From H to P : bit of Etymology.

I loathe the use of the word 'pooch' to refer to a dog.
To me it is too close to the childish terms 'poop' and 'poo',
and sounds dismissive. 
But it has an interesting history.

The Etymological Dictionary Online has informed me
that the word derives from the name that a prospector
in Alaska (called Dick Craine)
gave to his dog, in the belief that it was Tlingit for booze.  

It was, however, a shortened corruption of Hoochinoo
"liquor made by Alaskan Indians,"
from the name of a native tribe in Alaska
who distilled a liquor which was a favourite with miners
during the 1898 Klondike gold rush. 
Hence the word 'hooch' or 'hootch' to refer to
any home-made (or low-quality) spirit, 'moonshine'.

Well, whaddaya know!

(I once had brief acquaintance
with a playful dog called Brandy –
but he did not give rise to
the generic name for the distilled
fermented uice of the fruit of the vine,
originally known as brandywine.)

The Minotaur

 
had a vegetarian, browsing head
curly-haired and horned...

The rest of him was
murderously unsatisfied.

There was also Theseus.

Somewhere in between
was the Anti-Minotaur
whose upper parts were
murderously human
and whose bottom half
was hairy-vegetarian,
sexually unsatified.

My composition here
portrays the latter,

perhaps uniquely.

The many images that anyone can find
online are only of the former.

The Assyrian King-headed winged bull
hardly counts.

A Snipe

is a very fast
and elegant bird;

A gutter is home
to water-bears

and the odd or
occasional rat.

But guttersnipe

(a wonderful word
of disapprobation)

is now rarely used
to describe or
refer to an unprivileged
or disadvantaged brat.

Maybe millions in a mullion.

Rather cute

(not to say erotic) moss-piglets
also known as water-bears

are the most enduring, indestructible
and harmless of animals,

living well on almost nothing
for over 500 million years.

So why did evolution not stop ?  

They incline me to think
that there must be a God,

a very malign being,

a pathetic orphan
who, like a small boy, gets
a kick out of creation and destruction
just for the sake of it
or out of boredom.

Play.

When you're a child,
to play is fine
especially under supervision.

To play by yourself
is cause for concern.

To play with yourself
(especially if you're a little girl)
requires a Decision.

I am not worth more than a hermit-crab.

Diogenes of Sinope was,
so far as I know, not left-handed.

Nevertheless a family of hermit crabs
(Diogenidae, 429 species)
has been named in his honour.
They are sometimes known as
"left-handed hermit crabs"
because unlike other species of shell-less crabs,
their left claws are larger than their right. 

Confusingly, a giant hermit crab has also been named
after the scathing sage:

Petrochirus diogenes lives in the Caribbean Sea
and often resides in conch shells. 
It was originally named by Linnaeus
as Cancer diogenes.

Smaller hermit-crabs inhabit plastic pen-tops.

Challenge and Reward.

Real beauty
is challenging to all
who've been to school.
Is the most challenging
of all the beauties
solitude ?

Annachie Gordon

A fine performance of
a Scottish ballad on a familiar theme.

whose haunting melody Rachmaninov might have loved
and taken for a fine excursion.

Buchan, it is bonny-o, and there lives my love;
My heart it lies upon him, it will not remove.
It will not remove for all that I have done,
Oh never will I forget my love Annachie.

For Annachie Gordon, oh he’s bonny and he’s braw,
He’d entice any woman that ever him saw.
He’d entice any woman and so he has done me,
Oh never will I forget my love Annachie

Down came her father, standing on the floor,
Saying, “Jeannie, you’re trying the tricks of a whore.
You care nothing for a man who cares so very much for thee;
You must marry with Lord Saltoun and leave Young Annachie.

“For Annachie Gordon he’s only but a man
Although he may be pretty but where are all his lands?
Saltoun’s lands are broad and his towers they stand high;
You must marry with Lord Saltoun and forget Young Annachie.”

“With Annachie Gordon oh I’d beg for my bread
Before that I’d marry Saltoun with gold to my head.
With gold to my head and with gowns fringed to the knee,
Oh I’ll die if I don’t get my love Annachie.

“And you that are my parents, oh to church you may me bring,
Ah but unto Lord Saltoun, oh I’ll never bear a son.
Oh, a son or a daughter, oh I’ll never bow my knee,
Oh, I’ll die if I don’t get my love Annachie.”

When Jeanie was married and from church she was brought home,
And she and her maidens so merry should have been,
When she and her maidens so merry should have been
Oh, she’s gone to a chamber and she’s crying all alone.

