DISCREDITABLE LIP CURLS: HAND ME THAT FAN
I.
Margaret Atwood is utterly brilliant, witty, a tremendous novelist and an embarrassingly poor poet.
II.
Madonna's eyes now drift like separate Madagascars (Madgagascars?) from the main continent. What a public service! Women who lack limitless wealth and recuperation time for plastic surgery, i.e. all women, are now freed from the Big Lie. The limitations period of youth indeed cannot be tolled.
III.
The emails of an acquaintance have morphed to include a tagline quote from Mother Teresa: "I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love." I find this contention as dubious as the existence of a runner's endorphin high, although I may well be dually-discounted as cynical and pain-avoidant.
Even more disturbing, however, the Yodaesque quote has twined like kudzu into my acquaintance's writing. For example, "I want to be done with all insincerity forever and forever. What more painful, troubling insincerity could there be than to not birth and share the fullness of who we truly are into the world."
I am reminded of this exchange from Dorothy Sayer's Gaudy Night:
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"She even wrote a book."
"About agapemones?"
"Yes. And the Higher Wisdom. And Beautiful Thought. That sort of thing. Full of bad syntax."
"Oh, lord! I can't think why fancy religions should have such a ghastly effect on one's grammar."
"It's a kind of intellectual rot that sets in, I'm afraid. But which of them causes the other, or whether they're both symptoms of something else, I don't know. What with Trimmer's mental healing, and Henderson going nudist--"
"No!"
"Fact. There she is, at the next table. That's why she's so brown."
"And her frock so badly cut. If you can't be naked, be as ill-dressed as possible, I suppose."
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HERR KEPLER'S NOTEBOOK
Time is the bully anchor of the opposing tug-rope team.
The person with a happy home life tracks glitter through the world; the solitary person leaves snowprints.
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"The grasshopper warbler's song comes up out of the earth just as you think the day is quietening down. It has no prelude or warm-up: it starts midperformance, as if switched on by the dark, as it if has been singing like this beneath the earth until it was dark enough to come to the surface. As if, though we hardly hear it, this singing never stops."
A Year on the Wing (Tim Dee)
All writing and cartoons on this site copyright 2008-2010 Julia Martin, unless otherwise credited.
The person with a happy home life tracks glitter through the world; the solitary person leaves snowprints.
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"The grasshopper warbler's song comes up out of the earth just as you think the day is quietening down. It has no prelude or warm-up: it starts midperformance, as if switched on by the dark, as it if has been singing like this beneath the earth until it was dark enough to come to the surface. As if, though we hardly hear it, this singing never stops."
A Year on the Wing (Tim Dee)
All writing and cartoons on this site copyright 2008-2010 Julia Martin, unless otherwise credited.
No more hurt? What wicked nonsense. It always hurts. But perhaps she wasn't proposing a timeline, only a structure? There are persistent hints of a far side to all that pain.
ReplyDeleteBut in this world? No, it hurts, that's all.