Author: wlm3

Uses and Abuses of Figurative Language, Donald Trump Edition

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from left to right Chris Matthews, Hillary Clinton, Edward Snowden, Vladimir Putin, Julian Assange, Donald Trump. Anderson Cooper

from left to right Chris Matthews, Hillary Clinton, Edward Snowden, Vladimir Putin, Julian Assange, Donald Trump. Anderson Cooper

 

“Figures of speech are spices that add zest to language,” a tired textbook author might write.

But even though the previous sentence lazily relies on a stale metaphor, it’s still more pleasurable to read than “Figures of speech are words and phrases used in other than their literal sense, or in other than their ordinary locutions, in order to suggest a picture or image or for other special effect.’”[1]

Here’s the great American poet Richard Wilbur on the subject:

 

Praise in Summer

by Richard Wilbur

Obscurely yet most surely called to praise,

As summer sometimes calls us all, I said

The hills are heavens full of branching ways

Where star-nosed moles fly overhead the dead;

I said the trees are mines in air, I said

See how the sparrow burrows in the sky!

And then I wonder why this mad instead

Perverts our praise to uncreation, why

Such savor’s in this wrenching things awry.

Does sense so stale that it must needs derange

The world to know it? To a praiseful eye

Should it not be enough of fresh and strange

That trees grow green, and moles can course in clay,

And sparrows sweep the ceiling of our day?

In the octave of this sonnet, Wilbur, via metaphors, reverses the natural order, turning “hills” into “sky” and “moles” into “birds” that fly/burrow over the bones beneath them. He then reverses the mirror and transforms a “tree” into a “mine” and “sparrows” into “moles.”

In the sestet, he laments that even the most miraculous aspects of nature eventually bore us, so we end up through figurative language “perverting” what should by themselves fascinate us in their natural state — things of wonder like green trees, moles, and sparrows. Oddly enough, after questioning the need for figurative language, Wilbur paradoxically ends the poem with a metaphor as “sparrows sweep the ceiling of our day” — though at least the metaphor reflects the world in its correct orientation with the sky above and the ground below.

Because, as Wilbur notes, “figures of speech “wrench things awry,” their use can lead to misunderstanding. For example, if you don’t read much poetry, you might find “Praise for Summer” baffling, if not incomprehensible.

Problems can also arise when the less perceptive among us take figurative language literally, as Donald Trump claimed last week in his controversy du semaine.

In case you’re just emerging from solitary confinement, Trump made a literal accusation about the origins of ISIS and then tried to claim, post shitstorm, that he didn’t mean what he had said literally. He then cast the folks at CNN as dullards incapable of appreciating his use of irony.

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/764045345332396032

Allow me to render his accusation in verse as I might if I were quizzing my high school students.

Barack and Hillary founded ISIS,

So they are to blame for our current crisis.

Identify the figure of speech found in the couplet:

A.understatement   B. verbal irony (sarcasm)   C. synecdoche   D. hyperbole

The correct answer is D. Trump wasn’t employing sarcasm; he didn’t mean to convey that Obama and Hillary didn’t create ISIS by stating the opposite. If he meant the accusation figuratively (which I doubt), he was waxing hyperbolic – exaggerating – suggesting that Obama and Clinton’s mismanagement of foreign affairs led to the rise of the so-called Islamic State, thus making them de facto founders of ISIS. That he mocks others for not getting his sarcasm when he isn’t being sarcastic is worthy of sarcasm. Like we used to say in the 7th grade, “Smooth move, X-Lax.”

[cue Alanis Morrisette’s “Ironic”]

At any rate, you Republicans out there can surely lament that Trump lacks the verbal acuity of Ronald Reagan, who as deftly as Richard Wilbur turned language topsy-turvy, calling ICBMs “peace keepers” and taxes “revenue enhancers,” but then Reagan, who hand-wrote his own letters, was a voracious reader, which Trump obviously is not.

[1] Via Dictionary.com

Reagan-5694

 

Bachelor Party at Chico Feo’s: An Anthropological Study

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chico bachelor party

 

Last Saturday, I had the opportunity as an anthropologist to observe a late afternoon bachelor’s party at Folly Beach’s little corner of the Caribbean, Chico Feo.

