WORK

“Gilding the Lily”

To keep anxiety at bay, my friend called chemo dragonfly love. Those insects—christened, in places, the devil’s darning needles—hover as they contort their joined bodies into a heart, the male with pincers. Finger cutter, horse killer, ear stick, eye pisser. Look closely at the eyes of a female darner and you may well see dark puncture marks. As a slow drip through an IV. As a pill. Through a port into a vein. She called nausea erotica. Just the same, we name our storms to lessen them—not a tropical cyclone, but Arabella, with ballet shoes and bun. Tumors, too, were friends, waiting at the bus stop with backpacks in the morning. Cindy French braids Carrie’s hair, yanking at the scalp to form the tight crisscross. Not hair loss, but deep conditioning. She gave us the new lexicon on stationery embossed with a red rose speckled by raindrops. The stem still had its thorns. Ring-around-the-rosy, red rover, red rover, send her right over. She called death the world of 10,000 things: the dragon courting its damsel, catheter tubing in the wastebin, video of a toddler biting his brother, pas de deux, full-sugar ice cream, Crimson Queen, Trumpeter, Red Knockout, Tuscany Superb…I knew her as Rose Shapiro. At the funeral I learned she was born Passalacqua: to cross the river, to pass a glass of water.

—Lisa Ampleman
—from Poetry (June 2014)

WORD(S)

parataxis. noun. Placing phrases and clauses one after another, independently, without coordinating or subordinating conjunctions. A most famous example is found in the phrase “I came, I saw, I conquered.” AKA additive or anaphoric. Some examples of parataxis:

“I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun.” (Raymond Chandler)

“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.” (J.D. Salinger)

“Because my best friend in 4th grade chased
     city buses from corner to corner
Because his cousin’s father could not stop looking
     up at the sky after his return from the war
Because parataxis is just another way of making ends meet
Because I have been on a steady diet of words
     since the age of three.” (Major Jackson)

WEB

1. Book Traces is crowdsourcing the photography and scanning of marginalia in books before they are lost to the digital dustbin. They’re posting a continuous stream of pictures in the Book Traces Tumblr. You can participate!

2. Speaking of marginalia: how about unintentional marginalia whose mysteriousness is amplified thanks to Holmes and Moriarty? Issuing the same book with various versions having different meta-narratives would be fun.

3. Sun Ra’s Full Lecture & Reading List From His 1971 UC Berkeley Course, “The Black Man in the Cosmos”.

4. “She was 22 when her memory was obliterated. Twenty-six years later, Su Meck is still learning about the family she raised and the husband she has no recollection of marrying.” → Who Is Su?. A great story that really digs into the reality of an unbelievable situation and the multidimensional people involved.

5. Observed on this day, the martyrdom/mob-murder of Pope Callixtus I. Born a slave, saved from suicide, sent to the Sardinian mines and rescued by Jewish money-lenders, Callixtus somehow became an archdeacon and finally Pope. Once exalted, he started admitting sects and schisms to the church guilty of all kinds of wrongdoing, including sexual transgressions, and claiming for the Papacy the right to forgive anyone and anything—all the while being challenged by Hippolytus, the first elected anti-pope—before he was attacked by a mob and martyred, possibly by being thrown down a well.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• Reader H. sez: “Good one from Kizer [‘poets are primarily interested in death and commas’], but as MT would say, the only sure things are death and parataxis.”

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