"I remember the fur coats of the girls returning from Miss This-or-That’s..."

"... and the chatter of frozen breath and the hands waving overhead as we caught sight of old acquaintances, and the matchings of invitations: 'Are you going to the Ordways'? the Herseys'? the Schultzes'?' and the long green tickets clasped tight in our gloved hands."

That other sentence — "At the hookah bar, Jordan and Emily Wernet, a 25-year-old freelance illustrator of comics and tattoos, joked about the grotesqueness of a hand appearing inside a belly and about 'parasites,' 'popping one out,' and 'horrible little grubs' in the midst of more serious conversation about their fears of relinquishing sole ownership of one’s own body" —  made some readers feel that there was a "Gatsby" sentence gestating somewhere inside the womb of my Blogger account, so I thought I'd better pop out this post. I hope you don't find it grotesque, this string of words that F. Scott Fitzgerald, in full possession of the autonomy of authorship, determined to be, in fact, a sentence, worthy of a place in the pages of "The Great Gatsby."

And I hope it's not horrible that I ripped it out of his context and put it in my context as I, clasping tightly to my bloggerly autonomy, decided that this — this! — is a blog post. It is not for the professors, journalists, and literary critics to resolve the difficult question of when some quotes from this-or-that tossed together with some connective prose amount to a blog post. It's enough to say there's a divergence of thinking on this most sensitive and difficult question, and therefore it's up to me to decide what is worthy of publication here. My blog, my choice.

This "Gatsby" sentence has a simple structure. The subject is "I" and the predicate is "remember." How many sentences in the history of humanity begin "I remember...."? There's no end to where you can go from there (especially if you're not hung up on nonfiction and truthtelling). So string along the memories — the memorabilia, the "things... worthy of being remembered."

I remember the Michael Jackson memorabilia, the Bruce Lee memorabilia, the Martin Luther King Jr. memorabilia, Malcolm X memorabilia, the Jimi Hendrix memorabilia, the $43,350 Rolex watch, the fur capes and parkas....

I mean... I remember the fur coats.... They — the girls returning from Miss This-or-That’s — weren't wearing their fur in cape or parka form back in 1922.

Things remembered: fur coats, chatter, hands waving, matchings of invitations, and long green tickets. These remembered things give the reader a sense of the incompletely delineated human beings. Who are the unnamed girls and who are the "we"? There's the overspecificity of the people offstage, Ordways, the Herseys, and the Schultzes. There's the silly half-specificity of Miss This-or-That. These people — or, really, places (hence the possessive) — are, like fur coats and gloves, appurtenances to the human beings we are trying to see in this picture.

This is a mass of faceless humanity, cluttered with hands, waving and clasping. Hands appears twice in the sentence — the grotesqueness of a hand appearing — first, waving (connecting with others), and second, clasping a ticket (intent on getting to one's predetermined destination). The hands of the others reaching out are grubby and horrible and we've got a fear of relinquishing sole ownership of our long green tickets.

"At the hookah bar, Jordan and Emily Wernet, a 25-year-old freelance illustrator of comics and tattoos, joked about the grotesqueness..."

"... of a hand appearing inside a belly and about 'parasites,' 'popping one out,' and 'horrible little grubs' in the midst of more serious conversation about their fears of relinquishing sole ownership of one’s own body."

That's quite a sentence. I present it for your analysis, both formal and substantive. Free free to click here and take in the full context, which is quite interesting (and recently pointed at by Instapundit).

I wonder if Emily has designed tattoos for women's bellies that depict the illusion of seeing through to a distended womb with something grotesque inside.

"Photo of breast cancer survivor's tattooed chest is shared by thousands after Facebook's attempts to ban it."

The nudity rules don't bend for cancer or for art. What can you really expect? But, anyway, I'm no fan of tattoos but I love this adaptation to mastectomy.

"I got it because we got drunk and it was just a really funny idea and my friend said he’d do it for free."

"I sat on it for a couple days and was finally like, 'Man, I’m gonna get a butthole tattoo that says "Let It Be" with a bumblebee flying out!'"

She sat on it for a couple days and now she will sit on it for the rest of her life.

She's not even a Beatles fan. Well, no. If she were, she'd have a beetle crawling out.

The Sikh temple shooter was a 40-year-old former soldier named Wade Michael Page.

It's still not clear why the FBI is treating the murders as domestic terrorism. Perhaps the targeting of Sikhs by a non-Sikh is reason enough to investigate it as terrorism.

The neighbor says, as she understood it, the suspect had lived in the apartment with his girlfriend until their recent break-up. The suspect had then moved into another apartment nearby two weeks ago. She says he had returned to the old apartment and was banging on the door of his old apartment, demanding to be let in. The neighbor also said she believed the suspect had a 9-11 tattoo.

