you talkin' to me?

pardon me
you heard me
no, really, I didn't
I said, "to be or not to be"
that's what I thought
so you did hear me
point taken
I'll say it again
I dare you
"to be or not to be"
let's face it, that's pretty fuckn grandiose
how
c'mon
it ain't grandiose, it's basic
like "back to basics"
I've never understood what that meant
it's elemental, fundamental, mental, unsentimental
now you sound like early Dylan
nothing wrong with that
it's alright, ma
elementary, my dear Watson
he never said that
not exactly
anyway, where were we
right here
right here is where we always are
nowhere, man
now here
clever
slow down, you better slow down
break it down
when you said, "to be or not to be" were you serious
of course I was
serious as in suicidal
what, where do you get that
well, you're standing alone all serious and shit
it's a fecking play, I'm a character, on a stage
all the world's a stage
bingo
the play's the thing
how 'bout "play's the thing"
as in juggling, like the king's Fool
not that kind of juggling, more like thi
jousting
joisting
James Joyceting
ca-ching
bada-bing
to be
or
not to be
sproing
back to Square One
exactly
approximately
approximately King Hamlet
that's rich, even royal
royal manna
give that man a cigar
he she it them
that, too
 

The Unkenneling

My favorite word in all of Shakespeare is "unkennel."

"If his occulted guilt / Do not itself unkennel in one speech, / It is a damned ghost that we have seen . . . "  

Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 2 

A Le Moyne College professor noted that word more than fifty years ago. I remembered. 

Unkennel. You can picture it. Angry, growling dogs. Barking, drooling, panting with ravenous rage.

We used to use the term "go viral." That video went viral on YouTube. The tweet went viral in minutes. Their Facebook post went viral.

Viral? 

Coronavirus killed that. Or should.

The unkenneled coronavirus.

by any other name

Heroin.

Is the word part of the scourge? Is it a swish of the sword?

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, Heroin as a word was coined in 1898 in German as a "trademark registered by Friedrich Bayer & Co. for their morphine substitute. According to tradition the word was coined with chemical suffix -ine (2) (German -in) + Greek hērōs 'hero' (see hero (n.1)) because of the euphoric feeling the drug provides, but no evidence for this seems to have been found so far."

So what if the name were changed? No, no, no, we're not talking about the myriad demimonde, street, underworld, pop culture, and user-driven slang terms. Not that. Change the name. A new coinage. A coin of the realm of hypnotic transport and molten reverie.

Do words matter? In ancient times, identity was conferred by the very act of naming. There was a power to it. The Hebrew Bible is rife with examples of this.

What would the new word be?

Could such a word have such powers as to be salutary, salubrious, and beneficent?

And even if that were true, would such a move erase allure? Because after all, danger, menace, and perilous risk are part of the game, part of the ritual, yes?

What would that word be? The opposite of "hero"? Hardly.

As the Bard put it in Romeo and Juliet, “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet.” As if to say, "Call heroin by any other name, and you get the same results."

Is it so? How would we conduct a peer-reviewed study to find out?

In "Sacred Emily" in 1913 (year of my father's birth), Gertrude Stein wrote: "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose." (Did you know that in one version of this immortal declaration Stein put it in a children's story, carved on a tree trunk, round and round?) So, does Gertrude Stein side with Shakespeare on this semantic matter, or is she saying, "It's futile; it's beyond description; it is what it is"? (Or something else entirely.)

Heroin is heroin is heroin is heroin. 

What do you think? What do you feel? Tell me more. Especially addicts. Weigh in on this. 

Do words matter?

How much?

