The Proud Beggar

ever wonder what the hell I am thinking about? ever wonder what the hell James Joyce was thinking about? ever wonder what Helene Cixous was thinking about James Joyce? ever wonder what it means to be human? ever wonder of you're the only person in the universe who thinks the whole getting married and having kids thing is a little suspect? ever wonder what word pisses me off more than any other word?......NOW IS YOUR TIME TO FIND OUT.

(tip: I think this one reads best fullscreen in "book" viewing mode)




The Proud Beggar

From the Lewis Carroll Society Blog: Portmanteaus on This American Life

Mrs Eley & I are slowly starting our new gig as editors for one of the sections at the Knight Letter, the magazine from the Lewis Carroll Society of North America. I'll also be blogging for them at lcsna.blogspot.com. Here's a re-print of my inaugural post over there:

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Lewis Carroll was not mentioned by name, nor was the word 'portmanteau' ever dropped, but Humpty Dumpty's spirit lurked around the September 13th, 2009, episode of This American Life (#389 Frenemies). Starting at 29:45 in the episode, Ira Glass interviews lexicographer Erin McKean, whom he had asked to research the word 'frenemy'. She found the first attempted coinage by gossip columnist Walter Winchell in 1953, who wrote "how's about calling the Russians our 'frenemies'?", although the word didn't really take off till decades later.

Their conversation, transcribed, starting at 32:00 in the episode:

Glass: Wait, are there other words like this, where they sound alike, and then they get smashed together into one word?
McKean: Oh, it happens, like, all the time. I mean, think, there's, like 'guesstimate', right? And that's from 1936.
Glass: Do you have another one?
McKean: I love this one, and people say this one all the time with a little thrill of thinking they're the first person ever to say it: You know, that someone is entering their 'anecdotage.'
Glass: I've never heard that. So you get old, and then you start telling your anecdotes, and that's it?
McKean: Right, and I think the central part, is that you start telling the same anecdotes over and over again.
Glass: Right. You got another one?
McKean: Lots of people think that they are the first person to create the word 'linner'.
Glass: Linner?
McKean: Linner is that meal you must have between lunch and dinner.
Glass: That just makes me feel mad at somebody, hearing that...

(They go on to discuss the word 'slanguage' and lexical gaps.) The lexicographer and the radio host condescend a bit to these enthusiastic amateur wordsmiths, but they're far from being the first people to think they've coined a clever portmanteau. Mark Burstein quotes from James Atherton's The Books at the Wake, when he discusses the creation and later development of word-smashing techniques from Carroll to Finnegans Wake:

It must have astonished [James] Joyce, that avant-garde innovator, proud of his Irish nationality, contemptuous of the Church of England, and confident of his own originality, to find that he had been forestalled in so many of his discoveries by a mid-Victorian Englishman in minor Anglican orders.

Of course, Humpty Dumpty doesn't claim to have invented the practice, nor any of the portmanteaus of which he is the master. And back to Ira Glass, it's a shame they didn't get into the history of "smashing together" words, but it's interesting to learn that part of a lexicographer's job is to let people down when they learn they didn't invent words like 'anecdotage'.

-originally posted here.

Britney. Sports.

Who knew Mikhail Bakhtin and Julia Kristeva influenced Britney Spears? Her new stuff is highly intertextual.

Oh, and, sports sports sports, sporty sport.

A Few Notes about the Mimosas Witnesses

In discussing our religion, the Mimosas Witnesses, an acquaintance was shocked the other day when I mentioned there was an original New Yorker cartoon. Yes, our entire faith can be traced, not to some science fiction novel, but to a cartoon by Danny Shanahan published in the January 9th, 2006, issue of The New Yorker, which I realize is copyrighted by cartoonbank.com. This image can also be purchased on an ugly white t-shirt or a "Delux Framed Print" for $350. As the Archpope of Transubstantiation & legal seagull for the Mimosas Witnesses, I assure you that we are not in violation of Shanahan's copyright, as (with the minor exception of tithing the incomes of our proselytes) we have never made a cent off of our missionary work. I love Shanahan's detail of the pamphlet titled "Wake up!" It was the inpiration for the Shepard Fairey knock-off to the right. Shepard Fairey, of course, has had his own copyright issues with his Obama poster; & I expect to hear shortly from Witness "Big Mama" Raleigh's lawyers for the use of her photograph in the Faireyization of Mr Mary for my Mimosas Witness posters. Ah, copyrighting, the just protector of art & artists!