By the way, bachelor parties for centuries have been traditional components of mating and marriage rituals in the West. Whether you’re bidding “farewell to bachelorhood” in Munich at a Junggesellenabschied or in Arles marking the “burial of the life of a boy” at an enterrement de vie de jeune fill, you can be assured of one commonality: the Junges and garçons are gonna get shit-faced just like the lads in Liverpool and the dudes of Malibu.

 

Berlin Junggesellenabschied

Berlin Junggesellenabschied

Indeed, even though it was merely four in the afternoon at Chico Feo, a few of the entourage exhibited telltale signs of intoxication — sleepy, glazed eyes; mouths that hung open; wobbly legs. The first reveler in this condition I encountered kept bumping into the vacant bar stool adjacent to me.  Charlie, Chico’s world-class bartender, informed me with a scowl that these fellows were part of a bachelor’s party. It appeared that Charlie had already cut this fellow off.

I’d estimate these young men to be from the Northeastern United States, a section of the country in which good-natured mockery seems to be an ubiquitous social custom (see Tolerating Middle Class Northerners for Dummies). The bros bantered about slinging insults, ordering beer after beer, and slurping down in one swallow Chico’s delicious tacos as if they were oysters.

Most of these young men were large in stature, and even if they weren’t, they sported over-sized biceps and an array of body art ranging from rustic gunmetal blue barbed-wire wraparounds to high-end multicolored patterns that screamed Gauguin. It seemed, though, that some had acquired their muscular upper arms a while ago because now their abs resembled not so much washboards as loads of laundry.

It was interesting to try to determine who reigned as alphas of the cartload. One “dude” particularly seemed in charge, a vociferous twenty-something who looked as if his ancestors may have entered Ellis Island from Brindisi. He had an olive completion, aquiline beak, and jet-black short-shorn hair covered by a baseball cap worn backwards. He was conversing with some female patrons, boasting of the Adonis-like beauty of one of his friends, Paul, a ridiculously good-looking and fit fellow whose sandy hair fluttered in the on-shore breeze. Paul was sitting at the bar but looking in the opposite direction at the bacchanal taking place beneath the overarching trees that provide shade for Chico’s tables and chairs.

“These chicks want you to take off your shirt, Paul,” the alpha shouted in an accent that I’d place somewhere close to Newark.

Paul sat there passively grinning.

“C’mon Paul.   Show ‘em what you got.”

The females nodded their heads, and the ringmaster shouted, “C’mon, Paul, take off your shirt. Now! Show us your tits,” and a chant began “Show us your tits, show us your tits,” to which bartender Charlie, the real alpha, put an immediate stop. The ringleader opened his mouth and raised his arm as if he were going to continue, but Charlie’s stare short-circuited the bravado, and the erstwhile alpha dropped his hand and benignly smiled what I would call (removing my pith helmet of anthropological professionalism for a second) a stupid, shit-eating grin.

“Hey, which one’s getting married?” I asked Charlie.

“I don’t care,” he said shaking his head.

Unlike Dian Fossey or Jane Goodall, I didn’t ingratiate myself my this cartload[1] of not-so-fun-folks to follow them to their next destination, the Tides Hotel where they were wisely staying, eliminating even the need of Uber for their locomotion. However, I suspect that before the evening came to its inevitable end, these celebrants would witness some form of burlesque for hire, i.e., a stripper performing that age-old ritual.

I’ll leave you with this from Wikipedia:

In Israel, the bachelor party is called מסיבת רווקים. Such parties often feature heavy drinking and sometimes the presence of strippers.

Israeli מסיבת רווקים

Israeli מסיבת רווקים

Seems like a pattern, huh.

 

[1] Did you know you call a group of chimps a “cartload?” It’s a troop of gorillas and baboons, a barrel of monkeys, but a cartload of chimps. Go figure.

Overcoming Writer’s Block/ Avoiding Suicide

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painting by Rigney
painting by Rigney

There’s nothing worse than writer’s block. Okay, maybe famine, genocide, or a Mensa mixer is worse.

Ever been to a Mensa mixer?

