kurt vonnegut | because i enjoyed them

 

found poem | naaman zhou | second mentions

second mentions
(“elegant variation," “false elegance,” “cheap ornament”)
 

Something in the nature of the human ear 

makes repetition sound strange, or off,

a mistake; 

it’s bad to say the same thing twice.

Make sure to have elaborate alternatives: 

“the son of Peleus” for Achilles, or 

the “man of pain” for Odysseus. 

 

The Greeks had their own verb for this.

antonomazein, “to name differently,”

which lends its name to the rhetorical technique antonomasia. 

The thesaurus has been cashing this check for centuries. 

 

Adele, "the singer Adele,"

     "the Tottenham soul-pop titan"

a fox who ran onto a soccer field, 

     “the four-legged interloper” 

Grumpy Cat, the Internet meme, 

     “the sourpuss with the piercing look of contempt”

a swan that blocked a police car, 

     “the feathered obstacle”

a pair of armadillos who, for some reason, were put on a diet: 

     “The oval-shaped duo.” 

 

charming, insane, perfect.

 

cheese, "the popular dairy product"

tea, "the bitter brown infusion” 

bananas, “elongated yellow fruit” 

milk, “the vitamin-laden liquid”

 

St. Patrick’s Day, “the annual tradition” 

Microplastics, “the ubiquitous particles” 

Will Smith, “the former Fresh Prince”

 

The moon, “the tide-changing rock.” 

a sex doll, a “lust vessel” 

electric scooters, “the long-necked, flat-bottomed machines”

 

You’ve got animal ones, and sport ones, food ones.

"Porcine," "bovine," "ovine," all those. 

When animals are called, like, "porker.” 

In Germany, a Wildschwein (boar) is a "Paarhufer" ("even-toed ungulate")

 

These elephantine shifts distract our attention from the matter in hand.

Milton:  

Satan, “infernal Serpent,” “Apostate Angel,” “superiour Fiend” 

 

Charlotte Brontë: 

“His mother possessed a good development of benevolence, 

but he owned a better and larger.”

 

Nabokov:

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. 

She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, 

She was Lola in slacks.”

 

Boris Johnson: 

“Hands up anybody who’s been to Peppa Pig World? 

a pig that looks like a Picasso-like hair dryer.”

 

“Chutney Ivy in the city’s Cultural Quarter will also host 

a samosa fundraiser 

where guests can enjoy the triangular snacks.” 

How does that not activate a kind of delight at the back of the cortex? 

It’s the shape of the sentence, 

the simple geometry, 

the bathos, 

the fact that, 

not even halfway through the sentence, 

however funny or extravagant the synonym will be, 

you realize that you actually do need it.

 

 

edited from

The Twitter Account That Collects Awkward, Amusing Writing

by Naaman Zhou | The New Yorker, April 19, 2022

barney ronay | james milner's command performance

There has been a weird kind of voodoo about the current run. City have barely stuttered. They’ve also kept on winning, burying the pain of Madrid, playing like champions. Players have begun to break and fall away. The games have become frantic. But that gleaming set of teeth is still there in the rear-view mirror. 

James Milner, who played half a game in the middle and half a game on the right, touched the ball more than anyone else on the pitch, and spent the 90 minutes cajoling his teammates over the line like a long-suffering dad on a cross-country hike.

 

St Mary’s is one of the more hospitable away grounds at the best of times. Before kickoff a marching band tootled away through the rain outside the stadium. No flares were thrown. No baying crowd greeted the team buses. Inside the atmosphere brought to mind a fond early summer village fete. Whereas for Liverpool this was jeopardy, destiny, the edge of things. 

Milner has a timeless look to him these days. He doesn’t really run. He stalks. He doesn’t caress the ball, or thread it, or glide it. He clumps it. He kicks it like a man dishing out a fond, correctional repunishment, the kind of licks the ball will thank him for when it’s old enough. And through all this he looks oddly indestructible, an athlete made from some untiring super-substance – ancient Roman leather, whalebone and buffalo hide. ...

With 58 minutes gone he was up there jinking and feinting on the wing, dummying Redmond like a teenager. This is the kind of leader-by-default every organisation craves, asking nothing, screwing the joints into place, the wookie in the engine room, bolting this thing together on the hoof, banging the circuit boards.

excerpted from Milner’s command performance keeps Liverpool in fight for title
The Guardian, May 17, 2022

sonder

"Yesterday I had a really lovely chat with a very very old friend, one who has seen the worst and the best of me, and one of the things we covered in a wide-ranging conversation was the idea of sonder -- that every person you pass on the street, sit by on the bus, has their own story that is just as complex, weird, amazing, beautiful, and interesting to them as yours is to you. The time this really hits me is stuck in a traffic jam, trying to imagine the complex lives of every other person stuck in a car, but it can hit any time." Rob Oseyo

So there's a word for that. I remember how vivid that sense was all of a sudden at the time I became a Christian, early in Grade Eleven. In my experience it was all bound up together; I'm not the centre of the universe any more than all these other people (curiously enough, fifty years later the specific moment of realization was also on a bus), and Someone IS the centre of the universe. Who "has seen the worst and best of me." Who cares more than I do about all those other people, and about me. I'm not only much smaller and less important than I had always thought, I also matter infinitely more than I imagined, and so do all those other people. 

I knew a girl who lived on the North Shore of Vancouver. At night she would look out at the vast city spread out below her, all those lights. And she would become frightened. As though she would shrink away to nothing. Too many lives, and she was so small, and getting smaller.

danusha lameris | feeding the worms

Ever since I found out that earth worms have taste buds

all over the delicate pink strings of their bodies,
I pause dropping apple peels into the compost bin, imagine
the dark, writhing ecstasy, the sweetness of apples
permeating their pores. I offer beets and parsley,
avocado, and melon, the feathery tops of carrots.

I’d always thought theirs a menial life, eyeless and hidden,
almost vulgar—though now, it seems, they bear a pleasure
so sublime, so decadent, I want to contribute however I can,
forgetting, a moment, my place on the menu.