anybody who ever read Suetonius after reading Tacitus must’ve concluded that there were two entirely discrete Roman Empires coexisting temporally and spatially; while even the dullest dullard must realise that his own morning coffee and sweetbuttered brioche with raspberry preserves holds more meaning than all the Hitlers all the Robespierres all the Inquisitors all the Prophets Priests Kings and Paris Hiltons that ever were said to have lived.)

° And yet they’re all wrong.
° For the other day, as I was putting cosmetic colouring into my history of the McLey family, I came across a recipe for what surely must be the first cocktail ever mixed, nearly a century before the Roaring Twenties.
° The vampirism of old recipes, just thirsting for resurrection . . . .

° I nabbed Leggero and Greco--he no longer looks like Steve Reeves, he only looks as Steve Reeves would’ve looked had he too shaved off his facefur--before the Saturday crush began.
° I dazed them with a learned lecture upon “rectified whisky,” “common whisky,” and “burst-head.” What really dazed them were the 1837 prices: $.40 a gallon for aged rectified, $.36 a gallon for common singling, $.20 a gallon for rotgut shipped down from Cincinnati, for distribution by candidates on Election Day, no wonder folks voted more often back then.
° I myself was dazed by the fact that everything but the loaf sugar used to be produced locally.
° One or two substitutions had to be improvised, and only the rectified whisky is still local, that and the mint, but the two lads attacked the project with the attentiveness of chemistry students warned of the effects of phosphorous. Greco raided the kitchen for simple syrup, Leggero ripped apart the mint and added the ingredients in decent order, then clapped a tumbler over the tumbler, shook, poured.
° It foamed over, for very joy at being reborn after almost two centuries of dusty oblivion. A garnish of whole mint and, ecco!

Leggero’s Rectifier

2 fingers loaf sugar syrup
1 finger peach brandy
1 finger apple brandy
1 finger cherry cordial
2 fingers rectified corn whisky

Add

Mint
Broken ice

Shake and pour.

§§§§§

° “Rectifier?”
° Yes, because after only two sips, your world‘s as right as Rousseau‘s.

° Cordially mentholated, Giac.

P. S. Simple syrup, peach brandy, apple brandy, cherry cordial, rectified whisky. A historically correct substitute for peach or apple is grape brandy, my own McLey great great grandfather distilled it just north of Overton at his vineyard.

Contents Execrable, Part I (Foto, Lad)

2005-06-19T16:06:00.000+02:00

Dear Lad,
° I was humming Carl Orff’s setting of

Amabo, mea dulcis Ipsithilla, . . .

with a view toward improving same. Or, at least, riffing it into a more authentic metre.
° I thumbed through the text of the Catulli Carmina.
° All the way through.
° Nothing, no Ipsithilla at all.
° Then I eliminated the epithalamia and epyllion, and rethumbed.
° Nothing.
° Then I eliminated the epigrams.
° Nothing.
° Finally I opened my eyes and observed that Carmen vii followed immediately upon Carmen v.
° Aha! My 1961, Oxford University Press published edition of the poems of the most justly celebrated of all Rome’s poets had been bowdlerised.
° Censored!
° In 1961.
° Under the aegis of Oxford University Press.

° So I thought it might be worthwhile to remind ye young tigers how very wicked and dishonest were the Good Old Days. (For a return to the Good Old Days is the subtext of all the proCensorship resolutions currently before so many Redneck Legislatures).

° First, what did the 1961 Censor--”Editor” in his own mind--think fit to expurgate? ((Unbeknown to him, I also possess the 1958 Oxford University Press urtext, yes, just three years earlier.))

VI--Ad Flavium

uerum nescio quid febriculosi
scorti diligis: hoc pudet fateri . . . .
. . . . cur? non tam latera ecfututa pandas . . . .

((diseased whore; all the verbs based on futuere, fututum require only the insertion of a ck into the first syllable to translate themselves for an English reader, Italians need only a vowel shift))

XV--Ad Aurelium

((Peto ut)) conserues puerum mihi pudice,
non dico a populo--nihil ueremur
istos, qui in platea modo huc modo illuc
in re praetereunt sua occupati,--
uerum a te metuo tuoque pene
infesto pueris bonis malisque . . . .

((the inclusion of boy, that is, unfurry male youth, and Aurelius’s penis in the same sentence explains all))

XVI--Ad Aurelium

Pedicabo ego uos et irrumabo,
Aureli pathice et cinaede Furi, . . .

((Latin, unlike our own puritanical tongue, had verbs for being the oraltop, the analtop; like our own puritanical tongue, it had abundance of adjectives for effeminatebottompansyassedpooftersissyboyfaggot))

XVIII-XX

((These fragments are nonCatullan immigrants))

XXI--Ad Aurelium

Aureli, pater esuritionum,
non harum modo, sed quot aut fuerunt
aut sunt aut aliis erunt in annis,
pedicare cupis meos amores . . . .

((for one who trained a youth to be pedicated might well be said to be teaching him to be thirsty))

XXV--Ad Tallum

Cinaede Thalle, mollior cuniculi capillo
uel anseris medullula vel imula oricilla
uel pene languido senis situque araneoso . . . .

((a treasure trove of insulting references to the things a pansyassedbottom can be said to be softer than: bunnyfur (coniglio), goosedown, bonemarrow, an old man’s unviagraed penis, a cobweb . . . .))

XXVIII--Ad Verranium et Fabullum

. . . . o Memmi, bene me ac diu supinum
tota ista trabe lentus irrumasti.
sed, quantum uideo, pari fuistis
casu: nam nihilo minore uerpa
farti estis . . . .

