13 posts tagged “linguaphilia”
How did you pick your Vox name? Does it mean something?
Submitted by LeendaDLL.
I feel like someone's asked this question on here. But my name comes from a poem I wrote over the summer about an interaction between a baby and a kitten, called "Collector's Items":
Lorraine was a girl who played with trifles,
Her eyes always caressed the simplest trinkets,
She fondled and fumbled with diary locks,
She knitted and purled with the blandest strings,
She always nibbled colored plastic over dribbled crystal,
She crossed prismatic sand with pricked diamonds, and
Lorraine loved all things glisteningly mundane.Her cat Sylvia preened her finest furs,
Lorraine cultivated her litter near the kitten’s pride,
Lorraine and Sylvia disagreed on collecting,
Sylvia adored diamonds and the finest yarns,
Lorraine preferred the most vibrant colors,
Lorraine coddled the most sensual textures, so
Lorraine and Sylvia always snipped at each other.One day, Sylvia spread nonsense about Lorraine –
In a fit of pique, Sylvia took Lorraine’s breath away,
She put it in her den and covered it with scents,
Sylvia circled the scene of the crime and mewed,
She pranced about the tiny girl with royal airs, and
She pawed the swaddled playground with nose in clouds.
Lorraine rested amongst her celestial trifles in peace.
I generally like cats more than baby people. But I adopted the screenname Sylvia's Revenge because what's wrong with a little decadence? What's wrong with preferring space? And why can't spaces be shared? Sylvia may have been too rash, but c'est la vie. My screenname reflects the protection of kitten individualism. :-p
Madonna of feline leukemia.
Our lady of unpaid anesthesiologist bills.
Virgin of earthquakes on the fortieth floor.
Our lady of diabetic blindness.
Madonna of drudgery.
Our lady of deadpan.
Our lady of drive-by shootings.
Madonna of laboratory animals.
Virgin of the safety deposit box.
Our lady of the sales pitch.
Heavy-lidded Madonna of thorazine.
Virgin of planetary tensions.
Personal virgin of stainless steel.
Madonna of the iron lung.
Madonna of the stock market.
Our lady of the statewide blackout.
Madonna of radiation sickness.
Madonna of carbon monoxide.
Our lady of genetic mutation.
Virgin of ether.
Madonna of nitroglycerin.
Virgin of medical ethics.
Our lady of instant cremation.
Our lady of concentration camps.
Madonna of poised aspirin.
Our lady of the sniper at the elementary school.
Virgin of the dwindling emergency rooms.
Madonna of the negative horizon.
Madonna of technology.
Madonna of the mass media.
Our lady's machine museum.
Virgin of the revelation of identity.
Madonna of the double-blind study.
Our lady of AZT.
Our lady of psychoanalysis.
Virgin of computer-engineered tax evasion.
Madonna of the synchronized sound track.
Madonna of autonomy.
Our lady of Dianetics.
Our lady of the stalled escalator.
Virgin of food irradiation.
Virgin of chemically induced birth defects.
Madonna of the wildcat strike.
Our lady of cigarette advertising.
Our lady of twilight sleep.
Madonna of suits "made by some poor slob in Hong Kong."
Virgin of the extra "Y" chromosome.
Madonna of fossil fuels.
Madonna of gridlock.
Virgin of the complete blood transfusion.
Virgin of sudden infant death syndrome.
Our lady of organ transplants.
Our lady of the power lunch.
Madonna of after-hours clubs.
Virgin of the oil glut.
Our lady of talk radio.
Madonna of the Gallup Poll.
Madonna of Muzak and call-waiting.
Our lady of sexual harassment.
Madonna of the glib interviewer.
Our lady of the temporal lobe.
Madonna of the caste system.
Our lady of unpaid sick leave.
Madonna of infinte echolalia.
Say:
your race, your sex, your color. Say:
The world is round and the arctic cold.
