Lolcat Waste Land. Check it out. Ridiculous.

http://www.corprew.org/content/lolcat-wasteland/

Wow, kind of surprised that my blog is the first google hit for "Radiant Squalor." Perhaps more surprising is that it's the first hit for the Rochester quote, "As trees are by their bark embraced / Love to my soul doth cling." Did it somehow link it first because I was the one searching (?) is that crazy (?).

Speaking of the Rochester quote, it's from and early poem, and I continue to wonder whether it is meant as an innuendo or if he was at the time actually just writing more conventional poetry. Since I apparently have a problem with "irony," so I suppose I should run this by someone more "authoritative" on the subject. Maybe I'll put up the whole poem on here, why not? Can't sleep. . . hm but then I might have to go downstairs and get my volume of Rochester.

Actually kind of all poetry from the seventeenth century is innuendo anyway.

Ring for sale on etsy. Freaked me out!

Cloud Nine: Best Of Quote of the Day.

BETTY: I live for Clive. The whole aim of my life
Is to be what he looks for in a wife.
I am man’s creation you see,
And what men want is what I want to be.

CLIVE presents JOSHUA. He is played by a white.

Clive: My boy’s a jewel. Really has the knack.
You’d hardly notice that the fellow’s black.

YOU ARE DARK LIKE THIS CONTINENT

Okay, so as the last play of the quarter, I'm teaching Cloud Nine, by Caryl Churchill. I was a bit taken aback when I read it (I assigned it without having read it before). And so, for your amusement (?) I will be including a series of "best of" quotations. I'm not going to attempt analysis, but just as a caveat, yes, Churchill definitely intended some absurdity here, but since the play was written in 1979, it is not clear to me which aspects of the play were absurd to her vs. absurd to me.

But, enjoy! Esp. if I've already attempted to tell you about these.

BEST OF #1 (this is really the best/worst). This is from the first act, which is set in "Victorian Africa":

--------

CLIVE: You will be raped by cannibals.

MRS SAUNDERS: I just wanted to get out of your house.

CLIVE: My God, what women put us through. Cruel, cruel. I think you are the sort of woman who would enjoy whipping somebody. I’ve never met one before.

MRS SAUNDERS: Can I tell you something, Clive?

CLIVE: Let me tell you something first. Since you came to the house I have had an erection twenty-four hours a day except for ten minutes after the time we had intercourse.

MRS SAUNDERS: I don’t think that’s physically possible.

CLIVE: You are causing me appalling physical suffering. Is this the way to treat a benefactor?

(…)

CLIVE: Caroline, if you were shot with poisoned arrows do you know what I’d do? I’d fuck your dead body and poison myself. Caroline, you smell amazing. You terrify me. You are dark like this continent. Mysterious. Treacherous. When you rode to me through the night. When you fainted in my arms. When I came to you in your bed, when I lifted the mosquito netting, when I said let me in, let me in. Oh don’t shut me out, Caroline, let me in.

He has been caressing her feet and legs. He disappears completely under her skirt.

MRS SAUNDERS: Please stop. I can’t concentrate. I want to go home. I wish I didn’t enjoy the sensation because I don’t like you, Clive. I do like living in your house where there’s plenty of guns. But I don’t like you at all. But I do like the sensation. Well I’ll have it then. I’ll have it, I’ll have it. . .

(. . . )

CLIVE: Caroline, you are so voracious. Do let go. Tidy yourself up. There’s a hair in my mouth.

From philosophicallexicon.com. I mostly get these :-P. But my favorite is the "Derrida" entry.


aquinas, n.pl. (from a-, not, and quine) Philosophers who refuse to deny the existence or importance of something real or significant.
assearltion, n. A speech act whose illocutionary force is identical with the speaker. "He assearled himself across the room."

austintatious, adj. Displaying in a fine sense the niceties of the language. "I'm not sure what his point was, but his presentation was certainly austintatious."

derrida. A sequence of signs that fails to signify anything beyond itself. From a old French nonsense refrain: "Hey nonny derrida, nonny nonny derrida falala."

heidegger, n. A ponderous device for boring through thick layers of substance. "It's buried so deep we'll have to use a heidegger." Also useful for burying one's own past.

immanuel, n. (from im-, not, + manual, guide or rulebook) A set of instructions for doing something that kant (q.v.) be done.

kitch, n.Popular and pretentious academic nonsense, such as creationism or pop sociobiology. Hence kitcher, n. a kitch critic. "If only we had a kitcher around to tackle the anthropic principle!"

schell, n. An impermeable protective covering made entirely of German technical jargon, on the premise that what cannot be understood cannot be refuted; a useful hiding place for Ideas (though it may hold only one). Hence schell, v. to hide within a schell, e.g. "In the Phenomenology you can really see Hegel schelling his theory from any possible empiricist criticisms."


wittgenstone (from Old High Anglo-Austrian, witty and Stein) (1) v. To deny resolutely the existence or importance of something real or significant, on the ground that the grammatical pre-conditions for such a denial do not obtain. “Some think qualia should be quined or fostered – but I think they should be wittgenstoned.” (2) n. Clever but utterly unrelated metaphor used as an argumentative move to silence the opponent. “He argued that on my view I don’t know that I’m in pain; but since he’s not a good kripkographer, I managed to outsmart him with a wittgenstone.”