AdamSmith

This reminded me of David Ogilvy quote that goes something like

the best ideas come as jokes, so make your thinking as funny as possible.

It's really interesting to live our lives - particularly the dull parts of it - using a funny outlook.

I call it Ellenating life.

I love that. I do it as often as possible. My late father and his family were all like that, in marked contrast to the sour and dour outlook of my mother and her family.

WHY waste time reading. ? It doesnt even burn calories....

Actually I think it does. The brain uses a fair bit of energy.

Of course if what you're reading is Harry Potter...

There is no such thing as "Corinthian leather".

 

It's a made up Madison Avenue term meant to imply that there was something elite, luxurious and exclusive about the very ordinary leather Chrysler seats covers.

 

Suckered me right in, too. That was back when I was young and innocent and could not imagine anyone pulling such a brazen fraud right out in public.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corinthian_leather

Monty Python: "String"

Adrian Wapcaplet: Aah, come in, come in, Mr....Simpson. Aaah, welcome to Mousebat, Follicle, Goosecreature, Ampersand, Spong, Wapcaplet, Looseliver, Vendetta and Prang!

Mr. Simpson: Thank you.

Wapcaplet: Do sit down--my name's Wapcaplet, Adrian Wapcaplet...

Mr. Simpson: how'd'y'do.

Wapcaplet: Now, Mr. Simpson... Simpson, Simpson... French, is it?

S: No.

W: Aah. Now, I understand you want us to advertise your washing powder.

S: String.

W: String, washing powder, what's the difference. We can sell *anything*.

S: Good. Well I have this large quantity of string, a hundred and twenty-two thousand *miles* of it to be exact, which I inherited, and I thought if I advertised it...

W: Of course! A national campaign. Useful stuff, string, no trouble there.

S: Ah, but there's a snag, you see. Due to bad planning, the hundred and twenty-two thousand miles is in three inch lengths. So it's not very useful.

W: Well, that's our selling point! 'SIMPSON'S INDIVIDUAL STRINGETTES!'

S: What?

W: 'THE NOW STRING! READY CUT, EASY TO HANDLE, SIMPSON'S INDIVIDUAL EMPEROR STRINGETTES - JUST THE RIGHT LENGTH!'

S: For what?

W: 'A MILLION HOUSEHOLD USES!'

S: Such as?

W: Uhmm...Tying up very small parcels, attatching notes to pigeons' legs, uh, destroying household pests...

S: Destroying household pests?! How?

W: Well, if they're bigger than a mouse, you can strangle them with it, and if they're smaller than, you flog them to death with it!

S: Well *surely*!....

W: 'DESTROY NINETY-NINE PERCENT OF KNOWN HOUSEHOLD PESTS WITH PRE-SLICED, RUSTPROOF, EASY-TO-HANDLE, LOW CALORIE SIMPSON'S INDIVIDUAL EMPEROR STRINGETTES, FREE FROM ARTIFICIAL COLORING, AS USED IN HOSPITALS!'

S: 'Ospitals!?!?!?!!?

W: Have you ever been in a Hospital where they didn't have string?

S: No, but it's only *string*!

W: ONLY STRING?! It's everything! It's...it's waterproof!

S: No it isn't!

W: All right, it's water resistant then!

S: It isn't!

W: All right, it's water absorbent! It's...Super Absorbent String! 'ABSORB WATER TODAY WITH SIMPSON'S INDIVIDUAL WATER ABSORB-A-TEX STRINGETTES! AWAY WITH FLOODS!'

S: You just said it was waterproof!

W: 'AWAY WITH THE DULL DRUDGERY OF WORKADAY TIDAL WAVES! USE SIMPSON'S INDIVIDUAL FLOOD PREVENTERS!'

S: You're mad!

W: Shut up, shut up, shut up! Sex, sex sex, must get sex into it. Wait, I see a television commercial- There's this nude woman in a bath holding a bit of your string. That's great, great, but we need a doctor, got to have a medical opinion. There's a nude woman in a bath with a doctor--that's too sexy. Put an Archbishop there watching them, that'll take the curse off it. Now, we need children and animals. There's two kids admiring the string, and a dog admiring the Archbishop who's blessing the string. Uhh...international flavor's missing...make the Archbishop Greek Orthodox.... why not Archbishop Makarios? No no, he's dead. Never mind, we'll get his brother, it'll be cheaper. So, there's Archbishop Makarios's brother... (fade out)

http://www.montypython.net/scripts/string.php

... And 'Marjoribanks' is pronounced 'Marchbanks'.