Imagine it.  The space — a Quality Inn banquet room? Something more upscale? A Hyatt?

Tables, carpet patterns, windows, drapery, caterers.

Characters? Base them on people you know. One of your old high school teachers, an aging history droner with badly dyed hair (you choose the color).

Mix and unmatch outfits.

Add a recent widow with helmet-like hair and a nasal Midwestern accent, a brayer when amused.

You, the protagonist, a lonely man or woman who has joined out of desperation. There’s someone there you sort of dig, maybe.  Make him or her up yourself. Have your would-be love interest constantly checking a Tinder feed.

Or not.

It’s all up to you because I’m not going to write that short story. Writing fiction is too damned demanding.

Crucial Tip #1: One of the most effective ways to overcome writer’s block is to give up writing.

1378995960411.cached

* * *

If you’re a poet and stuck, you can always come up with an image and start from there, whether it’s a memory from childhood, your alcoholic father snoring on a sofa at four PM on a Saturday, his hairy over-abundant stomach exposed beneath a too-small wifebeater, the stomach inflating and deflating while a college football game blares from the TV.

Or a tropically bright painted bunting with nervous eyes doing reconnaissance. He darts out of a thicket as he cops drops trickling from the so-called waterfall in an aquatic garden in your back yard. He flits back, disappearing into shadows.

Cf. Wordsworth and Dickinson.

water garden

Coming up with ideas for poems isn’t that taxing, but writing a good poem is almost impossible, and there’s absolutely no money in it.  Plus poets tend to commit suicide with such abnormally high rates that actuaries prefer to insure wingsuit fliers over sonneteers.

Crucial Tip # 2: One of the most effective ways to overcome writer’s block is to give up writing poetry. (It just very well could save your life).

Dead Suicide Poets Society
Dead Suicide Poets Society

* * *

Therefore, if you’re one of these self-indulgent people who must write, I suggest non-fiction, and it would seem there’s so much to write about – the homeless, McMansions, the state of the spray-on tan industry, the Death of God/the Republican Party, the history of Mensa/the fallibility inherent in IQ testing, sleep apnea, the Nebraska Cornhuskers, the evolution of intimate apparel, the problem of writing block and how to overcome it.

Fox News Gumbo: A Poem (with apologies to Master Will)

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Fox news gumbo

 

Conjuration, mumbo jumbo,

Let’s make a pot of FOX News gumbo.

 

Wink of Palin, PAC ad break

In a black maw boil and bake;

 

Grumble, grumble, moil and mumble;

broadcast shit and stir up trouble.

 

Eye of Newt, toe of Santorum,

Copies of the Penthouse Forum.

 

Newscasts rife with stirred-up trouble,

Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.

 

Grumble, grumble, moil and mumble;

broadcast shit and stir up trouble.

 

Admin fuck-up – Benghazee!!!

Carnage worse than Wounded Knee!!!

 

Ersatz outrage, squawking heads,

looped forever in endless threads.

 

Rush Limbaugh: misogyny;

Xenophobic: Sean Hannity.

 

Israel, the Middle East?

Love the war but hate the peace.

 

Debunk science, evolution,

global warming, air pollution.

 

Grumble, grumble, moil and mumble;

Broadcast shit and stir up trouble.

 

Cool it with some David Frum

 

Presto!

 

Something wicked this way comes . . .

Roger Ailes as Bacchus

Roger Ailes as Bacchus

The Trump Campaign: A Tragical Farce or Farcical Tragedy?

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Mr Trump

“Life is a comedy to those who think and a tragedy for those who feel.” – Horace Walpole

When taken to extremes, melodramas and farces turn topsy-turvy and elicit the opposite effect of their original intent – overdone melodramas provoke laughter instead of tears; overdone farces can provoke palatable discomfort and sometimes fear.

For example, check out the trailer for the overly melodramatic movie Reefer Madness. Although it conforms to Laurence Perrine’s description of melodrama as attempting “to arouse feelings of fear and pity,” it does so through “cruder means” by employing “oversimplified plots” and “flat characterization.” In other words, everything is overdone, suspension of disbelief shattered, so the audience ends up laughing instead of trembling.

