Adventures in the Pointless Forest

More!

This is a good illustration of one of the many faces of death and the abyss that can appear in those late night moments described in my last post:

Fortunately I seem to be over it for now. Sleep and I are back in one another's good graces and I am glad of it.

Lately and unrelatedly, Jane has developed a very decided attachment to the sign for "more." In her very small ideolect it signifies something along the general lines of "I feel a lack." This is not really particularly more communicative than having no vocabulary at all, but she seems to feel that it adds value.

Sometimes she will look very pointedly at your electronic device or coffee or other unsuitable thing and sign "more more more more more." Then comes a pause to see if you are too dense to have gotten the point, apparently so, more more more more more, good grief, no one can be as stupid as you act, surely, more more more, you get it? more. more? more more more, oh fuck it, there's no getting through to these people, I'll just grab it.

Sometimes she will amble up to you and do a little offhand "more," with a shrug: whatcha got for me? Anything? Just checkin'. No? I'll be on my way, then, ma'am.

Occasionally, teething, she will sob BUH HUH HUH HUH HUH HUH more? BUH HUH HUH. It lends the whole scene a very touching pathos.

There is something to be said for having a such a broadly expressive "more." No need to worry about fine gradations of desire, or about phrasing for politeness. Jane-more would be a fine comment for those occasions when I ask my students a question about something near the end of their assigned reading, for example, and they all find something very interesting to look at that is not me. Or when I try FOUR TIMES to find a way through the hydralike earthquake-retrofitting construction to my lunch appointment, the intended start of which is slipping further and further into the past. Or when the family of six walking in front of me begins to move more... and more... slowly... and creaks... to... a dead... halt.

But as I am a grown woman who can both hear and speak, instead of baby-signing I may acquire an air horn. MORE!

Second verse, same as the first.

I have been exchanging a lot of planning emails with other academics this week. These messages might be too brief or blunt if we didn't plump them up with pleasantries. No one wants that. We must at all costs be pleasing and plump!

On the other hand, it is clear that none of us has a repertoire of stock phrases at all large enough to stretch to the number of stock spaces that need filling. So, on the theory that what worked once will work forever and always, we are very VERY ready to reiterate just how very much we are looking forward to things. 

I am looking forward to this event I am planning, with these speakers I am wrangling, and they are all looking forward to it, too. The organizer of the event I am attending is very much looking forward to my visit. I am looking forward to it as well! I am looking forward to her talk, and his talk, and meeting everyone. She is looking forward to everything. He is looking forward to everything. We are all so looking forward to what promises to be a very exciting forward-looking forward forward forward. Look!

When it is all over, I'm sure we can look back with pride at how thoroughly we looked forward to it all.

I'll bleb YOUR withering hay.

This Sunday took place in the shadow of a painfully blocked milk duct. The progression of events went about like this:

1. Good morning! Wow, my tit is certainly very full of milk.
2. Oh, damn.
3. Hours of fruitless hot compresses, hot showers, glasses of water, ibuprofin, attempts at expressing with the dairy-cow machine, and lethargic moaning (lethargy and moaning both of course known to be highly fruitful at the best of times).
4. A timid and tentative piercing of the bleb with a sterile needle.
5. THANK CHRIST. Bless you, suckling infant, for the powerful hoover of your maw.
6. Forty-five minutes of limp, yet enthusiastic, vocal relief.

Quite a satisfying dramatic arc, in the end, with all the ingredients—foreshadowing, rising action, climax, falling action, dénouement—just as they taught us in school.

And what a fine word "bleb" is, incidentally, isn't it? It's even better, as so many words are, if you take the time to read up on it in the OED. There you will find such splendid sentences as 

fig.1651 [Henry] MORE Enthus. Triumph* (1656) 180 You blebs of venery, you bags of filth!

and 

1880 J. E. BURTON Handbk. Midwives §38. 25 The ovum, or egg, is at first a little bladder, or bleb.

The second of these may seem fairly unremarkable on the face of it, but I think you'll find that it's very catchy. Try it aloud: The ovum! Or egg. Is at first a little bladder! Or bleb.