The Clementine Chronicles, continued

Murder on the Disorient Express

Dramatis Personae:

OldWhiteGuy stereotypical converted-loft dweller, goatee-adorned; spectacles-wearer; enough head hair to comb except on the sides owing to stylist's shorning the week preceding; 5'10"; 169 pounds; blue jeans; blue T-shirt; blue-green-purple flannel shirt not tucked in; fragrance: Luna Rossa by Prada; Euphoria by Calvin Klein deodorant; unshaven for several days

Three Ravens pecking at unseen morsels on the roadway or bickering on the chain-link fence or telephone wires

DismemberedClementine* Jackson Pollocked (except for color; goldenrod-clementine-flesh yellow-orange backgrounded by burnt umber wetted, ergo Mark Rothko'ed except for the scatteredness; picture a spherical descent bursting onto the concrete, tossed from an upper-story window; motive and perp, unknown) into 22 segments and/or fragments of said segments, on the sidewalk [see below] by the side exit of the brick former knitting mill; a splayed and still glistening ink-blottish stain artistically placed on the snow-bereft sidewalk as a place setting or as a result of the Capital Citrus Murder (CCM)
*cf. The Laughorist blog post of 2 December 2018

DismemberedClementine Peeled Skin (absent, nowhere to be seen; unknown if peeled in one fell swoop or not)

DeadFish (scales on; head attached; accusatory cyclops-ish eye; absent corpse, nowhere to be seen; cf. The Laughorist blog post of 2 February 2019)

62.8 CCM Suspects (40 apartments, average of 1.5 residents in each minus 1.0 LaughoristDweller [a.k.a. OldWhiteGuy], plus 3.8 happenstance, random street-cred pedestrians) 

Ghosts of Bob Marley & The Wailers

Scene 1: 

Enter OldWhiteGuy, exits building, turns right, spots DismemberedClementine (rest in pieces, R.I.P.), halts, retreats, pivots left, inspects crime scene, counts segments, makes mental notes, turns right again, walks on ice- and snow-ridden sidewalk to car

OldWhiteGuy (posing as Hamlet Lear) (sotto voce): "The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the skin!"

Enter Ghosts of Bob Marley & The Wailers singing: "One love, one heart... Let's get together and feel all right... Hear the children cryin'; give thanks and praise to the Lord ... Is there a place for the hopeless sinner who has hurt all mankind just to save his soul? One love, one heart ... Let's get together and feel all right!"

Exeunt Omnes

the play's the thing . . .

Play it as it lies. Lays, if you will. Play Layla, the long version, of longing, if you please. The play's the thing wherein we'll catch the conscience of the king. Play the cards you're dealt. A pair of queens. Royal straight. Royal gay. Royal blue. Play it as is. Plebeian. No overplay, excess, much, more, most. Play your hand, not heavy-handed, ham-fisted, handcuffed. No superlatives, nor absolutes. Try the comparative, for wiggle room, for loopholes, for breathing space. Infinitives. Imperatives. Let it go. Let it be. The be-all and end-all. Is what it is. No more, no less. Just this. Just now.

killing me unsoftly

This is not an insensitive rant. It offers no disrespect to victims of violence. It's a semantic commentary, a diatribe on diction. A reflection on language. In the last few days on TV or radio news reports I've been hearing the phrases "brutally murdered" or "brutally beaten." Really? Would it be "kindly murdered"? Or "gently beaten"? I don't think so. I don't think the phrase "killing with kindness" is meant to summon those meanings. And I don't think those who utter such phrases do so with Shakespearean irony, as when Hamlet has some wordplay over the murder of his father (if I recall rightly): "a little more than kin, and less than kind."

L'eau de lune

"I read the news today, oh boy . . . "

Actually, I didn't read the news; I heard it on NPR. (Who reads news anymore anyway? Sad.)

The news I refer to is that scientists studying stuff brought back decades ago from the Apollo missions have found molecules of water (water-bearing minerals, more accurately).

One scientist said, "This is not your grandmother's water." It's not oceans, or even puddles, or even liquid. Nor is it solid or gas. It is something else.

And surprising.

Surprising.

One scientist said she was so surprised she thought her instruments needed to be calibrated.

Water. We thought we knew you. We thought we understood intimately this building block of life. In our thirst for knowledge, we thought the word "water" in its infinite connotations and denotations quenched something. We were cocksure that, well (pun intended), water was at least wet, and close to solid in the frozen north, as solid as "meaning." But, alas, Water, we hardly knew you.

