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John William Tuohy lives in Washington DC
Bowdlerized.
In 1807, a new edition of the works of William Shakespeare hit the scene in England. Titled The Family Shakespeare, the collection of 20 of the Bard's plays in four volumes was at first anonymously edited, and promised in its preface to "remove everything that could give just offence to the religious or virtuous mind." Though the sanitized project later became a public sensation (and a source of literary derision) after its expanded, ten-volume second edition was published in 1818 and credited solely to physician Thomas Bowdler, the original expurgation was in fact the work of his older sister Henrietta Maria "Harriet" Bowdler, an accomplished editor and author. Within a year of the younger Bowdler’s death in 1825, bowdlerize had come to refer to cutting out the dirty bits of other books and texts—testimony not only to the impact of his eye for impropriety but to those of his sister Harriet as well, though her efforts were obscured by history, if not technically bowdlerized.
Kafkaesque kahf-kuh-ESK
Kafkaesque kahf-kuh-ESK
Something described as Kafkaesque
has an often nightmarishly complex, bizarre, or illogical quality to it. More
broadly, anything relating to or suggestive of the writing of Franz Kafka may
be said to be Kafkaesque.
Franz Kafka (1883-1924) was a
Czech-born German-language writer whose surreal fiction vividly expressed the
anxiety, alienation, and powerlessness of the individual in the 20th century.
The opening sentence of his 1915 story The Metamorphosis has become one of the
most famous in Western literature (“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from
uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect”),
while in his novel The Trial, published a year after his death, a young man
finds himself caught up in the mindless bureaucracy of the law after being
charged with a crime that is never named. So deft was Kafka’s prose at
detailing nightmarish settings in which characters are crushed by nonsensical,
blind authority, that writers began using his name as an adjective a mere 16
years after his death. Although many other literary eponyms, from Austenian to
Homeric, exist and are common enough, Kafkaesque gets employed more than most
and in a wide variety of contexts, leading to occasional charges that the word
has been watered down and given a lack of specificity due to overuse.
I adore words
Troth (troth, trohth)
1. One’s pledged word, loyalty,
or fidelity.
2. Truth.
3. Betrothal.
To pledge or betroth.
From Old English treowth
(fidelity, truth), from treowe (faithful). Ultimately from the Indo-European
root deru- (to be firm), which gave us truth, trust, tree, endure, druid,
during, durable, duress, trow and indurate.
Lexiphanic
Lexiphanic (lek-si-FAN-ik) Using pretentious words and language. After Lexiphanes, a bombastic speaker, in the satire of the same name by Lucian (2nd century CE). From Greek lexis (speech, diction, word) + phainein (to show).
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The Crying of Water by Arthur Symons
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Variation on the word Sleep by Margaret Atwood
which may not happen.
I would like to watch you,
sleeping. I would like to sleep
with you, to enter
your sleep as its smooth dark wave
slides over my head
and walk with you through that lucent
wavering forest of bluegreen leaves
with its watery sun & three moons
towards the cave where you must descend,
towards your worst fear
I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center. I would like to follow
you up the long stairway
again & become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands
to where your body lies
beside me, and you enter
it as easily as breathing in
I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
& that necessary.
Good Bones by Maggie Smith
Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.
Word origins (as a writer you should be aware of this sort of thing)
Intrepid comes from the Latin word intrepidus, itself formed by the combination of the prefix in-, meaning “not,” and the adjective trepidus, meaning “alarmed.”
Umbriferous (uhm-BRIF-uh-ruhs) Casting a shadow. From Latin umbra (shade,
shadow) + ferre (to bear). Some related words are umbrella, adumbrate, and
somber.
Abracadabra. A poem by Mia Kang
for Erich and Patricia
List of things to
banish
Can include words,
people, theoretical apparatuses
Can take the form of a
grocery list, a scientific experiment, or a manifesto
Can read like a
personal ad of unwanting
Can summon aid to help
with banishing
Can be uncertain of
what will remain
Can have no positive
mission statement
Can be written in a
language other than language
Can circulate amongst
FRIENDS ONLY
Can evade being
imagined, written, embodied, archived
Can go like this
Can make itself
irrelevant
Can include buildings,
brushstrokes, and other abominations
Can mean my way of life
is unlivable
Can mean my life is as
yet unlived
Can mean I must become
a menace to my enemies
Can undo futurity
forever in favor of *******
Can remake futurity
into someone who doesn’t recognize herself
Can punctuate the
present like a cup of coffee or a Monday
Can be dreamed up and
shot down and elongated
Can tell us something
Can include forms and
fantasies, even the ones getting us by
Can instigate an
interregnum
Can be unfinished
Can include hope
hopefully
Can be blank
But don’t kid yourself
It isn’t
And it can’t include
History
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The Great Black Heron
The Great Black Heron
Denise
Levertov - 1923-1997
Since
I stroll in the woods more often
than
on this frequented path, it's usually
trees
I observe; but among fellow humans
what
I like best is to see an old woman
fishing
alone at the end of a jetty,
hours
on end, plainly content.