You'll also be happy to learn that "bleb" can also be a verb, meaning (and the exact phrasing of this is the good bit, obviously) "to furnish with blebs." Hence:

1821 CLARE Vill. Minstr. II. 84 While big drops..bleb the withering hay with pearly gems.

Do you think this was written to be romantic, poetic, evocative, tender, lovely? I believe it was. But I fear, John Clare, that this line has not stood the test of time.

 

*Full title: Enthusiasmus triumphatus, or a discourse of the nature, causes, kinds and cure of enthusiasme.

Where nobody's dreams come true.

Okay, speaking of La Brea Carpets, can you believe that none—NOT ONE!—of these places is called that? What a missed opportunity.

Odds and ends

Jane will occasionally produce a perfect, implausible arc segment frown, as seen in the popular emoticon :(

"I hope someday to capture that one frown on film. Have you seen it?"

"Yes! Only once or twice though. She doesn't do it very often."

"True. It's rare. It's collectible. It's a get!"

Impossible to find on eBay, too, and there are no frown farmers, the way there are MMORPG gold farmers. (Although imagine if there were! Chain smoking Asian frown farmers working eighteen hours a day in combination internet cafe/creches.)

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I found this snippet in an old text file. I wonder if I planned to make something more of it, or if this was all there was:

It is an attempt to loosen the mental blockages to recording information and to scrape away the tartar of convention that handicaps its retrieval. The solution is by nature nonconformist.

"Wow. William Gibson character, is that you? I can't tell what this program is now because I read that part and I can't make any sense of it."

"Yeah, ignore that."

"I can't. It's taken over my brain. It's a virus."

I have no memory of this conversation at all, but it turns out that the program in question was Notational Velocity, which is in fact a very nice little thing, if not in fact by nature particularly nonconformist. Handy for keeping track of my shopping list, though.

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Finally, Lizardbreath will be pleased to learn that I have a Georgette Heyer novel on hold at the library. Also a number of Jane Langton books. I can't remember which one of you tipped me off to the fact that she wrote novels for grownups, but I'm excited.

I'm also excited about re-reading the (out of print?) Boyhood of Grace Jones. I never seem to be able to track down the other book about that character, The Majesty of Grace, aka Her Majesty, Grace Jones. Have any of you ever read it?

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Oh! PS. If you would like to obtain the original wug test pictures, to test the morphological generalizations of your own loved ones, see here.

Because. That's why.

"Pinkie is a good nickname. It's an especially good nickname for a baby. You know why? Because, A, babies are pink. And B, you buy them to feed to your snake."

Mole.

This man does not like his apartment complex. There are RUDE PEOPLE in the building, and CARS TOWED JUST BECAUSE and THE MAINTENANCE people come in with no warning. But most importantly:

MOLE
I have mole growing around my bat tub, the maintenance told me it's not mole and just cocked it well it came back IT'S MOLE!

 

For the past two days, Steve has been treated to frequent faux-exasperated expostulations from my corner:

"Well, hell. IT'S MOLE."

"Take my word for it, IT'S MOLE."

"IT'S MOLE, okay, it's fucking MOLE."

Oddly, he seems to like it. Just before bed last night, I broke into his reverie. "For fuck's sake!" I said angrily. "Guess what."

He looked up, startled and concerned. I glared. He stared. Then an expression of great joy lit up his face. "It's mole!" he exclaimed. "Yes!" I said. "It's mole!"

Do you think he'll cock it?

The past is another country.

They say "boner" differently there.

What a happy circumstance it is for us here in the present that "boner" once meant "stupid blunder." I own a copy of this collection of Batman stories featuring the Joker. It contains the infamous "Joker's Comedy of Errors," in which the titular villain goes on a crime spree organized around history's greatest boners. A very partial list of its delights:

Only a sense of humor like the Joker's could think of tranlating boners into crimes!

When the clown prince of crookdom sets out to re-create the classic errors of history for personal gain--and in addition readies a special boner just for Batman--it all adds up to one of the most exciting adventures ever to befall the dynamic duo.

The Joker's Collection of the Great Boners of History.

So! They'll laugh at my boner, will they?! I'll show them! I'll show them how many boners the Joker can make!

This emphasis on boners has given me an idea for a new adventure in crime!

I will take the great boners of all time and turn them into crimes!

See this picture? It shows a big boner of modern vintage.

Soon, Batman will make the boner of the year!

I'm worried about the boner he's readying for YOU!

It represents one of the classic boners of all time.