“Come to bed now Jeanie, oh my honey and my sweet,
For to style you my mistress it would not be meet.”
“Oh it’s mistress or Jeannie, it’s all the same to me,
For it’s in your bed, Lord Saltoun, I never shall be.”

And up and spoke her father and he’s spoken with renown,
“All you who are her maidens won’t you loosen off her gown.”
But she fell down in a swoon, so low down by their knees,
Saying, “Look on, for I’m dying for my love Annachie.”

The day that Jeannie married was the day that Jeanie died
That’s the day that young Annachie come rolling from the tide

And down came her maidens and they’re wringing of their hands,
Saying, “Woe to you, Annachie, for staying from the sands.
So long from the land and so long upon the flood,
Oh they’ve wedded your Jeannie and now she is dead.”

“All you that are her maidens, won’t you take me by the hand?
Won’t you lead me to the chamber that my love lies in?”
And he’s kissed her cold lips until his heart turned to stone,
And he’s died in the chamber where his true love lay in.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Saltoun_and_Auchanachie]

 

Thus are we caught

 like flies

in the world-wide web,

in our webs of lies.

The turning of the stairs

is somewhat dangerous
in your final years
of slow senility
when you get tottery.

Scary.

You start crossing the room
to switch off the light,
but by the time you have got there
you are wondering quite
why you left your chair.

'Pillicock sat on Pillicock's hill'

quoth Edgar, playing mad
before King Lear, old, elde, futile man.
A while before that, in Kildare,
another good old lad
or 'senior person' described
his pissycock plight:

"Elde makiþ me,
Y ne mai no more of loue done;
Mi pilkoc pisseþ on mi schone"

In my case (so far, fortunately)
mi onelie dribil druith upoon my trousers.
since 'loue' no longer holds me tight
by balls or brain or short-and-curlies –
but mi pilkoc pisseþ  3-5 times a night.

*

"Al we wilnith to ben old,
Wy is eld ihatid ?
Moch me anueth
That mi dribil druith,
And mi wrot wet..."

'Diogenes, he say...'

The best thing in life
is Entropy.

 

The marvels of modern medicine!

Thanks to a fetchingly pale blue tablet
of Fesoterodine, I no longer dribble
subtly from my willy
every time I run water from the tap.

How many mammals were martyred ?

Jesus didn't have a country, either.

But he made the dire mistake
of riding an ass into Jerusalem
rather than
out of Gaza.

Perhaps

'science' (as opposed to wisdom)
is the world-shattering result
of a mind-set that plants trees
(and even people) in rows,
the long outcome of pettifogginess ?

More doggerel.

It was 'rather late in the day'
that I abandoned all hope
of heterosexuality.
I would like to be able to say
that, because of my mother's rape,
I decided to be beard-lovingly gay
– 15 years after my only female lover
relieved herself of me.

But 'things didn't quite work out that way'.
I learned of my mother's single
heterosexual encounter just after
I was beautifully 'led astray'
at the age of forty by the first man
(and first moustache) I ever kissed.

Now I have drifted to the Island
of the Solitary Lotus-eaters,
where I can fade self-lovingly away,
mostly without my hearing-aids
but with my latest-prescription glasses
– and Now might well be Yesterday.

21/7/2024

 

'Kaki'

is a recently adopted name for the fruit of the tree known botanically as Diospyros kaki.  It has been known for centuries in English as Persimmon, and (again more recently) as Date-plum and Chinese fig...

Persimmons hanging over a wall in St.Antonin-Noble-Val

...and in French as Plaquemine (also a French place-name in Louisiana),  but it is now sold as Kaki in France. 

'Kaki' in French also means the colour khaki, which, perversely is a shade of green, whereas in English it is dust-colored,  and derived from  Urdu  "dusty," borrowed from Persian khak "dust."  

Persimmons were a favourite fruit in the Islamic and Turkish empires, and hang off the trees at this time of year in the gardens of the Alhambra in Granada, as well as - occasionally, here in southern France.

They were originally grown in China several thousand years ago, where they served as a symbol of balance, harmony and equilibrium.  In Japanese they are known as kaki.  Diospyros means 'celestial edible'.

Persimmons are now also known as Sharon Fruit because of their recent mass-cultivation in Israel for export.

They are sweet and somewhat bland, though bitter when under-ripe.

Lotus-eater in Shangri-la.

Cuckoos no longer come.
The clouds are massing fear-
dark on the horizon. Our
cloud-cuckoo land
will shortly disappear.

Autobiographical note:
although not 'born to be' a lotus-eater
I managed, through good fortune
and the Welfare State, to become one.

