Special offer.

 World Cup special offer. 

Kip’s, Berkeley, CA. One week ago.
     “As I understand it,” Confucius was saying to no one in particular, “M is the 13th letter of your Western alphabet. So, who am I going to root for going forward? Morocco is clearly out, Argentina is led Messi, France by Mbappé, and Croatia by Modrić.”
     “My good sir,” a man in a military jacket, having just stepped off the album cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, spoke over Confucius’ shoulder, “Pardon me for interrupting.”
     “No,” Confucius turned toward him, motioning to the empty stool beside him. “Sit.”
     “Allow me to introduce myself; I believe I can help you with your dilemma. Ljudevit Gaj,* modest,” swallowing the word with a modest cough but then repeating it for clarity, “modest creator of Ljudevit Gaj’s Latin alphabet. My card.”
     Confucius took it, odd proportions. There was only the name on the front and the dates 1809 - 1872. “Ah, turn it over,” Ljudevit Gaj said.

“I believe you'll find that in the alphabet my talented countryman Luka uses, M is the 18th letter.”

                                                                       12.19.22

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 * Don’t ignore the “1 minute read.” You know how much you use the site.

Special offer. This FIFA World Cup commemorative: Kǒng & Lju on a field of checks. (Actual size. Exclusive from The Ambiguities.)

Paronomasia

 continued from here

 Paronomasia 

Dramatis Personae: Axel and Nils Sundstrøm, Bel Monk, and Uncle Albert, wrapped up in a wool scarf and his full-length overcoat though its 40°F warmer inside Corner Coffee than outside on Division Street. And me.

Setting: Corner Coffee at the intersection of Division and Market. The smell of coffee, milk, and wet wool. Muted gabble. E.g.,

Jean-Maurice-Émile Baudot
1845-1903

Nils: Blah, blah, blah. Politics. Blah. Kyrsten Sinema. Kari Lake. Now Arizona politics.
     Until he stops to take a swallow of his, and I push in as he raises mug to mouth. Wait until it touches his lips, and I’ll be too late: “What do Lutherans find funny?” I say. “What do they laugh at?”
     “Not much,” Bel says. “Mostly they twitter. Or they bark.”
     Nils is putting his mug down, but Axel says, “Wait!” the older brother.
     And Bel goes on: “They’re nervous, or they’re angry.” Nils has put his coffee down and has both hands around his mug. But Axel says again, “Wait!” “Because they’re caught off guard and they don’t know what to say,” Bel twitters nervously, demonstrating. “Or they can’t believe what they’re hearing,” — an angry bark. (Big dog!)
     Nils: “I . . . ,” but Uncle Albert doesn’t hear, or he doesn’t care: “You are still thinking about your de Maupassant story,” he says to me. “It’s ruin, as I said before. And requital.”
     Taking his wool-gloved hands from his lap and putting them on the table: “No one likes being laughed at, so they retaliate. Stand-up comics. They imagine that the audience is laughing with them, but as soon as they sense someone is not, someone becomes a heckler; and the comic will set out immediately to turn the laughter so it is directed at him.
     “Varajou’s brother-in-law and sister laugh at nothing, they are too serious — not only self-serious, too serious altogether. Or, they laugh aloud at nothing. Still, they are sniffing, snorting at Varajou’s improvidence and yobbery. Why shouldn’t he snort and sniff back? Except his snort and sniff will break out — not when he sees that he’s mistaken the mayor’s wife for a bawd and her daughters for chippies, but when he gets what that means for his self-righteous brother-in-law, who depends on the mayor, what it means for his smug sister, who depends on her husband — then he will  break out in raucous har-de-har-har-har that he upsets their pinched, prudish, grasping apple-cart?

     “Think about it.”

 

Nils gets up, “Head,” he coughs.

     Axel says, “It’s not just Lutherans, it’s the Presbyterians, too, the Baptists, the Methodists, the Norwegians, the Finns, and the Latts. Bel is right. Most laughter is nervous chirp, angry bark, or confused coughed — or menacing, the witch’s cackle, the villain’s bwahaha. It is almost anything but delighted. It may be the only pure laughter not of children is at puns. We groan but without bitterness or cynically; we’re not nervous or angry, or lost. We laugh at puns, but it is never laughter truly at but we’re laughing with thepunster. Poor guy. He can’t help it.”