Confound that Batman! It is well that I am ready to trick him into HIS boner.

Gotham City will rue the day it mentioned the word boner!

Quite. The past also gives us this:

Vintage collections of howlers, illustrated by Dr Seuss! And this:

No excuse for draft boards to pull boners now (Jan 1949).

You might think that the 1980s were too recent to produce a prime-time character unblinkingly named Boner, but history disagrees.

What's more, the actor, Andrew Koenig, appeared as the Joker in a popular fan-made short film called "Batman: Dead End." Can this be a coincidence? Surely not.

That's right, Simpy. Never apologize, never explain.

Boner.

Gasket.

Today I learned that you can search the 1911 census of England and Wales online. I am finding it fascinating. First I looked up my old relatives, then I found Virginia Woolf (which is to say Adeline Virginia Stephen), then I got into looking for misspelled names. Fans of Terry Pratchett will be happy to learn that there are eight Magrats listed, though no Note Spellings.

This comes up because we are currently stuck for a middle name. On the one hand we have an assortment of serious options, all about equally as appealing as the next, all carrying a distinct risk of being all too trendy, blah blah et cetera. On the other hand we have

Zucchini

"It's popular in Japan!"

Vlurma

Fresh from the biography of America's oldest senator, Robert Byrd.

Facility

"It's a virtue name!"

Any other bright ideas?

Cunning stunts.

My parents were always willing to tell me what "bad" words meant. This gave me a certain degree of clout and satisfaction, because in those days cussing and related topics were surrounded by a great deal of highly unreliable mythology. I remember once coming home and reporting to my father that someone on the bus had claimed that putting up your middle finger meant "all the swears."

"Oh, no," my father said. "It means 'fuck you.'"

I also had a steady source of material largely derived, as in A Christmas Story and the Jean Shepherd stories the movie is based based on, from listening to my father attempt to fix things. This passage, for instance, rings very familiar:

"THAT SON OF A BITCH HAS GONE OUT AGAIN! THAT GODDAMN CLANKY SON OF A BITCH!"

The hot-air registers breathed into the clammy air the whistling breath of the Antarctic. A moment of silence. The stillness of the tundra gripped the living room; the hoarfrost sparkled like jewels in the moonlight on my mother's Brillo pad in the kitchen sink.

CLANK! K-BOOM! CLANK! K-BOOM! CLANK!

"SONOFABITCH!"

CLANK! K-BOOM! K-BOOM! CLANKCLANK!

But for all that, there was one word that I learned much, much later than the others, by a margin of years. I'd asked my parents what the worst swear word was. "Oh, 'motherfucker,' I suppose," they said. Hardly.

It was not until I was twelve or thirteen, amazingly enough, that I finally encountered the last one. This will seem really especially backward to any of you who speak British English, but I think it was pretty backward, regardless.

I remember the context well: it was in a graffito on the public mailbox near my house, and it was about a girl in my carpool. Her name was not Helga, but it was something very nearly as improbable, so let's call her that.

HELGA IS A CUNT

it said.

Poor Helga. She was pleasant, as I remember, a recent transplant from Austria whose English was excellent although she persisted in calling me "Wera," friendly and eager to please, an ordinary-looking girl with a nice habit of saying "Pardon?" instead of "Excuse me?" when she hadn't heard or fully understood your last remark. She also made me feel a little twitchy, because she gave -- or so she and others said -- blow jobs to college boys for money.

(Seventh-grade cash for blow job transactions have apparently not gone out of style. A few years ago, a teacher friend told us about a recent scandal at his school. A girl had been performing for selected boys at fifty cents a pop. This little prostitution ring had eventually been found out because the boys kept coming into the office to ask for change. Eventually someone wondered why they needed so many quarters, and why they looked so damn cagey when they asked for them.

I realize that it reflects very poorly on me that my first reaction to this story was: "If only she'd realized. She clearly could have been charging a dollar.")

Adult me looks back on pre-teen me and is sorry that Helga freaked her out. I was young for my age and couldn't quite deal with the blow job information. So even though she was nice, I gave her a wide berth and didn't return her phone calls. Maybe the college boys were even a figment, I don't know. In any case, I hope she's happy somewhere now, that if she's still giving blow jobs, it's for love and not money, and that it's been quite some time since anyone has called her a cunt.