Farces are by definition exaggerated comedy, and given the inherent cruelty in comedy, it’s not surprising that when taken to the extreme, farces can create discomfort.   Take, David Lynch’s 1977 movie Eraserhead, for example. Here’s an excerpt from Dennis Lim’s David Lynch: A Man from Another Place in which he describes a few scenes from the movie:

The first section of the movie with extended dialogue is also when most audiences realize they are watching a comedy of sorts. Lynch turns a staple of sitcom humor — the meet-the-parents dinner – into an ominous minefield of absurdist non sequiters, a deadpan farce [my emphasis] of misbehaving bodies. On the couch next to Henry [the protagonist], Mary [Henry’s consort] suffers an epileptic fit, which Mrs. X assuages by grabbing her daughter’s jaw and brushing her hair. Meanwhile, a litter of puppies nurse hungrily on their mother. Mr. X rants about the woes of being a plumber (“People think pipes grow in their homes!”), standing before an enormous duct that could have sprung from the ground. In the kitchen, Mrs. X tosses the salad with the help of catatonic Grandma X’s lifeless limbs. When Henry cuts into the squab-like creature that Mr. X has roasted for dinner, viscous blood spills from its cavity and its thighs wag up and down, sending Mrs. X into a drooling erotic trance. Then comes the bombshell, “there’s a baby,” at which point Henry gets a nosebleed.

Here’s a clip from the dinner in which someone has spliced in brief scenes of Robert De Niro, which, obviously, weren’t in the original. I don’t think they’re too distracting, though.

Compare the tone of that scene to this description of the English granddaddy of all farces, the puppet show Punch and Judy, The quote comes from a paper written by Ian Horswill of Northwestern University entitled “Punch and Judy AI Playset: A Generative Farce Manifesto Or: The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Predicate Calculus.”

In Collier’s historical script (Collier and Cruikshank 2006), Mr. Punch successively beats to death his friend’s dog, his own baby, his own wife, his horse, the doctor who tries to treat him after he’s injured by the horse, a policeman (beaten but not killed), and the Devil himself. When his wife confronts him over the murder of his own child, Mr. Punch, who wants to have sex with her, replies that she’ll soon have another one.

Thus, extreme farce shares with tragedy irrationality and darkness but lacks any positive cathartic effects.

I think most would agree that Donald Trump’s campaign has denigrated into a farce.   I’ll spare you an encyclopedic rehash of voluminous blunders that have characterized the campaign and merely offer that yesterday morning Emily Nussbaum wondered on Twitter what outrage Trump might come up during the day.  She posited his assaulting a baby or biting a bat’s head off.  After the incident in Virginia when Trump had a baby removed from his rally, Nussbaum tweeted this:

Perhaps I’m getting soft in my old age, but I’m starting to feel pity for Trump – pathos in the old Greek sense of the term.  Sure, he’s a terrible human being with skin as thin as Zig Zag Ultra Thin Cigarette Rolling Papers, but imagine the insecurities he must harbor. Imagine being such a hemophiliac of rage, every little nick resulting in arterial spurting; imagine being your own worst enemy. Imagine how unhappy he must be. Think Michael Henchard of The Mayor of Casterbridge or Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man – but without the self-awareness.

Let’s hope for his own sake – and for our own — that he loses the election.

 

A Fractured Nursery Rhyme (or Georgie Porgie Meets Simple Simon Meets Roger Ailes)

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Roger Ailes

 

Mrs. Mooney met a loony

standing in a puddle.

 

Said the loony to Mrs. Mooney,

“You think you’d like to cuddle?

 

With her head held high,

She walked on by,

 

And her wits began to gather.

“No thanks,” said she, “I reckon I’d rather not rather.”

 

from a Child’s Back Alley of Verses

 

On Bad Poetry (Which I’ve Written Lots Of)

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painting by Jivan Lee

painting by Jivan Lee

Just because a poem is famous, doesn’t mean it’s any good. Take Joyce Kilmer’s ‘Trees,” which I think I was forced to memorize every consecutive year in grade school.

 

I think that I shall never see

A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest

Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,

And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in Summer wear

A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;

Who intimately lives with rain[1].