 

“‘Bawd’?” I say to Uncle Albert. “‘Chippies’?”
     Axel because he can’t help it, turning also to Uncle Albert: “What do you think it was, the bawd rate?”
                                                                       12.12.22 

An officer but not a gentleman.

Guy de Maupassant
1850 - 1893

 An officer but not a gentleman. 

There’s a story by de Maupassant, typical of him in that it is not a story but an anecdote, with too obvious a point: “The Noncommissioned Officer.”     The feckless officer has decided to spend his leave in a small, backwater town with his sister and her husband though they are his opposites, proper, pious, and provincial. The officer is, if not a man of the world, worldly — hard-charging, hard-drinking, and randy, one of those men “for whom life has no greater pleasures than those of the café and public women.” These do not come free: he has decided to visit his sister because there is no one else of his family and acquaintance he has not borrowed from. So perhaps she and her husband, a local official, will . . . .
     But he discovers what he should have known all along had he any insight: all he will receive for his “troubles” are a week’s worth of prim lectures and bad meals. The meals he must eat, but the lectures he will ignore because he is a lout. He is, de Maupassant informs the reader, in the phrase the whole story is worth reading for: “Boasting, blustering, full of disdain for everybody, he despised the whole universe from the height of his ignorance.”
     The story ends predictably when the officer, having drunken his fill at a local café, and, looking for other satisfactions (his other satisfaction), misunderstands the barman’s directions and stumbles into the house of his brother-in-law’s patron, there mistaking the patron’s wife for a madame and his daughters for whores. His poor brother-in-law is mortified! Har-de-har-har-har. The officer falls on the floor laughing. But what is so funny?

I think, “I’ll ask Uncle Albert.”
     He's asleep in front of the France-Poland match; or, he’s asleep at the half. He has turned off the sound because he finds the Fox commentary team’s analysis simultaneously vapid and irritating. (Before he goes to bed, he’ll catch up with James Richard’s “The Totally Football Show.”
     I nudge him. “What? Go away. What?”

     “de Maupassant. I have a question.”
     Again, “What?”
     “About a story: ‘The Noncommisioned Officer’ in English.”
     “I don’t know it.”
     “The main character’s name is Varajou.”
     “Varajou,” he corrects my pronunciation.
     “Maybe. I don’t know, however, if I can find it.” He pulls his right talon from underneath his throw, painted with penguins, and points at his brain.
     “Come on,” I say.
     “Likely it is in there,” Uncle Albert says, “but the index . . . .” He stops.
     “Can you read what I’ve written?” I’ve printed it out.
     He waves his hand. I put the copy in it.

 

“Vaguely,” he says, waving the paper but referring, I take it, to his memory of the story.
     “So?”
     “So, what?”
     “My question,” I say: “What’s so funny?”
     “Ruin,” Uncle Albert says and waves the page toward me until I take it back from him.
     “Ruin?”
     “Yes. Ruin and recompense.”
     “That’s it? Meaning?”
     “Think about it.”
                                                                       12.04.22
                                                                                                                                                      to be continued*

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* TA returns on a once-a-week schedule. Mondays. Sometimes Tuesdays. Maybe.

Le Petit Trottin

This morning, while I am waiting to see Dr. Feight, I find among his magazines an expensive-magazine-sized and -shaped book of Toulouse-Lautrec plates. It doesn’t include Le petit trottin, an illustration Toulouse-Lautrec made for the cover of some sheet music, and the subject of a long-ago poem by my friend Rick Dietrich, who, like every poet since Keats, has written a wan version of “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”

To listen to Rick read the poem, click here.

Le Petit Trottin

Tonight, I am the wicked gentleman
disappearing from Toulouse-Lautrec’s cover
for his cousin’s song: the crumpled top hat,
the cane over his shoulder, the down-turned moustaches
and drooping jowls, the dotted green ascot
and green checked trousers—one thick leg vanishing
into the space that marks the cover’s edge,
but one leg left behind solidly planted,
and one eye left behind, leering from behind
its monocle, glued to Le Petit Trottin—
the name of Toulouse-Lautrec’s cousin’s song,
“The Little Errand Girl”—though she is not
so little, the leering gentleman observes,
her blond hair upswept over sensual ear,
her pink mouth, the lilac ribbon around
her pretty throat.
                                 “What do you have in your
basket, ma chère?” he is—without thinking—
for ever thinking, while she keeps him
there, fixed in the corner of her eye,
till the other thick leg can take the next step,
and he can disappear for good.