Also, in regards to the spelling of Mimosas Witnesses, I have recently been spelling it without the apostrophe. I was told that the Jehovahs Witnesses sometimes go by simply Jehovah Witnesses, but in my attempt to research that, I can't find any evidence that this is the case. They appear to be always "Jehovah's Witnesses" with an apostrophe. Anyone have any idea where I might have gotten that? However, aestetically, I like spelling it simply Mimosas Witnesses, in tribute to James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, which is often referenced with an incorrect apostrophe in the title. The Witnesses & the Wake share many a kindred interconnection.

James is in Finnegans Wake and James is in Finnegans Wake

I am reading a book wherein, on page 145, a copy of a letter written by Leonard Lyons to Julius Marx includes this excerpt of a Thornton Wilder letter to Leonard Lyons:

RE Groucho and "Finnegans Wake"- I have long thought he was in the book. Weren't the Marx Brothers once in a skit about Napoleon? I seem to remember them wearing tricornes, etc. Anyway, on pages 8 and 9

(pause for retrieval of your personal editions)

there is a visit to the Wellington Museum at Waterloo and I read ... "This is the three lipoleum Coyne Grouching down in the living detch."

On page 154, just a bit further on in the book I am reading, a letter from Tom S. Eliot, Missourian, to Julius Henry Marx, New Yorker, reads:

P.S. I like cigars too but there isn't any cigar in my portrait either.

But where is this portrait? (I know where it is, having read the letter - anyone familiar with portraits and their usual place may guess awkwardly, ashamed) The portrait is in this book and not in this book I am reading. The portrait is both somewhere outside of this book and inside this book. It was not entirely in any of your minds and it is now in your minds, though you might not yet have figured out where the physical nature of the portrait resides.

James, as we have known is not in "Finnegans Wake." James, also, as we(us) have known has not been in "Finnegans Wake." We have and continue to know, knowing that I like James Henry Welsch and James Eliot Quill and neither are in my portrait. Consequently, James Henry Welsch is James Joyce's thin goy mustache, I am Julius' thick greasepaint jew mustache, and James Eliot Quill is in Bulgaria, working on his being his very own mustache, and all of us three are in and are not in "Finnegans Wake."

Carlos C. claimed to be a shaman. He made multiple beautiful PHD students become his wives and sex-buddies. They all changed their names multiple times and cut their hair and dyed it blond. He made millions of dollars selling bags full of sand that you are supposed to put on your back while lying on a bed doing an 'ancient shamanic resting exercise' that only he could teach you if you had paid thousands of dollars to go to one of his workshops. He taught that women had to be celibate because sperm is poison. But his sperm wasn't poison because he was the Nagu*l. he was born in Peru in 1925, went to sculpture school in Lima, and died in L.A in 1998. His ashes were then sent to Mexico. He said squash your parents because they are fleas. he had a mastectomy. he died of cancer. he refused to be photographed after 1973. Joyce Carol Oates did not think his books should be shelved in non-fiction with the other anthropology books. Every woman who ever met him wanted to have sex with him. Like Pablo Picasso, he was only 5 foot 3. a woman who wanted to have sex with him once said that there was immense sadness in his left eye because she was married and would not have sex with him. After he died, most of his wives dissapeared, but one remarried and still lives in California, but won't talk to writers. his daughter/lover who he called the bl*e sc**t drove her car into the desert and died of dehydration instead of becoming a ball of light and ascending into the Nag*a, as he had promised she would. At one workshop, he had said that the bl*e sc**t was not really human. At another he said she was a bitch who could not complete her designs for paperweights in time for them to be mass-manufactured. All former followers agree that Carlos C. had a wonderful sense of humor.

E-mails: Three written today in Alameda

Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2006 11:50:27 -0700 (PDT)
From: "James Welsch" <__________@yahoo.com>
Subject:Thomas Stearns
To: "Grace Marlier" <__________@hotmail.com>

"By this grace dissolved in place" -T.S.

"There is a time for Thomas Stearns Eliot / & a time for my middle name" -J.H.

"Don't talk like a book, Dad." -Dolores Haze to Humbert Humbert.

Grace,

I saw the tallest lifeform on earth, the tallest tree, "Giant Tree" in the Humboldt Redwoods. It made me think of Melville. We're trying to find a place to live, in the "bay area".

Did you know that Liam & Virtue are in Brasil! Did you know it's winter down there, but not the white kind. Jenny just told me: "you should write her back like you're a black person, too." I suggest that your entire nice, despite street-wise, e-mail to me was a formality to get Liam's information! Well it didn't work, my liege! Except that I think he does now possess an electronic mail address, including all of his middle names, ljowg at yahoo dot com. He refuses to answer my inquiries regarding the dubya. Thomas Fucking Stearns! Bah! Joanne Kathleen? I love her. L.J. Olaf W.G. contacted me trying to find postcard locations for Ben, Hannah, Melinda, Rachel, of which I had none, only e-mails for two. He falls off the face of the planet & then expects everyone to resubmerge from Atlantis when he's lonely in Latin Land? The scoundrel!