Water. Just a word, just a concept.

And how many other watery definitions will slosh down the drain of certainty as our world, our cosmos, rocks us with surprise?

How many other words turn out to be just like, um, water?

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
-- William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616), "Hamlet," Act 1 scene 5

Between Silence and Scream

So, he was an English major, the mass murderer and suicide, and words were not enough to exorcise his demons. Words failed him. He failed in finding power enough in his violent and obscene words. To paraphrase T.S. Eliot, he found the "time to murder and uncreate."

Last week, the topic in the U.S. was words and race and pain (or so I hear). I was in Berlin and saw in the courtyard at Humboldt University a plaque in the ground, amidst the cobbles, commemorating sadly the burning of books. Again, are words talismanic and dangerous? Or utterly futile? (Incidentally, do you recall what the tabloid topic was just before 9/11? Shark attacks. You can look it up.)

"Then how should I begin /To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?" (again Eliot).

This guy did so with bullets, finding words impotent to shape or hold or issue his rage.

"Unkennelled" shows up in Shakespeare's "Hamlet." What tragic dogs were unkennelled, unloosed, from this guy's tormented lair?

To my tiny mind, I see comparisons and similarities linking the Unabomber, Henry David Thoreau, and this guy. The rants against society, the unsparing "morality," the utter disappointment in human imperfection and injustice and moral decay. Of course, such a link is a stretch, a leap. The Unabomber was an anarchic, shadowy killer; this guy a long-simmering cauldron. And Thoreau had no bombs or guns.

I was struck by a passage in today's NY Times, quoting Lucinda Roy, a professor who taught Mr. Cho. She said he'd show up with a baseball cap pulled low, wearing sunglasses.

"He seemed to be crying behind his sunglasses,"

she said.

Now many more people are crying behind sunglasses, or in the open air. Alone and always and forever.

Miserere Nobis

Yesterday evening, I walked in Burnet Park, the dog and I.

The day after the last day.

The first day after the last.

The robin's insistent trill, a solitary vespers.

The jet engine's ascending roar in the distance, like that cobalt-blue Tuesday morning.

The light settling like a warm blanket.

The robin's chant.

The dog's piss stain on a patch of snow.

My human odor.

A ghost of a freight train rumbling.

The presence of absence.

The forsythia's whisper of yellow.

The stubborn verdancy of grass.

A broken branch under foot.

A lone robin, a sentinel and mourner,

Near the top bony branch,

Singing arias for the misbegotten

And lost.

Free Will Hunting

Scientists are arguing about whether humans possess free will. A recent popular article by Dennis Overbye in the New York Times about this stated the view of cognitive scientists, science philosophers, and bookies (just wanted to see if you were still reading). It said free will is nothing more than an illusion, a monkey riding on a tiger's back.

Well, that conveniently explains the rationale for the phenomenon of spanking the monkey, doesn't it? We can't help it.

Whew.

What a relief.

Why didn't anyone tell me this? Why didn't anyone tell me this, say, in any year from 1965 onward?

So, all you who foolishly made New Year's resolutions: beware.

Give up.

I kid, but the article quoted scientists, philosophers, priests, paupers, sex addicts, neurologists, compulsive eaters, alcoholics, physicists, strippers, cab drivers, ballerinas, and talk-show hosts. (I made up most of that list. But interviewing such folks would undoubtedly have made for a much more interesting and less-snoozy piece.)

What about good?

What about evil?

What about dieting? Or cheating? Or heroism? Or being late for work? What about deciding to do the "right" thing? Or not doing the "wrong" thing? Most of the "experts" quoted said it's all an illusion. You think you are making a decision, but your brain has already decided even before you are aware of it.

Will power is only the tensile strength of one's own disposition. One cannot increase it by a single ounce. -- Cesare Pavese (1908-1950) Italian poet, critic, novelist, and translator.


We defy augury. There's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'Tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all.
-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616) British poet and playwright.

We run the full range here, folks, from the silly to the sublime.

Carry on.

Laugh. Or....

Else.

You have no choice.

Or do you?