Say: I shall kiss the rondure of your soul's
living marl. Say: he is beautiful,
serenly beautiful, yet, only ephemerally so.
Say: Her Majesty combs her long black hair for hours.
Say: O rainbows, in his eyes, rainbows.
Say: O frills and fronds, I know you
Mr. Snail Consciousness,
O foot plodding the underside of leaves.
Say: I am nothing without you, nothing,
Ms. Lookeast, Ms. Lookeast,
without you, I am utterly empty.
Say: the small throat of sorrow.
Say: China and France, China and France.
Say: Beauty and loss, the dross of centuries.
Say: Nothing in their feudal antechamber
shall relinquish us of our beauty-
Say: Mimosa - this is not a marriage song (epithalamion).
Say: when I was a young girl in Hong Kong
a prince came on a horse, I believe it was a piebald.
O dead prince dead dead prince who paid for my ardor.
Say: O foot O ague O warbling oratorio...
Say: Darling, use "love" only as a transitive verb
for the first forty years of your life.
Say: I have felt this before, it's soft, human.
Say: my love is a fragile concertina.
Say: you always love them in the beginning,
then, you take them to slaughter.
O her coarse whispers O her soft bangs.
By their withers, they are emblazoned dopplegangers.
Say: beauty and terror, beauty and terror.
Say: the house is filled with perfume,
dancing sonatinas and pungent flowers.
Say: houses filled with combs combs combs
and the mistress' wan ankles.
Say: embrace the An Lu Shan ascendancy
and the fantastical diaspora of tears.
Say: down blue margins
my inky love runs. Tearfully,
tearfully, the pearl concubine runs.
There is a tear in his left eye - sadness or debris?
Say: reverence to her, reverence to her.
Say: I am a very small boy, a very small boy,
I am a teeny weeny little boy
who yearns to be punished.
Say, I can't live without you
Head Mistress, Head Mistress,
I am a little lamb, a consenting lamb,
I am a sheep without his fold.
Say: God does not exist and hell is other people -
and Mabel, can't we get out of this hotel?
Say: Gregor Samsa - someone in Tuscaloosa
thinks you're magnifico, she will kiss
your battered cheek, embrace your broken skull.
Is the apple half eaten or half whole?
Suddenly, he moves within me, how do I know
that he is not death, in death there is
certain // caesura.
Say: there is poetry in his body, poetry
in his body, yes, say:
this dead love, this dead love,
this dead, dead love, this lovely death,
this white percale, white of hell, of heavenly shale.
Centerfolia...say: kiss her sweet lips.
Say: what rhymes with "flower":
"bower," "shower," "power"?
I am that yellow girl, that famished yellow girl
from the first world.
Say: I don't give a shit about nothing
'xcept my cat, your cock and poetry.
Say: a refuge between sleeping and dying.
Say: to Maui to Maui to Maui
creeps in his pretty pompadour.
Day to day, her milk of human kindness
ran dry; I shall die of jejune jejune la lune la lune.
Say: a beleaguered soldier, a fine arse had he.
Say: I have seen the small men of my generation
rabid, discrete, hysterical, lilliput, naked.
Say: Friday is okay; we'll have fish.
Say: Friday is not okay; he shall die
of the measles near the bay.
Say: Friday, just another savage
day until Saturday, the true Sabbath, when they shall
finally stay. Say:
Sojourner
Truth.
Say: I am dismayed by your cloying promiscuousness
and fawning attitude.
Say: amaduofu, amaduofu.
Say: he put cumin and tarragon in his stew.
Say: he's the last wave of French Algerian Jews.
He's a cousin of Helene Cixous, twice removed.
Say: he recites the lost autobiography of Camus.
Say: I am a professor from the University of Stupidity,
I cashed my welfare check and felt good.
I saw your mama crossing the bridge of magpies
up on the faded hillock with the Lame Ox -
Your father was conspicuously absent.
Admit that you loved your mother,
that you killed your father to marry your mother.