The
Russians mushroom-hunting after a rain
trail
after themselves a world of red sarafans,
nightingales,
samovars, stoves to sleep on
(though
without doubt those are not
what
they can remember). Vietnamese families
fishing
or simply sitting as close as they can
to
the water, make me recall that lake in Hanoi
in
the amber light, our first, jet-lagged evening,
peace
in the war we had come to witness.
This
woman engaged in her pleasure evokes
an
entire culture, tenacious field-flower
growing
itself among the rows of cotton
in
red-earth country, under the feet
of
mules and masters. I see her
a
barefoot child by a muddy river
learning
her skill with the pole. What battles
has
she survived, what labors?
She's
gathered up all the time in the world
—nothing
else—and waits for scanty trophies,
complete
in herself as a heron.
An attack on those least able to defend themselves
Biden and Xavier Becerra
I can’t come to grips with the fact that we actually need to protect
orphans and foster kids from lunatics who want to change the children’s sex.
If these were kids from stable homes with at least one parent in place,
this would never be an issue. But it is an issue. So much so that Rep. Jim
Banks, has unveiled a bill to protect the adoption rights of parents who want
to raise kids based on biological sex.
Remarkably the bill protects the kids from the loons in the child welfare
agencies…who are charged with housing and protecting these children from
loons…. preventing them from denying prospective adopters who say they will
raise kids in a manner consistent with the minor’s biological sex.
The increasingly bizarre US Department of Health and Human Services
announced a rule aimed at ensuring minors are placed in homes accepting of
their sexual orientation or gender identity.
Okay, sounds harmless enough but in the fine print…. weasels love fine
print…..the rule "would require that child welfare agencies ensure that
each child in their care who identifies as LGBTQI+ receive a safe and
appropriate placement and services that help them thrive. The proposed rule
would protect LGBTQI+ youth by placing them in environments free of hostility,
mistreatment, or abuse based on the child’s LGBTQI+ status. And the proposed
rule would require that caregivers for LGBTQI+ children are properly and fully
trained to provide for the needs of the child related to the child’s
self-identified sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender
expression"
Kids in these circumstances are traumatized, they will more than likely
fail in this life at everything they do and they will die relatively
young.
Those are the undisputable facts, the last thing they need is this crap.
Banks’ bill would prevent child welfare agencies and related groups that
receive federal funding from getting those funds if they refuse prospective
parents who insist against the child’s stated LGBTQ status.
That includes prospective parents who say they will refuse a child’s
desire for medical, surgical, pharmacological, and psychological treatment if
it is inconsistent with their biological sex.
In the matter of foster kids, foster carers and agencies will have to use a transgender
child’s “identified pronouns, chosen name, and allow the child to dress in an
age-appropriate manner that the child believes reflects their self-identified
gender identity and expression”.
HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra thinks that messing with these
traumatized and directionless children even more is a positive thing. “This is
going to change the complexion of how we view foster care treatment for our
foster kids, but more importantly, how we look at the people who we rely on to
care for foster kids.”
Try to sell Gay to his rich kids and see what happens to
you.
The people who are fighting this rule are the many
faith-based providers of foster care, but you see, that’s why the whack jobs
at Health and Human Services wrote the rule in the first place.
When the government goons who wrote this rule put it in
print they knew it violated the US Constitution and discriminated unfairly
against Christians who hold traditional orthodox beliefs on marriage, the
family, and sexual morality by forcing them from the sector.
Really what this is about is two things, one is to force
fostering parents and related religious agencies to override their
consciences and the other is to push the Catholic Church…which raised me
within the Connecticut foster care system…out of the fostering and adoptions
services they offer. Without faith-based organizations and foster homes,
the foster care system, which survivors only through miracles, would
collapse, plain and simple because the rule would severely limit the number of
available foster homes. What that will do is force the federal and state
agencies to pour even more money into a foster system that doesn’t work.
Let me simplify that…in the end, the ones who will get hurt
are kids from dirt-poor backgrounds who have no way to defend themselves, but,
you see, that’s the brilliance of the government plan.
Island
Island
Langston Hughes
Wave of sorrow,
Do not drown me now:
I see the island
Still ahead somehow.
I see the island
And its sands are fair:
Wave of sorrow,
Take me there.
