A Caricature

Daily Dose

From 77, by Guillermo Saccomanno, translated by Andrea G. Labinger

CONFESS

"I must confess: it embarrassed me to go after a truth in my underwear."

From 14

A Caricature

Daily Dose

From The Selected Poems, by A. R. Ammons

WINTER SCENE

There is now not a single
leaf on the cherry tree:
except when the jay
plummets in, lights, and,
in pure clarity, squalls:
then every branch
quivers and
breaks out in blue leaves. 

Clerihew for Cloistered Critic

SISTER WENDY BECKETT

The modus vivendi
Of Sister Wendy
Sent her out to the world as a famous art-fan
Then straight back to God in her caravan.

A Caricature

Daily Dose

From The Angel on the Roof, by Russell Banks

WAS

"I was the boy who went up the hill and then, inexplicably, turned around and came back empty-handed. I was Little Boy Blue asleep with his horn, while his sheep roamed the meadow, and the cows ate the corn. I was ashamed for all of us, every one."

From Success Story

Clerihew for a Visionary Queen

GARY INDIANA

Veiled in glittering arcana
Gary Indiana
Turned his penetrating gaze
Back upon those Vile Days.

A Caricature

Daily Dose

From The Novel of Ferrara, by Giorgio Bassani, translated by Jamie McKendrick

IN SHORT

"In short the last three years felt like a lifetime."

From Within the Walls

Clerihew for a Cold Winter's Night

DOROTHY PARKER

The days growing darker
Dorothy Parker
Settled in
With books and gin.

A Caricature

Daily Dose

From Essayism: On Form, Feeling, and Nonfiction, by Brian Dillon

WIT

"Wit is the art of bringing unlikely things or ideas together, in such a way that the scandal or shock of their proximity arrives alongside a conviction that they have always belonged together."

From On Aphorisms

Breakfast at the Bookstore with Brad and Nick #146

Daily Dose

From Pale Fire, by Vladimir Nabokov

IMAGE

"The image of those old-fashioned horrors strangely haunted our poet."

From Line 92: the paperweight

Clerihew for the Treasurer

ROBERT BENCHLEY

Robert Benchley,
Ever so gently,
Made great sport
Of The Treasurer's Report.

A Caricature

Daily Dose

From On Christmas: A Seasonal Anthology, introduced by Gyles Brandreth

IN THE MEANTIME

"In the meantime , we must not forget the children. No one else could."

From Christmas Afternoon: Done in the Manner, if not the Spirit, of Dickens, by Robert Benchley

Mum and the Dogs

It didn't start with dogs, it started with flamingos.

Every year when I go home to Pennsylvania to see family, I sleep in what was my old bedroom. Nowadays my old room is full of my mother's crafting projects; painted slates, decoupage. (I admire the things she makes. I have four pieces at my desk at work, and keep a painted tea-kettle and a collage coffee-pot in my library at home.) Most of her projects get cleared away before I come to visit. (It's a lot.) And on what will be my nightstand again, next to the button-lamp my mother made, there they are: two ceramic planters in the shape of spaniels, one green, one red. They're decorated with a kind of swirling, 70s, floral mange and they have daisies for tails. Their heads are elongated as if they are being pulled slowly into the gravitational field of a black hole. Their dead eyes stare at me when I reach to turn out the light every night. They are hideous. My mother knows this. I hasten to add, my mother did not make these abominations. (My mother's projects are actually rather beautiful.) The dogs came from an auction box, or a yard-sale, years ago. Their only purpose is to taunt me. They're a running joke between my Mum and me; call it, Brad's War on Kitsch.

As I say, it started with lawn-flamingos.

When I was a child, we went sailing on the weekends.  Never had a boat.  Not much for being on the water.  Yard-sailing, we went, my mother and I.  My hometown, hers too, didn't have a bookstore.  Still doesn't.  We went to yard sales because we were, if not poor, far from "comfortable," as the rich say. My mother likes a bargain. I needed books. The Thursday paper listed yard sales.  Sometimes the listing mentioned books.  We always went to those first. If we could, we'd try to go Fridays. First day had the best stuff, before it "gets all picked over." I had school and Mum worked, so we had to go early or not at all. She cleaned college dormitories, which was horrible, and the homes of the local professional-class; professors, doctors, and the like.

I couldn't have been more than ten when I tripped to the fact that any house with a lawn-flamingo was unlikely to have books, and even if books were advertised, the books would not amount to much if there was a flamingo in the yard. My mother found my snobbish deduction hilarious, but over time had to admit the truth of it.