Of course, Sikhs had nothing to do with 9/11, though people sometimes mistake Sikhs for Muslims (and mistake Muslims generally for the subgroup of Muslims behind 9/11), but in a planned killing where someone goes to the place of worship, it would be harder to make the mistake.

ADDED: The FBI special agent in charge of the investigation said: "We are looking at ties to white supremacist groups."

Tattoos.

Lots of interesting photographs here, quite aside from whether the tattoos are wise choices or well done. I love #19, done with a fisheye lens, which shows a man whose large upper arm is consumed by a technically excellent monochrome depiction of the face of Bruce Springsteen. A terrible idea. Sickeningly earnest to me, but the guy is quite pleased with it, and he's at a Bruce Springsteen concert, so there's something charming about it. Horrible and charming.

The next photo — #20 — takes us in a completely different direction:

"Vinnie" Myers specializes in tattooing nipples and areolas onto women who have undergone breast cancer surgery. Using precisely mixed pigments, he creates a perfect 3-D illusion of the real thing...

"The witches’ brew of predator-prey arms races: eye of newt, fenny snakes and resistance to a deadly poison."

The title of a lecture, one of many events here at the University of Wisconsin campus this week — in observance of the birthday of Charles Darwin. (We do a whole week for "Darwin Day," apparently. The great man's actual birthday was February 12, 1809.)

My mind is dragged back to the fascinating story in the previous post. Trent Arsenault has the ideal Darwinian strategy, doesn't he? He's perfecting and maximizing his genetic material and its distribution, including the likelihood that his offspring will be healthy and well-protected and well-reared to adulthood.

If you do come to Madison this weekend, perhaps to take in some Darwin-related things, make sure to drop by the Chazen Museum and see the Art Department's faculty show. Meade and I loved it. I couldn't do photographs of that exhibit, but there's a slide show at the link. My favorite thing was "Stoney's Tiny Tattoo" ("a painted-wood structure by Assistant Professor Fred Stonehouse... Inside, graduate student Ben Grant tattoos himself"). No one was doing tattoo performance when we were there. I just loved all the faux-primitive drawings inside the booth.

But wait! Why am I talking about Darwin's birthday today? It's not the 12th, it's the 7th. And it's not a big centenary birthday for Darwin. That was 3 years ago. Today is the 200th anniversary of the birth of another great Charles D: Charles Dickens. And the reason I noticed this is the usual reason people these days notice things like that: I saw a mysterious Google Doodle and clicked on it. I've read a lot of Dickens, but there's only one Dickens book I've read twice:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way....

Oh, yes... that reminds me, it's just about exactly the 1-year anniversary of the start of the Wisconsin protests, our own special Wisconsin season of darkness/spring of hope/winter of despair.

If you're coming to Madison for Darwin Day Weekend — and maybe the faculty art show — you can also sojourn in and around the protest commemorations. I don't know what's in store, but check out the Capitol Square for some hope and despair and epochal belief and incredulity.

"My love of footnotes as art form, as commentary, as the place to embed sneaky and wry asides..."

"... that do not belong in the text, only grew and grew through childhood, until I reached college."

A woman who loves footnotes so much she had "n.b." tattooed... on her foot. The woman, s.e. smith, links to Wikipedia to help people understand "n.b." — nota bene — and Wikipedia just gives us the literal and semi-literal translation: "note well" or "pay attention"/"take notice."

Now, I've listened the the audiobook of David Foster Wallace reading "Consider the Lobster" about a thousand times — n.b. David Foster Wallace gluttonously indulged in footnotes — and he does an aside:

n.b. - which means "nota bene," which the audio commandant wants me to tell you means "note well," but actually really means "by the way"...

Here's a reddit discussion of that Wallace aside. They seem to think he's joking. But what's the joke? Is it that people use "n.b." when there's no reason to pay any more note to the thing after the "n.b." than to anything else in the text? Or is it not a joke, and Wallace is giving the abbreviation the meaning it has genuinely acquired in use over the years, which is to designate an aside?

At this point, you might wonder whether Wallace is a prescriptivist or a descriptivist when it comes to word usage, and the cool thing about that is there's an essay in the "Consider the Lobster" essay collection* — it's not all about lobsters! — that has about a million things to say on that subject, but since it's not one of the essays in the audiobook — which is an abridgment — his resolution of that issue is not lodged in my brain. The essay is "Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage." Key passage:

Garner's A Dictionary of Modern American Usage is thus both a collection of information and a piece of Democratic rhetoric.⁴⁹ Its goal is to recast the Prescriptivist's persona: The author presents himself as an authority not in an autocratic sense but in a technocratic sense. And the technocrat is not only a thoroughly modern and palatable image of Authority but also immune to the charges of elitism/classism that have hobbled traditional Prescriptivism.