Poems are made by fools like me,

But only God can make a tree.

 

How is this poem bad? Let me count the ways. Its meter is sing-songy, its imagery idiotic. Tree roots don’t resemble mouths, nor does the earth around them resemble a breast, so it’s hard to visualize a tree breastfeeding, nor do you want to.

Then in the penultimate couplet, the tree now has a bosom and has been “intimate” with rain. So essentially the tree is personified; it’s a suckling female child with bosoms who raises her arms to pray to God, who seems to have fashioned each tree individually with His own hands.

[Understatement alert] Here are some considerably better lines of verse concerning a tree:

Labour is blossoming or dancing where

The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,

Nor beauty born out of its own despair,

Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.

O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,

Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

Yet, the author of this exquisite example of ottava rima, WB Yeats, also produced this poem, entitled “To a Squirrel at Kyle-Na-No”:

Come play with me;

Why should you run

Through the shaking tree

As though I’d a gun

To strike you dead?

When all I would do

Is to scratch your head

And let you go.

Squirrel to poet: You must be kidding me, man.

Dylan, whom I revere, can also come up with some clunkers.[2]   For example,

Ah, my friends from the prison, they ask unto me

“How good, how good does it feel to be free?”

And I answer them most mysteriously

“Are birds free from the chains of the skyway?”

What’s up with the Biblical diction? And the paradox of the last line doesn’t work as an image, and what does it have to do with the rest of the song, which is about breaking up with someone because her sister is an asshole?

My favorite type of bad poem was written intentionally to be bad. I have one of these, a poem I wrote after having read mass murderer Pee Wee Gaskins oral autobiography. I had to write the poem to purge myself of Pee Wee’s tortured syntax and obscene backwoods locutions.[3] I reproduce it here with the warning that it’s disgusting in about every way possible, so if you’re squeamish and find things in extraordinarily bad taste offensive, quit reading now:

Pee Wee Gaskins Stopping by a Lake on a Summer Evening

 

Whose corpse this is I ought to know

Cause I’m the one what kilt it so.

I hope nobody come round here

To watch it in the lake me throw.

 

My common law wife must think it queer

I ain’t been home in over a year.

Running up and down the coast

Slitting throats and drinking beer.

 

Ain’t got no ID on him, cocksucker.

Think he said his name was Drucker.

Now I got him chained up like Houdini.

Teach him call me a scrawny motherfucker.

 

Them chains sure makes a body sink fast

But this here good feeling don’t never last

Just like a piece of prison ass

Just like a piece of prison ass . . .

 

Of course, the greatest intentionally bad poem ever written is the brilliant “Ode to Stephen Dowling Bots, Dec’d” by the great Mark Twain.

 

Enjoy!

 

And did young Stephen sicken,

And did young Stephen die?

And did the sad hearts thicken,

And did the mourners cry?

 

No; such was not the fate of

Young Stephen Dowling Bots;

Though sad hearts round him thickened,

‘Twas not from sickness’ shots.

 

No whooping-cough did rack his frame,

Nor measles drear, with spots;

Not these impaired the sacred name

Of Stephen Dowling Bots.

 

Despised love struck not with woe

That head of curly knots,

Nor stomach troubles laid him low,

Young Stephen Dowling Bots.

 

O no. Then list with tearful eye,

Whilst I his fate do tell.

His soul did from this cold world fly,

By falling down a well.

 

They got him out and emptied him;

Alas it was too late;

His spirit was gone for to sport aloft

In the realms of the good and great.

[1] Huh?

[2] You can read my argument why he deserves a Nobel Prize here.

[3] When can read about my close encounter with Pee Wee here.

89dcb58198f5d58b8271e6dc67c03a83

 

Tales of the 1%: Paradise Lost

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Typical Sabbath at our home

Typical Sabbath at our home

My wife Judy and I are the worst type of snobs and look down our noses at such gauche cultural artifacts as Cadillac Escalades and house brand whiskeys.

We read our Dostoyevsky in Russian, our Kierkegaard in Danish. We couldn’t agree more with Sartre: “L’enfer, c’est les autres.”

