The fruitcake is a metaphor, applied first of all here to my 4/20 posting “Oh joy, oh rapture unforeseen!” — a huge, complex mixture of writing about joy, playfulness, sex, story-telling, intertwined narrative, human nature, memory, artistic performance, Purcell, Jeremiah Clarke, Mendelssohn, Shakespeare, Schubert, Mozart, my life as a child, Lenore Barth and her family, my life with Ann Daingerfield, my life with Jacques Transue, my despair at the evil in the world, and, oh Christ, much more. All compounded together in such a way that no individual topic can easily be pulled out of the mixture. Like a fruitcake.
(You then get the allusion to (offensive) fruit ‘male homosexual’ for free.)
And then this metaphor applied to personal identities, most pointedly mine. Also enormously complex mixtures, a fact merely hinted at my assertions in the 4/20 posting:
I am a prole, proud of it, a union guy from the age of 17 on; I am also a distinguished university professor and all that other good shit.
And then, and then, and then … I am in fact a giant fruitcake of identities, and so are you (just not the same ones).
What about a metaphor counterposed to the fruitcake metaphor? In particular, how do we characterize postings that present pretty much one thing at a time, with the understanding that the postings are parts of some larger assemblage?