Suddenly, my terrible childhood made sense.
Say: beauty and truth, beauty and truth,
all ye need to know on earth all ye need to know.
Say: I was boogying down, boogying down
Victoria Peak Way and a slip-of-a-boy climbed off his ox;
he importuned me for a kiss, a tiny one
on his cankered lip.
Say: O celebrator O celebrant
of a blessed life, say:
false fleeting hopes
Say: despair, despair, despair.
Say: Chinawoman, I am a contradicition in terms:
I embody frugality and ecstasy.
Friday Wong died on a Tuesday,
O how he loved his lambs.
He was lost in their sheepfold.
Say: another mai tai before your death.
Another measure another murmur before your last breath.
Another boyfried, Italianesque.
Say: Save. Exit.
Say: I am the sentence which shall at last elude her.
Oh, the hell of heaven's girth, a low mound from here...
Say:
Oh, a mother's vision of the emerald hills draws down her brows.
Say: A brush of jade, a jasper plow furrow.
Say: ####00000xxxxx!!!!
Contemplate thangs cerebral spiritual open stuff reality
by definition lack any spatial extension
we occupy no space and are not measurable
we do not move undulate are not in perpetual motion
where for example is thinking in the head? in my vulva?
whereas in my female lack of penis? Physical
thangs spatial extensions mathematically measurable
preternaturally possible lack bestial vegetable consciousness
lack happiness lackluster lack chutzpah lack love
Say: A scentless camellia bush bloodied the afternoon.
Fuck this line, can you really believe this?
When did I become the master of suburban bliss?
With whose tongue were we born?
The language of the masters is the language of the aggressors.
We've studied their cadence carefully -
enrolled in a class to improve our accent.
Meanwhile, they hover over, waiting for us to stumble...
to drop an article, mispronounce an R.
Say: softly, softly, the silent gunboats glide.
O onerous sibilants, O onomatopoetic glibness.
Say:
How could we write poetry in a time like this?
A discipline that makes much ado about so little?
Willfully laconic, deceptively disguised as a love poem.
Say:
Your engorging dict-
atorial flesh
grazed mine.
Would you have loved me more if I were black?
Would I have loved you more if you were white?
And you, relentless Sinophile,
holding my long hair, my frayed dreams.
My turn to objectify you.
I, the lunatic, the lover, the poet,
the face of an orphan static with flies,
the scourge of the old world,
which reminds us - it ain't all randy dandy
in the new kingdom.
Say rebuke descry
Hills and canyons, robbed by sun, leave us nothing.
The poem of the mind in the act of finding
What will suffice. It has not always had
To find: the scene was set; it repeated what
Was in the script.
Then the theatre was changed
To something else. Its past was a souvenir.
It has to be living, to learn the speech of a place.
It has to face the men of the time and to meet
The women of the time. It has to think about war
And it has to find what will suffice. It has
To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage
And, like an insatiable actor, slowing and
With meditation, speak words that in the ear,
In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat,
Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound
Of which, an invisible audience listens,
Not to the play, but to itself, expressed
In an emotion as of two people, as of two
Emotions becoming one. The actor is
A metaphysician in the dark, twanging
An instrument, twanging a wiry string that gives
Sounds passing through sudden rightness, wholly
Containing the mind, below which is cannot descend,
Beyond which it has no will to rise.
It must
Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may
Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman
Combing. The poem of the act of the mind.
"Do you like me?"
I asked the blue blazer.
No answer.
Silence bounced out of his books.
Silence fell off his tongue
and sat between us
and clogged my throat.
It slaughtered my trust.
It tore cigarettes out of my mouth.
We exchanged blind words,
and I did not cry,
and I did not beg,
blackness lunged in my heart,
and something that had been good,
a sort of kindly oxygen,
turned into a gas oven.
Do you like me?
How absurd!
What's a question like that?
What's a silence like that?
And what am I hanging around for,
riddled with what his silence said?