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Alessandro Tofanelli (Italian) Prima di natale [Before Christmas], 2020
Intuition
As I
approach seven decades, I have become much more aware that aging is many
things, an accumulation of changes that happened in quick succession causing
some parts of me to grow while other parts of me decline.
I’ve
become more cognizant of the important matters in my life, which, more and
more, are always things, while, willfully, I am less aware of the
insignificant, which, more and more, are people.
You have
no doubt heard the expression “Age is just a number” is a dumber way of saying
that our sense of spirit, my eternal being, has gotten better and seems to get
better with every passing day.
I think
this change is due largely to my growing and ever-expanding reliance on my
intuition. Unlike the use of my legs or the ability to lift heavy things, my
intuition has gotten better with age, and the more I rely on it, the more
reliable it has become. I feel wiser for using it and I wonder if the use
of our intuition is a natural part of aging. When we are young, for
men anyway, we can rely on our quickness and our strength, as we age, at least
in my case, fast no longer defines me, in fact, I avoid fast things now, they
tire me out. As I said, my terrific strength, built by decades of
manual labor that I hated is far, far less than it
was. Nowadays, before lifting anything seemingly heavy, I have to
ask myself “Is it worth a heart attack?” a real possibility in my
case. Of course, we have to be careful in our use of intuition because as we
age, cognition and emotion impact the decision processes. It's simply a part of
life.
The
older we get our deliberative processes, the ability to critically examine an
issue lessens. That is balanced out by our stability and emotional
processing increases. The bottom line is it all balances out. By relying more
on our stability of emotions and less on our declining deliberative faculties,
the quality of their decisions is significantly improved. As Camus wrote, “To grow old is to move
from passion to compassion.”
December 7, Pearle Harbor Day
“They shall not
grow old, as we that are left grow old. Age shall not weary them, nor the years
condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning we will remember them.”
Laurence Binyon
I haven't read it but I intend too.....right up my alley
A true story of glamour and tragedy
Review:
“American Eve: Evelyn Nesbit, Stanford White, the Birth of the ‘It’ Girl, and
the Crime of the Century” by Paula Uruburu
DEC
6, 2023
This
book, published in 2008, isn’t new but neither is the story of love, loss,
betrayal and passion. Evelyn Nesbit’s connection to the Adirondack region is
through her stay at Chateaugay Lake in 1915, while hiding from hordes of
reporters during her husband’s second murder trial in New York City.
In
1900, when Florence Evelyn was 15 years old, she moved from Pittsburgh to New
York City with her mother (confusingly named, Evelyn Florence) and brother.
Painters, sculptors and photographers had already re-created her likeness so
often that her face was everywhere: magazines, advertisements, newspapers and
even in church stained-glass windows. In NYC, the trend continued. She was
slightly built, a “waif” who stood barely 5 feet tall, due mostly to
malnourishment her entire childhood. Her father died when she was 11 years old,
leaving a financial mess for her ill-equipped mother to untangle. Once her
neglectful mother realized her daughter’s beauty was a valuable currency,
Florence Evelyn became the family breadwinner until her mother remarried and
cut off all communications with her daughter.
Although
Florence Evelyn read every book she could find and dreamed of fulfilling her
father’s dream that she attend Vassar College, instead of attending high
school, Florence Evelyn worked in a department store during the day and posed
for painters and sculptors in the evenings. Her younger brother worked in the
same store while their mother dreamed of becoming a clothing designer. She
often left the children with family members for months at a time while she
searched for work with no results, and the family continued to live in poverty.
Even after moving to New York City for Florence Evelyn’s career, they fared
little better. She continued to work during the day, posing for artists. In the
evenings, she played the role of a Spanish maiden in the musical Florodoro, and
then she partied into the mornings. She was 16, with inconsistent parental
supervision. During this time, she changed her name to Eve Nesbit.
Men
began to notice the girl’s beauty. She became an obsession for countless, much
older, men. On a nightly basis, her dressing room was filled with flowers, love
letters and gifts from admirers she didn’t know or even care to know. Until
Stanford White, millionaire architect, made his entrance, Eve was uninterested
in the men who sought her attention. White was 46 years old, married and a
father. White kept up his carefully cultivated public persona as a patron of
the arts, but he privately preyed on young girls like Eve. She wasn’t the
first, nor the last. This is only the beginning of Eve’s story.
Even
if you don’t know the tragic story of Evelyn Nesbit, you can probably guess
some of what this young, vulnerable girl endured. But there is much more to the
fascinating story in Paula Uruburu’s book. I recommend reading the tale of the
“It” girl at the turn of the century. American Eve is a little bit like a
reality television show mixed with a melodramatic telenovella and a Bollywood
movie, but sadly true.
Style matters.........
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