 

Justice

is the puppet-master's script.

 

After ten hours' sleep

and interesting, rarely unpleasant, dreams
I wake up in the morning
worrying needlessly, regretting that
and wondering why I'm still alive.

In the early evening (after a third of a bottle
of wine) I go to bed feeling quite cheerful
that I so easily and painlessly survive.

Verboten Ear-Wurm*

Through the racket
of the Philips Furore
vacuum-cleaner which I take out
every six weeks or so) I realised
'with horror' that I was humming
the catchy tune of the Nazis' Horst Wessel Lied,
whose lyrics have long since been demonised.

*The correct German is Verbotener Ohrwurm.

 

Almost none of us

is unharmed by school,
whose purpose is to dull us
into docile collaboration with
the all-destroying
money-making
achievement-ethic.

PS see: https://www.theguardian.com/film/article/2024/jul/19/my-slogan-is-very-simple-no-education-just-liberation-bela-tarr-film-can-combat-political-right-hungary

 

Vessel of Time.

 

by Jean-Marie Appriou

Fun for all under President Trump.

 

Cutely painted Russian dolls

were made in the Gulags.

Vladimir Vladimirovich,*
Vlad the Invader,
doesn't like democracies.
He sees them as disgusting
gulags of hypocrisies.

*Putin, who prefers autocracies.

Most liberals

"...can't grasp their true nature,
their real aspirations and the feeling – the certainty!
– that what they want for themselves will always be more
than what they want for other people...
That's why they concentrate so much on feelings and injuries,
on naming, on correctness, because they don't have the stomach for the inequality they depend on.

"...in Kansas or Illinois people vote against their own interests
because they detest a culture that sees them as needy,
they hate caring elites who like to tell them what is good for them. In the modern world...people don't mind being exploited so long as they can choose it themselves."

– excerpted from Caledonian Road by Andrew O'Hagan, page 474.  My emphasis.

The problem with escaping

from the big white/European/Christian/
Abrahamic prison of the mind
is that you're suddenly oppressed
by the freedom to form ideas
enjoyed by Diogenes,

who refused to commit the crime
of optimism.

~

Almost every minute of our waking lives,
encouraged by the solipsistic religions,
we wilfully ignore the titanic
juggernaut of evidence
that we (unlike locusts or red-legged
spider-hunting wasps)
are a blight upon the planet,
and will keep smiling, hoping sadly
or grimly, or with manic
destructiveness right to the finish.

Black and White.

by Elliott Erwitt

Grete Stern: Sueño Nro 7, Quien Será 1949.

Orphaned thought-fragments

jotted down during a disturbed but fecund night's sleep.

Nature abhors
a vacuum garden.

~

In the cathedral of autocracy
every sculpture conceals a device.

~

Violence not only
begets violence –
it also spawns silence.

~

When people mention
The Real World
you know that they and it are false.

~

Jesus is Identikit.
However you imagine him – he'll fit.

~

People prefer rumour to fact
because rumours have the glamour
of shared secrets.

~

The world is a series of news-reports.

~

Before the onslaught of factory-made mugs
with stuck-on handles,
Decent People had tea-sets.
My favourite featured hollyhocks.
We all have mind-sets
locked in china-cabinets
or like teaspoons lined up in a box.

~

Beyond their phones,
from clouds to lichen,
people seem to notice little
of the world around them.
Not even thunder.
I see them blunder past
the window of my kitchen.

_

Mostly, it seems that
sex is to respect
as house is to home.

~

Memory: fragments like mercury
in little drops and pools on consciousness.

It's finally true:

'The End is nigh.'

Or at least nigher than it might have been.

Valencia: Flood          Beirut: War

Marlon James, celebrated author,

(on BBC Radio 4's 'Bookclub') said:

"I have noticed when I read [about] sex
 even in detail, how people really seem
not to enjoy it."

So many millions touched only with violence.
They cannot imagine being
touched with kindness
rather than brutality.
Sex so frequently is a sordid Calvary.

Become one

of the Illuminati
or Illuminatae

instantly!

requires 3 AAA batteries

Or you can keep reading this blog.

Good Days.

Collecting the good days
should bring long-lasting pleasure
similar to collecting plants.

But days erase each other
and get lost in the deep
dark-webby cupboard
of my memory.

 

Voting:

when being passive

is dressed up to seem active.

Like praying.

Natural Queer History

Josh Davis, of the Natural History Museum in London
and author of A Little Gay Natural History, said:
“Around 1,500 species have been observed
showing homosexual behaviour
– but this is certainly an underestimate,
because it is seen in almost every branch
of the evolutionary tree – spiders, squids, rams,
penguins, geese, monkeys..."