Not surprisingly, then, we have always craved our privacy, have bought homes off the beaten path or that possessed either tree-and-shrub sheltered backyards or expanses of marsh as borders.

For example, here’s the backyard of our first home in Rantowles circa 1980.

wes and Judy Rantowles

We chose the lot on Folly Beach where we built our current house to accommodate the neuroses of even the most reclusive agoraphobe, shifting the footprint of the house so it does not face head-on toward the river, but, rather, looks out obliquely to undeveloped Long Island so our eyes aren’t assailed by the unfortunate aesthetic choices of the nouveau riche.

Looking out the front yard you see this:

front view

And from foyer you see this:

backyard 1.0

And until this summer our westward side yard was a forest, but no longer. Now instead of a thatch of tropical foliage, we see this, another house!:

new house

I know what you’re thinking. You entitled piece of shit. Ever seen a favela for Christsakes?   Don’t you realize that you still have more privacy than 99% of the world?

Rocinha-Favela-5

Yes, but, it’s not about the 99%; it’s about me. Now my entire lifestyle has been jeopardized. No more naked Twister on the side porch with Meryl Streep and Don Gummer, no more enjoying the glint of sunlight on my arc of urine streaming in golden splashes from the deck.

These people who have moved in look like squares. They tool around in golf carts and wear Masters golf caps. For all I know they’re going to be blasting Barry Manilow and the Ray Conniff Singers at all hours of the night. How could a loving God have punished me so? What have I done to deserve this?

The horror, the horror!

Ominous Clouds, Tangerine-Tinted Dumpster Fires

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trump and putinThe trope that the Republican presidential nominating process has been a parody of a reality TV show has been superseded with a more pernicious general election scenario – now we’re watching a neo-Cold-War thriller, The Apprentice having morphed into Bridge of Spies.

You can read about the controversy here, but the SparksNotes summary of the conjecture goes like this: Trump’s companies are in hock to Russia, which explains Trump’s odd embrace of Putin, which explains the removal of a pro Ukrainian plank from the Republican platform. If you consider these unusual geopolitical stances in light of the increasing likelihood that the hacking of the DNC’s emails is the work of Russians, it looks as if Russia, our erstwhile mortal enemy, is manipulating the presidential race to favor Trump.

Meanwhile, the leaked emails reinforce the Sanders deadenders’ belief that the election was stolen by Hillary, who, through the fogged-up glasses of their fanaticism, looks like the fraternal twin of Donald, so they demand “a choice not an echo” and would just as soon see the tangerine-tinted-dumpster-fire Donald elected as Hillary.[1]

They even booed Bernie himself, who is certainly old enough to remember this:

So, all and all, not a great start to the Democratic Convention when several polls have come out to show Trump ahead in the general election.

I say, invest in radiation suits.

[1] To paraphrase Samantha Bee’s too apt description.

Perhaps There Is Reason for Optimism

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Galaxies, constellations, solar systems, stars, and planets go round and round and round in their gravitational grooves. Days are born to die, to dawn, to die, to dawn, time and time, again and again.

Yang 陽: Tribalism is brain stem stuff: Tar Heel, Blue Devil, Tyger, Tyger[1] A twig snaps; adrenalin pumps. My Territory. My Toy. My Girl.[2]   My Generation.[3] Godzilla demands that parking space. Brainstem stuff.

Life yearns to be. The lowly weed cracks through concrete in the dying strip shopping center off Folly Road. That weed feeds on the CO2 of the homeless man who instinctively dodges it with his shopping cart. Yin 陰

Ayahuasca Shaman by Paul Heussenstamm

Ayahuasca Shaman by Paul Heussenstamm

A millennium from now, in the Amazon, ringed round a fire, Sons of the Wind tell of a time when the jungle was dying and silver birds were flying overhead buzzing with water rising and the white ghosts sighing into tiny blinking talk boxes but how Tucano chased them away with the sun itself . . .

Again and again, time and time, dawn to die, gravitational grooves, round and round, planets and stars and solar systems and galaxies.

[1] Burning bright in the darkness of the night . . .

[2] Talking ‘bout my girl, my girl.

[3] P-p-p-people try to put us down.