#swelling unctuous paps

[lardr]

Good breasts, yes, but a bad face, narrow eyes, long nose, cheese-like skin. Her hair smells slightly of watercress.

K. Amis, to Larkin (quoted here)

[lardr]

breasts have become "industrial mirrors" — they accumulate more toxins than any other organ, thanks to fat content — [...] Breast-feeding [...] is also a source of competition between mother and infant. Evolutionary biologists call it matrotropy, or eating one's mother. [...] Or did you know that the left breast tends to be bigger than the right one? Or that breast volume varies by 13.6 per cent during a monthly cycle, owing to changes in water retention and cell growth? Or that the world's largest set of implants weighed 21 pounds and required a size 38KKK bra? Ouch. And beyond the lingering question of why do men have nipples, Williams points to features of other mammals, like the manatee with nipples under her flippers, the aye-aye of Madagascar with nipples near her butt, and a hedgehog from Madagascar which takes the prize for most nipples, namely 24 of them. I occasionally wished her editor had roped her in a tad, as in "my knockered preconceptions were knocked upside down"

in the LARB. Extreme interlarding I know, but "swelling unctuous paps" &c. A couple of notes. 1. For breast-as-mirror, cf. Fielding, "Thy pouting breasts, like kettledrums of brass, / Beat everlasting loud alarums of joy." 2. For lopsidedness, cf. Muldoon, "while both are inclined to be standoffish, / the left ball hangs lower than the right as a general rule." (There is also that story about the stabbed woman who was saved by her implants.)

[lardr]

Swelling airy paps

Farmers 'pumping cows' udders full of gas and gluing them up' to win prizes

Competitors are said to pump air to deliberately inflate the udders before sealing the teats with superglue to stop the air or milk leaking out.

The procedure gives the cattle the appearance of having full udders, an attribute believed to be desirable in show cattle.

[Via Jenny Davidson. Partly I am reminded of the variant spelling, now standard, in that stanza of Coy Mistress, see eg here:

Now, therefore, while the youthful glue Sits on thy skin like morning dew, And while thy willing soul transpires At every pore...]

[lardr]

"A sow consults an ape physician who examines a urine flask"; MS Bodl, 264

[lardr]

the pap supprest

From Persius, Satire 1 (see prev. post)

Dryden has translated this satire, but appallingly and inexplicably glossed the sow's udder as "dessert":

To give thee all thy due, thou hast the Heart To make a Supper, with a fine dessert; And, to thy threed-bare Friend, a cast old Sute impart.

Thus Brib'd, thou thus bespeak'st him, tell me Friend (For I love Truth, nor can plain Speech offend,) What says the World of me and of my Muse? The Poor dare nothing tell, but flatt'ring News: But shall I speak? thy Verse is wretched Rhyme; [ 110] And all thy Labours are but loss of time. Thy strutting Belly swells; thy Paunch is high; Thou Writ'st not, but thou Pissest Poetry

Elsewhere in the Satire:

The nauseous Nobles, ev'n the Chief of Rome,

With gaping Mouths to these Rehearsals come,

And pant with Pleasure, when some lusty line

The Marrow pierces, and invades the Chine.

At open fulsom Bawdry they rejoice;

[ 50] And slimy Jests applaud with broken Voice.

Base Prostitute, thus dost thou gain thy Bread?

Thus dost thou feed their Ears, and thus art fed?

At his own filthy stuff he grins, and brays:

And gives the sign where he expects their praise.

[lardr]

This man, whom your table, whom your dinner has made your friend -- think you his heart one of loyal friendship? 'Tis boar he loves, and mullet, and sow's paps, and oysters, not you. If I dined so well, he would be my friend too.

Martial 9.14 -- I have conflated the trans. here and in Cynthia Damon's (!) book, which also provides the following delectable fact:

Persius had already drawn the connection between a sumen, "sow's udder" (his was nicely warmed), and a friend one could not count on.

[lardr]

Swelling unctuous paps (again)

And he wanted to see them living in palaces of alabaster columns, eating in vast halls upon an immense creamy table from vessels of old silver—eating strange fabulous foods — swelling unctuous paps of a fat pregnant sow, oiled mushrooms, calvered salmon, jugged hare, the beards of barbels dressed with an exquisite and poignant sauce, carps’ tongues, dormice and camels’ heels, with spoons of amber headed with diamond and carbuncle, and cups of agate, studded with emeralds, hyacinths, and rubies — everything, in fact, for which Epicure Mammon wished.

Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward Angel (previously)

[lardr]

St Jerome was said to have been shocked to witness the Scots enjoying a meal of swineherd buttock and maiden’s breast, and a late 16th-century writer noted that cannibals accounted human flesh ‘the sweetest meat of all others’, but dietary writers wouldn’t approve anything closer to human flesh than pork, human blood ‘taken from a clean, happy and temperate adolescent’, or the milk of a healthy young woman of ‘tempered complexion’. This last food was advertised as a favourite of the elderly John Caius of Cambridge, who offered vivid proof that you are who you eat: Caius was made ‘so peevish and so full of frets when he suckt one woman froward of condition and of bad diet; and contrariwise so quiet and well, when he suckt another of contrary disposition’.

Steven Shapin, LRB ("Notoriously windy foods, like beans, gave audible and olfactory proof of imperfect concoction, but might be recommended as a primitive version of Viagra: the gases diffuse through the body, expanding the peripheral blood vessels and ‘keeping the rod erect’, according to Antonio Gazzo’s Corona florida medicinae")