November 2009 Archives

“I want the frim-fram sauce with the ausen fay
With chafafa on the side.”

—Redd Evans & Joe Ricardel, “The Frim-Fram Sauce”, 1945.

“The table was strewn with garlands and flowers, and laden with tankards and pitchers. . . . There were terra-cotta platters of plump eels sprinkled with seasoning; there were wax-coloured alphestae, and sacred beauty-fish. Besides these there was a pompilus, a purple fish said to have been born of the same foam as Aphrodite, boopoe, bebradons, a grey mullet served up with calmars, and multi-colored scorpenae. Certain dishes were served in little saucepans in order that they might be eaten foaming hot, and among these were a great slice of myra, fat tunny-fish, and hot devil-fish with tender tentacles. Finally came the belly of a white electric eel, as round as the belly of a beautiful woman.
    Such was the first course.”

—Pierre Louys, Aphrodite, 1896; translated by Lewis Galantiere, 1933.

“The three sad eyes of the ellipses. Something is lost . . . Three islands. Small songs in a sea that prefers to forget the land . . . The mouth opens and begins to speak; there is nothing that can be said . . . One world followed by another and then another. Tiny black specks at the end of the galaxy . . . A three frame animation where nothing appears to happen, though perhaps down on the minuscule surface, there are different kinds of silences, memories, things forgotten or left. The trailing off, the continuing on . . . Small black stones in the river of speech . . . Three tunnels waiting for the three trains of past, present, and somewhere in between . . . Dots lost and drifting from i’s, j’s, or umlauts, floating between words in the cloudbound grammar above the teleological cities of the sentence . . . Notes from a song with neither pitch nor rhythm. The dark matter music between things . . . Three brother molecules in a subatomic folktale, though it is unclear which is the youngest, most foolish, most likely to wed the princess . . . An echo of the full stop at the end of the sentence. Things end, but their ripples mark the page with their tiny fingerprints. Here I am, though what I was is forgotten, disappeared, or unclear. I grip the cliff of the page, holding on until you get here ready to imagine what I might have been.”

—Gary Barwin, for Craig Conley.

“Eli Watkins, Prophet of the Third Revelation, wore a cream white flannel suit, which made his tall figure conspicuous. He had adopted a pontifical air in these days of glory and power. He did not shake hands with you, but fixed you with a pair of large, prominent, bright blue eyes, and said, ‘The blessings of the Lord upon you.’ ”

—Upton Sinclair, Oil!, 1927.

“There were beautiful silver and gold-plated trophies with engraved inscriptions, which helped to hypnotize you into thinking that the hitting of little balls about a field was of major importance!”

—Upton Sinclair, Oil!, 1927.

“ ‘Hello, Ross,’ he said; ‘pleased-to-meecher. I got an uncle that’s spending a hundred thousand dollars to put you in jail.’
    ‘Is that so?’ said Bunny, a trifle startled.
    ‘Sure thing! He’s nuts about this red-hunting business, and the pinks are worse than the reds, he says. I’ve been worried about you.’ ”

—Upton Sinclair, Oil!, 1927.

“The greatest oil strike in the history of Southern California, the Prospect Hill field! The inside of the earth seemed to burst out through that hole; a roaring and rushing, as Niagrara, and a black column shot up into the air, two hundred feet, two hundred and fifty—no one could say for sure—and came thundering down to earth as a mass of thick, black slimy, slippery fluid. It hurled tools and other heavy objects this way and that, so the men had to run for their lives. It filled the sump-hole, and poured over, like a sauce-pan boiling too fast, and went streaming down the hillside. Carried by the wind, a curtain of black mist, it sprayed the Culver homestead, turning it black, and sending the women of the household flying across the cabbage-fields. Afterwards it was told with Homeric laughter how these women had been heard to lament the destruction of their clothing and their window-curtains by this million-dollar flood of ‘black gold’!”

—Upton Sinclair, Oil!, 1927.

“And up through the ground came a bubblin’ crude.

Oil, that is. Black gold, Texas tea.”

—Paul Henning, ‘The Ballad of Jed Clampett,’ 1962.

“I went away wondering why the green toe of her left slipper was dark and damp with something that could have been blood.”

—Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest, 1929.

“Say, can I have some of your purple berries
Yes, I’ve been eating them for six or seven weeks now
Haven't got sick once
Prob’ly keep us both alive”

—David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Paul Kantner, ‘Wooden Ships’, 1969.

“Mary knows everything there is to know about the colour red. As a scientist, it has been her life’s work. If you want to know why we can’t see infrared, why tomatoes are red or why red is the colour of passion, Mary is your woman.
    All this would be unremarkable, if it weren’t for the fact that Mary is an achromat: she has no colour vision at all. The world, for Mary, looks like a black and white movie.
    Now, however, all that is to change. The cones on her retina are not themselves defective, it is simply that the signals are not processed by the brain. Advances in neurosurgery now mean that this can be fixed. Mary will soon see the world in colour for the first time.
    So despite her wide knowledge, perhaps she doesn’t know everything about the colour red after all. There is one thing left for her to find out: what red looks like.”

—Julian Baggini, The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005.

“ ‘You heard Uncle Al. If anything happens to that horse, you’ll be redlighted.’