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all around it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
What time period would you have lived in, if you could have lived at any time?
The part of the future where thinking controls our existence. I'd be a rebel bad ass motherfucker if left to my imagination. "For there is nothing good or bad/But thinking makes it so," said Mr. Hamlet.
Also, another cool poem that brings a smile to my face: "The Wit" by Elizabeth Bishop
"Wait. Let me think a minute," you said.
And in the minute we saw:
Eve and Newton with an apple apiece,
and Moses with the Law,
Socrates, who scratched his curly head,
and many more from Greece,
all coming hurrying up to now,
bid by your crinkled brow.But then you made a brilliant pun.
We gave a thunderclap of laughter.
Flustered, your helpers vanished one by one;
and through the conversational spaces, after,
we caught, - back, back, far, far, -
the glinting birthday of a fractious star.
Here's a poem called "Against Coupling" by Fleur Adcock:
I write in praise of the solitary act:
of not feeling a trespassing tongue
forced into one's mouth, one's breath
smothered, nipples crushed against the
rib-cage, and that metallic tingling
in the chin set off by a certain odd nerve:unpleasure. Just to avoid those eyes would help-
such eyes as a young girl draws life from,
listening to the vegetal
rustle within her, as his gaze
stirs polypal fronds in the obscure
sea-bed of her body, and her own eyes blur.There is much to be said for abandoning
this no longer novel exercise-
for now 'participating in
a total experience'-when
one feels like the lady in Leeds who
had seen The Sound Of Music eighty-six times;or more, perhaps, like the school drama mistress
producing A Midsummer Night's Dream
for the seventh year running, with
yet another cast from 5B.
Pyramus and Thisbe are dead, but
the hole in the wall can still be troublesome.I advise you, then, to embrace it without
encumberance. No need to set the scene,
dress up (or undress), make speeches.
Five minutes of solitude are
enough-in the bath, or to fill
that gap between the Sunday papers and lunch.
What song or lyrics are stuck in your head at the moment? What album is it from?
Submitted by Lox Ly.
"Can I get control/do you like me vulnerable/I'm armed and I'm equal/more fun for the people"
--M.I.A., "Bucky Done Gun"
"Yo sé que no he sido un santo, pero lo puedo arreglar, amor!
No sólo de pan vive el hombre y no de excusas vivo yo.
Sólo de errores se aprende y hoy sé que es tuyo mi corazón!
Mejor te guardas todo eso, a otro perro con ese hueso y nos decimos adiós."
--Shakira feat. Alejandro Sanz, "La Tortura"
(Translation:
I know I haven't been a saint
But I can make it up to you!
Man doesn't live on bread alone
Nor do I live on excuses.
We only learn from mistakes
And today I know my heart is yours!
Better save that for yourself
Take that bone to some other dog
And let's say goodbye.)
Trying and lying/defying denying/crying and dying/where is everybody?"
--Nine Inch Nails, "Where Is Everybody?"
"Tick tock tick tock tick tock tick tock/take a chance you stupid ho...
Look at your watch now/you're still a super hot female/you've got a million dollar contract/and they're all waiting for your hot track..."
--Gwen Stefani, "Whatcha Waitin' For?"
What books are on your nightstand?
I have way way way too many books on my nightstand because it's doubling as a bookshelf. I'll put a few titles here, though, because I think it's a good question.
- Sula by Toni Morrison
- Every Tongue Got to Confess: Negro Folk Tales from the Gulf States by Zora Neale Hurston
- Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
- A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain
- Fear and Trembling/The Sickness unto Death by Soren Kierkegaard
- The Rebel by Albert Camus
- Inferno by Dante Alighieri (translated by Mark Musa)
- Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankel
- Language and Myth by Ernst Cassirer
- Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy
- Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J. K. Rowling
- The Bible by Jesus :-p
- Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
But what I'm really about to read are my Torts and Civil Procedure case books, along with referencing my Federal Rules of Civil Procedure book. Life sucks that way.