((cf. Merrill’s unbeatable translation, “You have most scurvily abused me.” Memmius, you may have irrumared me with your “beam,” but it looks like somebody else has stuffed you full with a--well, a verpus is a circumcised male, therefore a wogsubject of a subjugated nation out East somewhere))

End of Part I, Contents Execrable

Contents Execrable, Part II (Foto, Lad)

2005-06-19T16:03:00.000+02:00

Contents Execrable, Part II

XXXII--Ad Ipsitillam

. . . .
nam pransus iaceo et satur supinus
pertundo tunicamque palliumque.

((postprandial, dopo il pranzo, (ad)jacent, giacere, sated, saziato, borethrough, pertugio, tunic))

XXXIII--Ad Ipsitillam (but not really)

. . . . quandoquidem patris rapinae
notae sunt populo, et natis pilosas,
fili, non potes asse uenditare.

((you couldn’t sell a certain hairy portion of your posterior for a red cent; a preceding line gives birth to the Italian taunt “fanculo”))

XXXVII--Ad contubernales, Ad Ignatium

. . . .
solis putatis esse mentulas uobis,
solis licere, quidquid est puellarum,
confutuere et putare ceteros hircos?
. . . .
Egnati, opaca quem bonum facit barba
et dens Hibera defricatus urina.

((yet another word for peckers; a reference to a popular Spanish dentifrice, the principal bleaching agent known to the Romans))

XLVIII

Mellitos oculos tuos, Iuuenti,
si quis me sinat usque basiare,
usque ad milia basiem trecenta
. . . .

((miele, honeysweet eyes; how many kisses applied; the expurgation arises from the sex of the owner of the eyes . . . .))

LIV--De Octonis capite

Othonis caput oppido est pusillum,
?? ?? rustice semilauta crura,
subtile et leue peditum Libonis,
. . . .

((a garbled attack on Julius Caesar, semilavato leg))

LVI--Ad Catonem

. . . .
deprendi modo pupulum puellae
trusantem; hunc ego, si placet Dionae,
protelo rigida mea cecidi.

((how to deal with a little boy messing with your girlfriend))

LVII--Ad Catonem

Pulcre conuenit improbis cinaedis,
Mamurrae pathicoque Caesarique.
. . . .
morbosi pariter, gemelli utrique,
uno in lecticulo erudituli ambo,
non hic quam ille magis uorax adulter,
riuales socii puellularum.

((trotting out all the pansyassedpoofterwords against Caesar, and adding adulter to the list)

LIX--In Rufum

Bononiensis Rufa Rufulum fellat,
. . . .

((at last, fellatio rears its pretty head, with a soupçon of incest))

LXVII--Ad Ortalem

. . . .
‘Primum igitur, uirgo quod fertur tradita nobis,
falsum est. non illam uir prior attigerit,
languidior tenera cui pendens sicula beta
numquam se mediam sustulit ad tunicam;
sed pater illius gnati uiolasse cubile
dicitur et miseram conscelerasse domum
. . . .

((yet another common winter vegetable that a man’s “dagger” can be limper than; major league incest, that is, inhouse child sexual abuse))

LXIX--In Rufum

Noli admirari, quare tibi femina nulla,
. . . .
laedit te quaedam mala fabula, qua tibi fertur,
ualle sub alarum trux habitare caper.
. . . .

((Right Guard applied to this area would banish the fragrance of billygoat))

LXXI--In Rufum

. . . .
nam quotiens futuit, totiens ulciscitur ambos:
illam affligit odore, ipse perit podagra.

((Latin’s most useful verb again; his odour murders her, his gout murders him))

End of Part II, Contents Execrable

Contents Execrable, Part III (Foto, Lad)

2005-06-19T15:59:00.000+02:00

Contents Execrable, Part III

LXXIV--Ad Lesbiam ((?))

. . . .
quod uoluit fecit: nam, quamuis irrumet ipsum
nunc patruum, uerbum non faciet patruus.

((sometimes the editor is right, “screws over” is all that’s meant; and anyway, it doesn’t count if it’s your uncle? or his wife?))

LXXVIII

Gallus habet fratres, quorum est lepidissima coniunx
alterius, lepidus filius alterius.
. . . .

((and of course aunt and nephew don’t count either))

LXXVIIIb--Ad Rufum

. . . .
sed nunc id doleo, quod purae pura puellae
suauia comminxit spurca saliua tua.
. . . .

((sloppy wet kisses were always sloppy and wet))

LXXIX

Lesbius est pulcer. quid ni? quem Lesbia malit
quam te cum tota gente, Catulle, tua.
. . . .

((and brother and sister don’t count, do they?))

LXXX--Ad Gellium

. . . .
nescio quid certe est: an uere fama susurrat
grandia te medii tenta uorare uiri?
sic certe est: clamant Victoris rupta miselli
ilia, et emulso labra notata sero.

((burst rectum, lips covered in slimy fluid, just Lord have mercy!))

LXXXVIII--Ad Gellium

Quid facit is, Gelli, qui cum matre atque sorore
prurit et abiectis peruigilat tunicis?
. . . .

((the editor hopefully notes, “perhaps it’s only his stepmother”))

LXXXIX--In Gellium

Gellius est tenuis: quid ni? cui tam bona mater
tamque ualens uiuat tamque uenusta soror
tamque bonus patruus tamque omnia plena puellis
cognatis, quare is desinat esse macer?
. . . .

((no, mothers and sisters and uncles and cousins do not count, but they can sure help burn the calories . . . .))

Nascatur magus ex Gelli matrisque nefando
coniugio et discat Persicum aruspicium:
. . . .

((so now let’s blame it on the Persian magi, what an Epiphany!))

XCI

. . . .
et quamuis tecum multo coniungerer usu,
. . . .

((since you couldn’t seduce my mother and sister, you found a way to really hurt me . . . .))

End of Part III, Contents Execrable