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Yam

Rind and resurrection, hell and seed, Fire-folia, hotbeds of a casserole Divinely humble, it awaits your need. Its message, taken in by you,

Deep reds obliterate. Be glad they do. Go now by upward stages, fortified, Where an imaginary line is being Drawn past which you do not melt, you suffer

Pure form’s utter discontent, white waste And wintry grazing, flocks of white But with no shepherd-sage, no flute, no phrases; Parchment froze, howling pricksong, mute

Periods that flash and stun— Hit on the head, who brought you to this pass? Valleys far below are spouting Baby slogans and green gripes of spring,

Clogged pools, the floating yen … You feel someone take leave, at once Transfiguring, transfigured. A voice grunts MATTER YOU MERELY DO I AM

Which lies on snow in dark ideogram —Or as a later commentary words it, One-night’s-meat-another-morning’s-mass- Against-inhuman-odds-I-celebrate.

#james merrill

Symboles are poor unhandsome (though necessary) scaffolds of Demonstration; and ought no more appear in publique, than the most deformed necessary business which you do in your Chambers.

Hobbes

Daisy is so moved by this belated but shatteringly complete experience that she can be forgiven for what she does next. ‘Afterward, as they lay together, half asleep, but unwilling to drift apart into unconsciousness, Daisy farted, in a tiny series of absolutely irrepressible little pops that seemed to her to go on for a minute.’ It takes bad art to teach us how good art gets done. Knowing that the dithyrambs have gone on long enough, Mrs Krantz has tried to undercut them with something earthy. Her tone goes wrong, but her intention is worthy of respect. It is like one of those clumsy attempts at naturalism in a late-medieval painting – less pathetic than portentous, since it adumbrates the great age to come.

Clive James, LRB (ht aaron)

[Beckett] gives Rosset a wonderfully deadpan account of standing on a street corner in London after a lunch with Charles Monteith and Peter du Sautoy of Faber and Faber. While they praised Krapp’s Last Tape as “frightfully funny,”

I was calculating with anguish the chances of my bladder’s holding out to the only public lavatory known to me in the West End, viz. in the Piccadilly Underground (it did almost).

Fintan O’Toole

Think of that! He removes his hat without misgiving, he unbuttons his coat and sits down, proffered all pure and open to the long joys of being himself, like a basin to a vomit.

Beckett, Watt

As Per the Geese:

So it's not their fault they void their bowels twenty times a day and discharge as they waddle across the commons. But we wish they'd manifest at least some symptom of their shame, instead of acting like we should be glad to have their green turds for a gift. See how they swagger, showing off their black necks, and the white strap that makes them as mysterious as geishas. Now no one dares spread out a picnic blanket any day in the park, and who knows what we'll look like when we are rendered entirely as dots? See the young mothers patrolling the lakeshore at dawn the morning of the Easter egg hunt, with little shovels and translucent grocery sacks that dangle from their wrists. See how they squint like boxers, peering into the shaded mulch. [...]

Lucia Perillo (from Luck is Luck)

#geese

My third reservation is minor, and has to do with the small boy writing privy inscriptions on the wall; a reservation which merely to state is sufficiently to expound. Some of the dirt perhaps comes under the head of the poetry of gesture, and some perhaps is only the brutality of disgust. My complaint is meant to be technical; most of the dirt is not well enough managed to reach the level of either gesture or disgust, but remains, let us say, coprophiliac which is not a technical quality.

R. P. Blackmur, reviewing Cummings

30prufrock-blog

I settled on the Chamber-pot as soon as ever he was off,” a sprightly prostitute named Juliette says of her latest client, “till I made it whurra, and roar like the Tide at London-Bridge.”

ny mag (via 30prufrock)

Charlie Parker wrecked jazz by—or so they tell me—using the chromatic rather than the diatonic scale. The diatonic scale is what you use if you want to write a national anthem, or a love song, or a lullaby. The chromatic scale is what you use to give the effect of drinking a quinine martini and having an enema simultaneously.

Philip Larkin

One of Bloom’s mooted entrepreneurial schemes involves selling human waste on an industrial scale. Joyce’s work is mired in excremental language and imagery: water closets, commodes, sewers, ‘clotted hinderparts’, ‘slopperish matter’, ‘nappy spattees’, ‘pip poo pat’ of ‘bulgar … bowels’ and so on. Nowhere is Joyce more potty-mouthed than when taking on the language and procedure of religious devotion. At the outset of Finnegans Wake the books of Genesis and Exodus become urinary and colonic tracts and Christ the salmon turns into a big brown trout, a ‘brontoichthyan’ thunderfish or turd floating in a stream mingling with ‘piddle’. But, again, the process has already begun in Ulysses. Bloom starts his day by votively bowing his head as he enters his outhouse to perform the act of defecation that will see him hailed as ‘Moses, Moses, King of the Jews’ who ‘wiped his arse in the Daily News’. Buck Mulligan, in his parody of Mass, quick-changes from priest to military doctor, peeping at an imaginary stool sample floating in what he has been presenting as an altar bowl. The shaving bowl doesn’t contain faeces, but other sorts of human waste: stubble and cast-off skin cells. These things, too, belong to the category of excreta, as do phlegm, bile, navelcords and blood: whatever is excessive, leaking, trailing, dragging.

Tom McCarthy does Joyce (LRB)

"the wasteful gallinule"

drib-drab

Mankind, ll. 126-27

sparklesdire

Rubaiyat of the Prostate

Awake! For in the Lavatory Bowls of Night Old Men have peed and stained the brilliant White: And Lo! the Yellowness of Age has dimmed The Star of Youth that once shone bold and bright! Ah, me, once Damsels all they had bestowed On those Young Men who batted, bowled and rowed - Though they to all and sundry, on their Bikes, Their rosy Knickers in the Daylight showed! 'Tis at this age that we remember How—- But no more have we, Friends, the Strength; enow To lay the Loved Ones in the silken Bed! Though HE did us so mightily endow! Strange, is is not? That Sailors, greatly thewed, By us with Godlike Beauty were imbued: And now from Sea return’d lie still in Earth, That erst so dazzled us, when in the Nude! The Wine, the Grape, the Visions that we saw—- And shared, it seemeth, with great Evelyn Waugh! Ah, these the Liver faintly doth forbid. Once Nightingales, but now the black Rook’s Caw! I dreamed that Dawn’s Left Hand was in my Fly And lighted was the Candle, burning high! But, waking, saw with disappointed Gaze That Light a flicker, and about to die. The Roses and the Gardens, let them go! Our Youth, our Love, that we once fancied so, Forget them, as the Nights of Too Much Wine Blot out all Memory like falling Snow!

Gavin Ewart

Only the young are allowed to suffer openly. Adults go to a punishment room with water but nothing to eat. They lock the door and suffer the noises alone. No one is exempt and everyone's pain has a different smell.

-- Craig Raine [C: "does everyone's rain smell different?"]

[Robert D. Kaplan] wanders from Sierra Leone to Iran to Cambodia, all the while splattering the reader with regurgitations of various scholarly research: where the word Turk comes from, a pocket history of the Iranian city of Qom, the “deceptive” nature of the term Indochina.

Tom Bissell

lardr

sauce

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