Archive for the ‘Poetry’ Category
April 24, 2019
From Jeff Bowles on Facebook on the 12th, this Magritte-based composition:
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Apparently a Magrittean disavowal (there’s a Page on such disavowals here), playing on Magritte’s wry late 1920s painting La Trahison des images (The Betrayal / Treachery of Images) — which shows a pipe, with the painting labeling itself Ceci n’est pas une pipe ‘This is not a pipe’. Here we get Louis Flint Ceci, on the left, objecting in astonishment that what’s on the right is not (a) Ceci; instead, it’s (a) Davisson.
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Posted in Art, Books, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Movies and tv, Music, Paradoxes, Poetic form, Poetry, Semantics, Writers | 2 Comments »
April 13, 2019
[The body of this posting vanished from WordPress on 4/23/19. I am working on restoring the text. If anyone has pieces of the text, please e-mail me at zwicky@stanford.edu.
If you’re looking for my posting about Louis Flint Ceci and Magrittean disavowals, that’s “A Ceci disavowal” at:
https://arnoldzwicky.org/2019/04/24/a-ceci-disavowal/ ]
Posted in Art, Books, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Movies and tv, Paradoxes, Poetic form, Poetry, Semantics, Writers | 4 Comments »
February 20, 2019
(This posting will go lots of places, some of which — a Greek military re-enactors’ group in Melbourne — you’ll find astonishing, but there’s no denying that, as the title suggests, it’s penis-dense. Without actually depicting them — those images are in my posting this morning on AZBlogX, “Gay Heart Throbs” — but still. However, without penises strewn along the road every few feet, there’s no getting to the fun stuff (like allusions to Miss Anne Elk and to Sonnets from the Portuguese). So use your judgment.)
Phallophilia I: self-regard. A recent Daily Jocks ad (for Kasper Military shorts from the Helsinki Athletica company) showing a hunky model gazing fixedly down at his bulging crotch, with a title and a caption supplied by me:
(#1) On contemplating his penis
Could I just say here for one moment that
I have a new theory about the penis?
Yes, well you may well ask, what is my theory.
And well you may. Yes my word you may well
Ask what it is, this theory of mine.
Well, this theory that I have — which is mine —
This theory which belongs to me is as follows.
Ahem. Ahem. This is how it goes.
Ahem. The next thing that I am about to say
Is my theory. Ahem. Ready?
My theory is along the following lines.
All penises are round at one end,
Tubular in the middle, and then
Anchored in hair at the far end.
That is the theory that I have
And which is mine, and
What it is too.
— excerpts from an interview with noted penis scholar Gay H. Throbs, DPhS. (Doctor of Phallological Science)
On the nose, GHT!
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Posted in Captions, Gay porn, Gaze, Gender and sexuality, Language in advertising, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Names, Parody, Phallicity, Poetry, Pseudonyms, Resources, Signs and symbols, Underwear | Leave a Comment »
February 13, 2019
(Hot guys in very skimpy underwear, suggestive verse, but generally playful and not actually X-rated. Use your judgment.)
Today’s Daily Jocks sale ad, for Marco Marco Valentine’s Day homowear, with a caption in two parts, one raunchy doggerel, one Puckish:
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Lincoln Darwin Valentine
Is a cutup friend of mine
Loves the boys with all his heart
Loves them hard in every part
And the youth, mistook by me,
Pleading for a lover’s fee.
Shall we their fond pageant see?
Lord, what fools these mortals be!
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Posted in Captions, Double entendres, Facial expression, Holidays, Language in advertising, Language play, Movies and tv, Poetic form, Poetry, Underwear | Leave a Comment »
January 29, 2019
A souvenir from Juan Gomez, who visited Peru (Cuzco, Machu Picchu) with his family for the New Year’s holiday: a little stuffed llama I’ve named Glama Grrl (he’s seen here perched high in the spathyphyllum forest on my worktable):
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The Peruvian camelid has been exploited for all sorts of word play purposes, perhaps most famously in the light verse of Ogden Nash, but also in joking that turns on the fact that the element llam– has (at least) three separate sources in Spanish (referring to the camelid, to fire or flames, and to calling (out)). Glama Grrl will then lead us to the original traveler from darkest Peru, Paddington Bear.
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Posted in Ambiguity, Clothing, Language and animals, Language play, Names, Poetry, Spanish, Toys and games | 2 Comments »
January 19, 2019
Into the lull between Thesaurus Day (the 18th) and Penguin Awareness Day (the 20th), I thrust two bits of poetry taking off from images on Facebook: Make Big Money (brought to me by Kyle Wohlmut) and The Long Room, Trinity College, Dublin (brought to me by Joelle Stepien Bailard):
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Posted in Holidays, Language and animals, Language play, Mishearings, Poetry | 1 Comment »
November 19, 2018
My 10/9/18 posting “Fruit bars” featured my mother-in-law Monique’s recipe for apricot bars / squares/ crisp cookies. Dried apricots made into a chewy filling for cookies with crunchy top and bottom layers, cut into squares.
At the time, Kim Darnell (who’s done all the actual work in this enterprise) and I contemplated other dried fruits as a basis: figs, dates, prunes, mangos, etc. We have so far achieved: apricots, figs, and dried cherries and mixed berries, the last baked yesterday.
I’ve been moved to verse, of a sort, but nothing original — instead, a parody of a bit of Lewis Carroll’s epic nonsense verse “The Hunting of the Snark” (published in 1876, with grotesque illustrations by Henry Holiday: full text available here).
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Posted in Language and food, Parody, Poetry | Leave a Comment »
October 15, 2018
It began with this poignant texty on Facebook:
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Voting as part of the story marks this as a recent version, and the shrinking forest (possibly an allusion to deforestation) might be recent as well. But the main idea — that the trees accepted the axe because its handle was wood and they thought it was one of them — feels antique, fabulesque. And so it is.
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Posted in Formulaic language, Music, Poetic form, Poetry, Slogans | 1 Comment »
September 17, 2018
In the most recent New York Times Magazine, “On a Line by Proust” by Adam Giannelli. Then, from the “graduation dinner” for the 1990-91 Fellows at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, my “class poem”, “Les vrais paradis sont les paradis qu’on a perdus” (the very line by Proust). The Giannelli is a villanelle of sorts, for a general audience; mine is very free verse, also occasional verse written for a small community.
In chronological order.
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Posted in My life, Poetic form, Poetry | Leave a Comment »
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