I'm house-sitting for my sister in Alameda, a carefully preserved mid-century community (tupperware & nuke scare) sausaged between "The City" & "The East Bay". We plan to use this old house as a haven while we do our reconnaissence into scary Berkeley, our perhaps new hood. Everyone has a different idea for me. All I want to do is stay in the mountains & live the life of the idle rich. Cosmic forces conspire to move me to urban Dis. Count me momentarily 'in' on B.A., despite the rigamarole which will keep me from you.

Peace & Robert Allen Zimmerman,
J.H.
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Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2006 11:16:09 -0700 (PDT)
From: "James Welsch" <________@yahoo.com>

Subject: Le
To: "Bonnie Whiting Smith" <____________@gmail.com>

Bonnie Anne,

First, some initial thoughts about the Jabberwock:

I recommend immediately securing a copy of Martin Gardiner's amazing "The Annotated Alice" which contains the most thoro introduction & footnotes to both Alice Books. The section on the Jabberwocky is pages of footnotes, definitions, & translations. I just found the wikipedia entry, which also has definitions & more translations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabberwocky

It also has a long section on pronunciation, which you may want to study! before pronouncing it "wrong" for a bunch of nubiles.

The French:

Il brilgue: les tôves lubricilleux
Se gyrent en vrillant dans le guave.
Enmîmés sont les gougebosqueux
Et le mômerade horsgrave.

Several suggestions for other things you can do or add to the play:
I would recommend using the Humpty-Dumpty dialog as a framework, because it's hilarious & explains the idea of a portmanteaux. Perhaps you could make a humpty-dumpty costume into an instrument!

Look into Joyce's Finnegans Wake - it quotes the Jabberwock repeatedly, & the whole book is inspired by Carroll's innovation of the portmanteaux. If you were interested in quoting other nonsense besides the Jabberwock, perhaps you could sing the quotes from FW. (I'll look them up for you). The major themes of the Joyce are the toppling of the tower of babble-babel-baba, i.e. the nonsensization of language, & it is overlapped with the fall of Carroll's Humpty-Dumpty, & fall of drunk Tim Finnegan from the old Irish song. (Finnegan falls off a ladder & wakes up at his own wake, i.e. Jesus. The whole nonsense novel is supposed to be his dream-death-drunk.) Look for references to Humpty-Dumpty on the first page!

If you're interested in other nonsense verse, there's a good dover edition of Carroll's complete poetry. You might want to include the "Mad Gardner's Song" to your act, always a favorite. Edward Lear is the other famous nonsense poet. I also love Robert Burns, the Scottish bard, & I was going to send you this poem I recently found:

Ye gallants bright,
I rede you right,
Beware o' Bonnie Ann;
Her comely face sae fu' o' grace,
Your heart she will trepan:
Her een sae bright, like stars by night,
Her skin is like the swan;
Sae jimply lac'd her genty waist,
That sweetly ye might span.

Youth, grace, and love attendant move,
And pleasure leads the van:
In a' their charms, and conquering arms,
They wait on Bonnie Ann.
The captive bands may chain the hands,
But love enslaves the man:
Ye gallants braw, I rede you a',
Beware o' Bonnie Ann!


Secondly, our party:
It was mostly people from my work, afterall, plus James Quill & Darren Southworth, my only old friends who made the journey. Three of my ex-coworkers got into a dramatic threesome, rife with yelling & crying, which complicated my simple festivisties. Jenny & I are looking for a place to live in the bay area, house-sitting for my sister in Alameda this week. We were just up in Ashland, Oregon, seeing Shakespeare's King John, & then camping in the redwoods. We saw the tallest tree in the world, the tallest life-form on eath, "Giant Tree", a humbling experience; then drove down the coast, beautiful! I'm reading Nabokov. More later - stay in touch - I have help my sister with the newest baby, one month old, baby Will, already twelve pounds.

Love,
James Henry

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Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2006 13:52:32 -0700 (PDT)
From: "James Welsch" <_______@yahoo.com>
Subject: P.S.
To: "Bonnie Whiting Smith" <__________@gmail.com>

I found the great lecture I saw, where I was first introduced to the Carroll-Joyce connection:

http://www.lewiscarroll.org/bander.html

Scroll down to the section called "Joyce Carroll Notes" for the quotes.

But, if you have time, that whole essay might give you a lot of inspiration & suggestions. Also, I can put you in touch with Mark Burstein if you want to ask him for ideas. There's already been a lot of music/theater/addition writing about the Jabberwocky, & I'm sure he knows everything inside out. There's also a movie based on it from the 70s, directed by Terry Gilliam (Monty Python / Brazil).

Too much information?

James