H is for Hannah.

  annah, my sister, the youngest of us originally, is on the phone.

 Not long into the conversation, she asks if I had ever been ambitious
  (past perfect tense). Her husband, Dwight, is retiring, and they are going
  to travel, first to Alaska, then to Costa Rica, then New Zealand, and
  maybe Scotland after that.
     “I don’t think I ever was,” I say. “I have no imagination when it comes
  to the future,” I add after a pause.

Hannah says that Dwight thinks I am the kind of person that goes into a field to gather stones, trips over one, then rolls over and lies down with his hands behind his head, staring into the clouds.
     “He said that?”
     “Maybe not in those exact words. But, yes.”
     I want to say that I’d always liked Dwight, but I never thought he understood other people very well. He understood what they were for, but he didn’t understand them.
     But I don’t say it.

R is for Roz

 oz says: 

“I was thinking before I went to sleep last night about the story in the Bible where there’s a funeral procession and Jesus runs into it somehow. The funeral is for a boy — or young man — the son of a widow. And Jesus raises him from the dead, he is the sole support of his mother. And that’s where the story ends; we never know what happens next.”

I say: “It’s ‘The Widow of Nain.’ In Luke.”
     “Right,” she says, remembering. “That’s right. But it’s sad — I was thinking this, too — that the story has to follow Jesus. I mean, I know it does. It’s heretical, probably, to think otherwise, but it’s also sad. Because his story ends, and the young man’s keeps going, and the young man’s mother’s, and we don’t know what happens to them.
     “I also know,” Roz goes on, “because I went to Sunday School; I know that Jesus’ story never ends. So, don’t say that. But I want to know what happens to the man and his mother.”
     “What do you think?” I say.
     “I don’t know. I have no gift for stories. What do you think?”
     “I don’t know either,” I say. “They live until they die, like we do.”
     “There’s a happy thought,” Roz says. “But then we live forever!” she says brightly though she doesn’t believe it.

A is for Albert.

A is for Albert.

Uncle Albert says he’s moving out if I don’t go back on my meds, but I don’t think he will. Roz says I need to though — go back — because he doesn’t have anywhere to go.
     I say, “What about where he was, with Maggie and Carl and them?” I still don’t believe he is going to go; he’s not going anywhere, regardless. But Roz shakes her head. “No,” she says, meaning he can’t go there.
     “It’s no different,” I say about whether I am on them or not. “He wouldn’t know if I hadn’t told him. He wouldn’t know the difference.”
     “But he does know, however he knows it,” she says. (This is not what I thought she’d say. I thought she’d say something about how everyone can tell the difference. But she is too kind to say that.)

Here’s why I don’t want to do it: I just don’t. Besides, they don’t help. I can’t tell the difference.
     “He’s 96 years old,” Roz says.
     “So?” I say. She looks at me. I say, “He’s been 96 for as long as I can remember.” She looks at me. “Maybe he’s only 86,” I say. “Or maybe he’s 106. Who knows?” Still looking at me. “I’m going upstairs,” I say.

“You can’t flush medicine down the toilet,” she says after me. “You have to take it to the box in the Sheriff’s Office.”
     “I know that,” I say because I’ve done it before. It doesn’t matter that I’d forgotten for the moment; I know it.

When I get upstairs, Uncle Albert wants to know if I can help him go down:
     He holds onto the banister with his right hand, and I go a half-step ahead and he holds onto my shoulder with his left. That’s going down. Going back up, he holds onto the banister with his left hand, and I go a half-step behind, and he holds onto my hand with his right elbow.
     This time he is coming down to watch the Premier League matches. Neither of us knows until I turn the TV on that they have been postponed because the Queen died and all the clubs are mourning.
     He met the Queen once, he says, Uncle Albert. They were born the same day, they discovered, Uncle Albert says. “The same year?” Roz asks.