A Commonplace of Poetry: Poems by Charlie Pendergast (RiskPress, 2010).
A complimentary copy came to me, courtesy of the author, a few days ago. It’s a collection of poems and also a commonplace book (an assemblage of quotations that someone finds moving, thought-provoking, significant, or entertaining; see, for example, W.H. Auden’s A Certain World: A Commonplace Book (1970)).
From the June/July issue of Instinct magazine, David Perry’s “Adventures in Gaybysitting” (pp. 50-51):
A gay man’s first foray into the wild, untamed war zone know as “babysitting”
about Perry’s babysitting his cousin’s son Max.
Just a small silly point, but I enjoyed the portmanteau gaybysitting, gay + babysitting. (Some days I am very easily entertained by portmanteaus.)
(About art rather than language.)
In my mail a couple days ago, an advertisement from the Levenger company for a bookend version of The Wrestler, a 1920s aluminum sculpture that fascinated Steve Leveen, the company’s CEO. The Levenger version:
Leveen was taken with the robotic character of the sculpture, but it’s also notable for its exaggerated muscular masculinity, right up to the jutting codpiece (more pronounced in the original than in this miniature).
Drinks with friends yesterday, at Café Renzo (where Niebaum-Coppola — yes, that Coppola — used to be). On the table was a flyer for a cognac:
LOUIS XIII is a blend of 1,200 eau-de-vie aged from 40 to 100 years, and created exclusively with grapes from Grande Champagne, the most prestigious region of Cognac.
$75 for half an ounce!
We were amused at the idea that blending 1,200 cognacs would result in something superior to any of them, or to a blend of a few carefully chosen ones. Presumably the blending of a great many cognacs is a selling point, along with the age of the contributors — snob appeal, to go along with the “exclusively” and the “most prestigious” in the flyer, plus the “eau-de-vie”.
[Note plural eau-de-vie, though eau is singular in French. So it’s a zero plural. And in fact, you can google up lots of occurrences of many eau de vie, alongside some for many eaux de vie.]
(Mostly about art, but with some remarks on writing style.)
From the 6/6/11 New Yorker, Andrea K. Scott’s brief “Critics Notebook: Face Value” on Mark Grotjahn’s new show in New York:
A note to art lovers lining up at Gagosian to see “Picasso and Marie-Thèrése, L’Amour Fou”: when you’re done, walk one block south. The relentlessly dazzling paintings in Mark Grotjahn’s new show at the Anton Kern gallery are descended from another of the Spaniard’s great loves – his passion for tribal masks, which sparked a radical synthesis of abstraction and portraiture. Stare long enough at the maelstroms of sinewy lines in Grotjahn’s apparently abstract big paintings and the lines will stare back, resolving into almond-shaped eyes above flaring nostrils and the curve of a grimace or grin. The real payoff here isn’t the emergence of faces, neat trick though it is – it’s the audacity of the paint handling. Working on larger than life-size sheets of cardboard (later mounted on linen), the L.A.-based artist lays the oil on thick with a palette knife. Long trails of short, stuttering strokes evoke the anxiety of painting in a post-Picasso, post-Pollack world. That the results feel so primal yet so self-aware makes Grotjahn’s show something close to a triumph.
This drew me to looking at more of Grotjahn’s work.
Maureen Dowd’s op-ed column in the NYT yesterday (the funny-angry “Non Means Non”) takes on the fallout from the Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair. In the middle, this wonderful desperate attempt at fending off accusations of sexual impropriety:
The French president wasted no time jettisoning a junior minister — also the mayor of Draveil — who was accused of sexual assault by two former employees. Georges Tron resigned Sunday after the two women in their mid-30s said they had gotten the courage to come forward after the Strauss-Kahn arrest.
Tron, it seems, liked to give foot massages and sometimes more. It got to the point where some women would wear boots if they knew Monsieur Masseur was coming to a meeting.
“Yes, my client is a reflexologist,” riposted Tron’s lawyer, Olivier Schnerb. “He’s never hidden it. He has given conferences at the Lion’s Club. It’s a healing treatment.”
A bit later, another report:
Nicole Guedj, a lawyer and former minister, said wistfully of male colleagues: “One thinks, ‘I wish you wouldn’t just look at me. I wish you would listen to me.’ “
Listening would be good. Maybe her male colleagues think that women just chatter on inconsequentially (see numerous postings on Language Log), so they’re not worth listening to.
On the front page of yesterday’s New York Times, Papaya King goes to Hollywood:
A New York Dog Makes Its Hollywood Debut
by Adam NagourneyHOLLYWOOD — It is tucked in a storefront a block from the Walk of Fame, walking distance from the annual Academy Awards ceremonies, and steps from the hubbub of tourists, hucksters and celebrity hunters that is Hollywood: a Papaya King hot dog stand, in all its garish yellow and orange glory, selling hot dogs imported straight from the Bronx.
This symbol of New York landed last week in the heart of Hollywood, with a cluster of balloons and a cheeky billboard campaign that includes an off-color joke about a casting couch. (Another Papaya billboard reads: “We’re 100 percent natural. But we think we’ll fit in L.A. just fine.”)
Note the allusion to the billboard, without the actual text. Just the sort of winking avoidance that the paper claims to abhor. The story would have been fine without “that includes an off-color joke about a casting couch”. Or with the sexually suggestive text from the billboard. But this middle course is just annoying.
Two t-shirts that came to my attention recently. The first is a Bad Panda, offered by CafePress for Fathers Day; maybe it’s the phallic theme (eats, shoots, and leaves?):
Then there’s a cute visual pun, an Emperor penguin from Woot (link from Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky):
The laurel wreath is especially nice.