--------------------------

⁴⁹(meaning literally Democratic — it Wants Your Vote)

Thus, I take it, Wallace wasn't joking. He was seeking votes for assigning the meaning "by the way" to "n.b."

--------------------------

*Even though I have the audiobook of "Consider the Lobster" and the paperback of the unabridged text, I bought the Kindle version just now so I could cut and paste text for blogging purposes. But when I made my first attempt at copying, I got a pop-up window — the first I've ever seen in a Kindle book — "Due to publisher restrictions, copy is not allowed for this title." That was pretty annoying. I found a few key words — hypereducated snoot egghead — Googled and found copyable text here. Feel free to read it free. N.b., it has 52 footnotes [at the free link; 124 footnotes in the Kindle text].

"Katy Perry... transforms into old woman, recalls heartbreak with Diego Luna."

Don't most rich old ladies regret marrying the dull bastard who got them all their stuff and wish they'd spent their lives with the hot, passionate artist who ran off that one night when they'd had that big fight?

Don't ask me. That's not what I did with my life, but it's a fine old cultural meme — that the wives of rich men are so unhappy and that they wish they'd gone down the other road, the one with all that hot sex and emotional turbulence — and it's pithily realized in Katy Perry's new video "The One That Got Away." (I'm watching this because my son Chris emailed me to say: "I'm not generally a Katy Perry fan, but I think this new video is great and very emotionally effective.")

I'm worried that this video will influence young girls to get their boyfriends to draw DIY tattoos of hearts on their inner forearms, but quite aside from the unfortunate tattoo incitement...

[NOTE: Watch the video before answering, and answer the question asked.]

What lesson will young girls take from this video?
	Art, beauty, and hot sex are much more important than material wealth.
	Have a hot romance with a beautiful artist, but marry the guy who'll get you all that cool stuff.
	You'll have to choose between love and money and live with whatever regrets ensue.
pollcode.com free polls

"And then while your girl goes to the ladies', you go out front to smoke a cigarette..."

"... and on the way back you ask your waitress — the one with the tattoo of the meat cleaver on her grass-fed bicep — if she wants to go to a steakhouse on her night off."

A fine last sentence to an essay by Tom Junod called "The Death of the Entrée," published in the "Eat Like a Man" section of Esquire.

Zombie...

... tattoo.

"I wanted to fix the offending tip ... remove the whole phallic aspect. I told her I'd just swing it upwards."

The problem with Brandy's elephant tattoo.

Tattoo OSU.

Ouch!

Terrelle Pryor and four of his Ohio State teammates will be suspended from the first five games of the 2011 season ... for first accepting discounted rates on tattoos and then letting that escalate into selling personal OSU memorabilia to the owner of a local tattoo parlor....

At the Special Touch Café...

... you can get tattoos, fireworks, and more. We didn't get any fireworks or tattoos. Not today, anyway. We did get some dinner at Culvers, though.

"The tattoos take her look to a entirely different place."

"Honestly, I can't decide if they add or distract from her natural beauty but, with that added edge, it's hard to take your eyes off her."

And: "I love that she can pull off the black sock/brown shoe look in summer."

"He was going to get the tattoo whether he liked it or not."

"He would not be picked on anymore if he got it done."

"What this film was about for me, which are the moms that take care of the babies and the children no matter where they come from."

Said Sandra Bullock, accepting her Oscar, after fighting alongside her husband Jesse James to win full custody of his 6-year-old daughter, Sunny. There are 2 other James kids — Chandler, 15, and Jesse Jr., 12 — who have had Bullock as a mom. Moms take care of the babies and the children no matter where they come from... but what is she supposed to do now that her husband has betrayed her? Stay together for his children? Or are they her children now? She has dropped plans to adopt them. Presumably, James's children will go back to their real mothers, now that James is consorting with that tattooed, Nazi-arm-band-wearing stripper.

Why is Helen Mirrin "disgusted and shocked" by her tattoo?

Because it's "completely mainstream."

***

What about yourself are you shocked by because you meant it to be shocking and it's so not shocking?

Kathy Griffin interviews Levi Johnston.

I'm presenting this here because I love great conversation.

I love these scribbly tattoos!

Much more — from Yann Travaille — here. (Warning: some clickable thumbnail-sized photos have naked breasts.)(Via Neatorama.)

Do these tattoos remind me of death? No, they remind me of taking delightful chances.