When I came home from college for the first time, my father made a sign for the yard that read "Welcome Home Brad." My mother put lawn-flamingos on either side of it and stood grinning by them as we pulled into the driveway. After that, it was our "thing."

For my last birthday I got a shirt with tiny flamingo print, a necklace of flamingos, a flamingo that nods in the sun, etc., etc. In my middle-fifties. Mum's in her eighties. The woman is relentless.

Actually, my mother is known for for her style. Her taste is good. She dresses well, never leaves the house without her face, has an eye for fabrics, and color, and drape. She taught me to see beauty in simplicity, utility, age. She doesn't know the word, but she has always been quick to point out the ersatz and to find the one good thing amidst the dross. Were I to find fault now I'd just say she's always been sentimental and likes "cute things" simply for being "cute," and that we do not share.

It was, I think, my father who bought the painted plaster dogs that lived either side of the front door. These were ugly; machine-made, badly painted, clumsy. I found their ugliness offensive. I would hide them behind the furniture. Likewise I'm pretty sure Dad was the one who got the Fork and Spoon salt-and-pepper-shakers I hated as a kid. I thought them impossibly tacky. My mother thought them "cute." I used to hide them in a cookie jar that sat unused on top of the refrigerator. My mother is short and could not reach them there. They didn't "go" with the china I liked. Quite the little aesthete, setting the table in the double-wide.

I was an insufferable little shit, is what I was.

One Christmas, my mother sent me the Fork and Spoon salt-and-pepper-shakers, beautifully wrapped. Next time I went back for a visit, I hid them in plain sight in her china-cabinet. Got them again the next year for Christmas. I made her a calendar the year after; color pictures of Fork and Spoon, in a different setting each month: under a palm tree in California, in the mountain snow, visiting Las Vegas.

It was a thing.

And now the dogs. In retirement my father made a living from reselling stuff he bought in auction-lots: furniture, housewares, collectibles, "junk." The dogs came from there. My mother it was who probably rescued them from "down in the building" where such stuff is sold. Brought them up to the house specifically to put them by my guest bed, just to goad me. Relentless. She doesn't even much like dogs.

Dad did. He always kept dogs. Blueticks, bloodhounds, beagles, and mongrels, some for hunting, some to race, some just company, but all his dogs. When the last ancient beagle, slow as death and deaf as a post, went off after a rabbit and never came back, Dad said he was done. "Too old to chase her," he said, "home or heaven, up to her." He was right. She was his last dog.

My mother only ever had the one dog, Buster. Only animal big enough to bathe that ever lived in her house -- other than us. Buster was his name. Buster was special. A bright little terrier-mix. He'd hide under the sofa and growl when my scary grandmother came every day. Smart. He stayed when I left for college. When he died on the road, my mother said she'd never have another dog and she never has. People tried to give her dogs, still do, but no. My brother's dog, Bear comes across the yard from his house to hers every day now. Brings her the newspaper and gets a treat. Since my father died, when they bring my mother's supper, Bear brings the bread in a bag, or a napkin, something, just to have something to bring. That's his job. Otherwise he sits on the porch mostly.

Nowadays, my mother's mostly alone.

When Dad was still alive, he was in on the running joke too, specially around Christmas. One year they sent me a giant tin frog for the yard. Not pretty. Another time they sent an antique mirror decorated with -- wait for it -- painted pink flamingos. You get the picture. Relentless.

I still have Fork and Spoon, by the way. Mum has a picture of them framed in my old room. Everybody wins.

Auden said that the surest sign that a person had taste was that the person was never sure of it. I don't known that I'm sure of nearly so much as I was when I was fifteen. Fork and Spoon seem rather dear to me now.

But those ceramic spaniels? Those things are just ugly as sin.

Well played, old woman, well played.

Miss you.

Clerihew for a Bear Inspiration

A. A. MILNE

Alan Alexander Milne
lit up like a fiery kiln.
You would've too
Had you thought of Pooh.

A Caricature

Daily Dose

From A Literary Christmas: An Anthology, from The British Library

WASSAIL

"'Wassail, you chaps!' he shouted.
'Wassail, old sport! the shouted back; 'we'd jolly well well drink y'r health, only we've nothing to drink it in.'
'Come and wassail inside,' said Bertie hospitably; 'I'm all alone, and there's heaps of "wet."'"

From Bertie's Christmas Eve, by Saki

A Caricature

Daily Dose

From The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen

EASIER

"Her life would have been easier if she hadn't loved him so much, but she couldn't help loving him. Just to look at him was to love him."

From page 266

Clerihew for a Busy Fellow

DAVE EGGERS

If writer's block
One would knock,
Show the beggars
Dave Eggers.