Back to Front.

Electorates and political parties
are more concerned with immigration
which is eternal
than with relatively recent
climate change
and the inevitable

surge of homelessness and starvation.

Ebony

'The jet-black heartwood of the Central African forest ebony, Diospyros crassiflora (a relative of the Persimmon, Diospyros kaki) used to fashion piano keys, guitars, door knobs and pool cues, is threatened by illegal logging and conversion of forests into grazing land or palm oil and rubber plantations. 

'An initiative to transform the growth and harvesting of ebony in Cameroon is led by Taylor Guitars, supplier to – yes – Taylor Swift.

'In 2011, Taylor Guitars' co-founder Bob Taylor bought a dilapidated ebony mill in Cameroon’s capital, Yaoundé and refurbished it to supply wood for his instruments. 

Five years later, the company partnered with the Congo Basin Institute in Yaoundé to develop ebony tree nurseries and a community-based planting programme. 

The company also replants ebony and fruit trees that buffer Cameroon’s Dja reserve, a Unesco world heritage site.' 

Races.

There is always an arms race,
which is very different from
a foot race.  Excitement
makes the heart race. Rage
makes the blood surge
like a mill-race.

How do I slow the inane
racing of my brain ?
I have tried Cannabis, Psilocybe,
Ecstasy in vain...

Ten hours a day.

Bed.
I wake in it almost suicidal
and go back to it 14 hours later
quite chirpy and bright.
My dreams are chaotic and
interesting, rarely scary; 
and I don't at all mind getting up
five times to pee in the night.

Up.
I am outraged
that someone referred to me
at the market as that old man.

I'd rather be called an ammonite.

Fakeworld.

 

Find out here.

And beware the fake interview, too.

A Diogenean Thought.

Since human beings have
negative environmental impact
alongside infinitesimal
cosmic significance,
it is 'criminal' to save them
from their own catastrophe
or dissuade them from suicide.

We are less and less surprised.

Many boys were sadistically beaten
in Catholic-run Irish schools
until the end of the 20th century.
But only those who were groped, raped or forced
to suck cocks are considered to be victims.

Now, 'in a different part of the wood',

*  *  *

I was born allergic

to banality.  Hence my dislike
of garish lipstick (someone must have
- perhaps with stealth -
thrust their mouth at me in my
first year unaccounted for).
The ultimate banality (far beyond
comfortable complacency)
is hideous wealth. 

Two Cities.

Warsaw:
perhaps not quite Europe's most hideous architecture.

 

Oslo:
McDonald's, Burger King - and a protesting tram.

"I've got plenty of Nothing..."

I wonder what black people felt
on hearing this offensive song 
from the Gershwins' Porgy and Bess,
at a time of vicious segregation 
(mostly) in the southern US, where lynchings
and punishments by murder were common,

and quite a few million in the Land of the Free
were dying of plenty of nothing.

Sex and Celebrity.

I have long known of the existence
of tear-bottles in antique society, 

but I have only recently discovered
that gladiator-sweat was widely
(and unsurprisingly) valued
as one a most powerful aphrodisiac.
(No mention has survived
of the rarer foreskin cheese.)

Could it have been collected in tiny bottles
for consumption by the super-rich ?
Or in handkerchieves ?
Or was it mixed with flour,
patted into raw mini-baps
for them to sniff
and lick and savour in erotic ease ?

Or was it sold (or even auctioned)
like modern wrestlers' jock-straps ?

Fateful.

Some may remember The Millennium Bug
and the digital-numerological panic
surrounding the year 2000.

It was also the year that the
(U.S.A. presidential) election defeat
of environmentalist Al Gore
turbo-charged already-irreversible
climate change, amongst other
oilygarchic and militaristic evils. 

2024 may bring a similar speeding-up
of our super-Wagnerian rush to Ragnarók.

It's not that

we are the only thuggish species
but that the worst of us are
so good at organisation
that we would organise the galaxy
into a black hole, if we only could.

Due partly to the Internet,

 English is the widest-spread lingua franca
there has ever been.  It is unfortunate
that it is a nuts-and-bolts, anti-abstract language
with little of the metaphysical subtlety
of Farsi or Pali. (Not to mention, thanks to Gutenberg
 + pronunciation-shift, a crazy orthography). 

But hey!
Things could be worse. The last lingua franca
was French, with much emotional subtlety
but little innovative plasticity,
or cut-and-paste opportunity
for verbal re-arrangement.

French could never come up with such
a brilliant word as 'infotainment'.