A Caricature

Daily Dose

From The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins

ON THE POINT

"I was on the point of answering, 'I never said so.' But the vicious cockatoo ruffled his clipped wings, and gave a screech that set all my nerves on edge in an instant, and made me only too glad to get out of the room."

From The Second Epoch, Chapter II

Clerihew for a Gourmand

ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT

Alexander Woollcott
Mixed himself a bull-shot,
Then, for lunch, a gin martini,
With eggs, ham, and biscuits in-betweeni.

A Very Short Shopping Story

"Thrifty," Katarina Maria recalled, "that was Mom's word for it." Theo remembered Christmas less kindly, "That old woman loved Woolworth's. If it was in a bin by the door, and the shit was less than a dollar, then... maybe." "It wasn't like we didn't have money," his sister explained, "she just didn't want to spend any of it. Old world, maybe. Who knows? Anyway, me and Theo, we robbed that Woolworth's blind."

A Caricature

Daily Dose

From Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

HAPPINESS

"Happiness can be variously understood."

From XXII

A Caricature

Daily Dose

From Communion: The Female Search for Love, by Bell Hooks

BEFORE

"Before I reached the age of forty, I never even considered that my relationships did not last because I did not know enough about love."

From Chapter Seven, Choosing and Learning to Love

A Clerihew of Hill House

SHIRLEY JACKSON

Shirley Jackson
Was somewhat lax in
Her housekeeping;
The spirit was willing, but the flesh kept creeping.

A Caricature

Daily Dose

From Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, by David Grann

ONE

"There was one question that the judge and prosecutors and the defense never asked the jurors but that was central to the proceedings: Would the jury of twelve white men ever punish another white man for killing an American Indian?"

From Chapter 20, So help you God!

Another Very Short Christmas

Bobby and Bill didn't so much resent their new "Dad" as fear their mother's influence over the nice new man in their lives. They worried. It was what they did.  They'd found the guns and the money in the garage. A sure sign Harriet would be making her "special punch" for yet another Christmas party, and they'd be moving again come the New Year. And they really liked Anthony, they really did.

Clerihew for a Bird Man

EDWARD LEAR

Edward Lear
Was a dear.
(Fond of birds
As you might have heard.)

A Caricature

Daily Dose

From Red Cotton Night-Cap Country, by Robert Browning

STILL

"Still, 't is the check that gives the leap its lift."

From Chapter 1

Breakfast at the Bookstore with Brad and Nick #145

Daily Dose

From All that Heaven Allows: A Biography of Rock Hudson, by Mark Griffin

NOT ONLY

"With a secret, sexually transgressive lifestyle imprisoned within a 'normal,' straight-acting, suitable-for-framing public persona, Rock Hudson is not only the star of a Douglas Sirk melodrama, he is one."

From Chapter 9, Written on the Wind

A Caricature

Clerihew of a Country Walk

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

William Wordsworth
Fell towards earth
While wandering lonely as a cloud,
Tripping on a furrow Colleridge plowed.

Daily Dose

From Autumn, by Ali Smith

ONE MIGHT

"One might imagine it'd be unpleasant, being sealed in a tree. One might imagine, ah, pining. But the scent lightens despair. It's perhaps a little like wearing a coat of armour except much nicer, because the armour is made of a substance through which years themselves, formative, have run."

From Chapter Two

Clerihew for a Readable Churchman

C. S. LEWIS

Question: Name a Christian militant
Disinclined to pompous cant?
Answer: As you probably knew, is,
Only ol' Clive Staples Lewis.

A Caricature

Daily Dose

From Less, by Andrew Sean Greer

LOOK

"Look, you: there are enough stars for everyone tonight, and among them shine the satellites, those counterfeit coins."

From Less Moroccan 

A Caricature

Daily Dose

From An Untouched House, by Willem Frederik Hermans, translated by David Colmer

NO MORE

"I picked up the bayonet and her handbag, which I clicked shut. There were no more signs of what had happened in the marble bathroom."

From page 58

A Very Short Christmas in Paducah

Who can forget Christmas, 1927? That was the year Bettelhiem's Acrobatic Babies -- probably the most notorious little people act in American vaudeville -- shot up the boarding house in Paducah. "I never had trouble from Show People," said the landlady, Mrs. Emma Thrush, "exception being Ernie Bettelhiem and his damned tumblers." She went on to tell the local paper, "He wasn't good to 'em, that's true, so when they got into my peach brandy, why, next thing you know, the boy's got my late husband's deer riffle, and all Hell broke loose."  The act broke up shortly thereafter.

A Caricature