Also just now reminds that Yale undergrad humor magazine The Petard (published quite irregularly; none of the discipline of the Harvard Lampoon, but therefore also no pressure to publish no matter what, instead only when they had accumulated enough worthwhile stuff -- their motto was 'The nation's oldest funny college humor magazine") printed this spot-on American-Cut-Glass 'endorsement' on one of their back pages:

'A mahfluss wuhk uv greachumoh. Woncanahddli be withoutit.

And that has a setup line I am missing in memory, but will post (be sure ) once it comes back to me.

Exactly! Also to be as inaudible as possible. I'm thankful for closed captioning; otherwise I would have not understood some of Giles' lines on Buffy because Tony Head deliberately used a posh Oxbridge accent for him.

Fascinating in this respect is to listen to recordings of the Queen's Christmas message over many years, and notice how her extreme Cut Glass enunciation in the '50s gradually gave way to the far more 'natural' way she speaks in public today.

Apart from the (understandably decentering) episode of Diana's death, Elizabeth has pretty unfailingly accurately read, reflected and responded to her people's mood and needs, insofar as a modern monarch can fulfill them.

Somebody did an entire book of poetry in this fashion

 

https://smile.amazon.com/Mots-dHeures-Gousses-dAntin-Manuscript/dp/0670490644/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1480579970&sr=8-1&keywords=mot+d'heure

 

The title is

Mots d'Heures: Gousses, Rames: The d'Antin Manuscript

one of the poems begins

un petit, d'un petit ... s'étonne aux halles .

 

Literally, "the little child of the child was astonished by [the great marketplace Les] Halles"

but that's kinda besides the point.

Pardonnez-mois le hijack.

Collected French Translations: Poetry by John Ashbery – review

Visionary lunacy and peculiar choices tell us much about the Pulitzer prize-winning poet

John Ashbery (right) and Pierre Martory stroll along the Seine in Paris, 1958

In a 1956 letter to Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery wrote: “I hate all modern French poetry, except for Raymond Roussel”, specifying: “I do like my own wildly inaccurate translations of some of the 20th-century ones, but not the originals”. The editors of this book rather solemnly gloss this as Ashbery musing on “his own hard work”, and his “difficulties in building a canon for his own new poetic journeys”. They may be right, but the comment is also funny and provocative, taking a dandy-esque line on the tired debates (tired even then and comprehensively exhausted now) about accuracy and fidelity in translation.

This book (along with its sibling, Ashbery’s Collected French Translations: Prose) is mostly non-canonical in focus. Though several poets may be familiar – Reverdy, Breton, Supervielle, Eluard – others, such as Daumal, Ganzo, Lubin, Blanchard, Roche, will not. The highlights include a few poems by the Swiss boxer-poet Arthur Cravan and the sequence of prose poems, from The Dice Cornet, by the the Jewish-Breton Max Jacob, who died on his way to a concentration camp in 1944. The contemporary with whom Ashbery feels most kinship is his friend and former companion, Pierre Martory, whose volume The Landscapist he translated in 2008. Where Ashbery often reads like a French poet writing in English, Martory, barely known even in France, has the air of an American poet writing in French. His poem “The Landscape is Behind the Door” not only gives us one of the best lines in this book – “I draw you like a salary” – but reads like a New York School poem that just happens to use French words:

Rimbaud is Ashbery’s guiding figure, prince of the counter-canon as well as the canon, a poet who occupies the centre through sheer force of vision while managing to fill the margins for pretty much the same reason. Ashbery’s version of Illuminations appeared in 2011 with a splendidly ardent introduction: “If we are absolutely modern – and we are – it’s because Rimbaud commanded us to be.” As for the 19th century, there is only one Baudelaire poem here, no Verlaine, no Gautier and none of the Symbolists, save Mallarmé. It’s such a peculiar choice that even the French don’t have a name for the genre it falls into: a series of English nursery rhymes followed by Mallarmé’s own prose translations, re‑Englished by Ashbery with faithful, visionary lunacy, the kind of meaning-promising meaninglessness that makes nursery rhymes so compelling. “Fabulous and fabulously unreadable,” Ashbery concludes, with relish.

Ashbery is a poet of margin-quarrying, tributary-chasing curiosity, but as a translator he is far more accurate than his throwaway comments suggest. It’s as if his very exactness guaranteed his translations their unfamiliarity. This chimes with something in Ashbery’s own poems, which have what he calls, in Rimbaud, a “crystalline jumble”, and where personal pronouns (the I’s and You’s and We’s) on which we hang interpretation, are porous, interchangeable things. Ashbery’s poems track the minutiae of a consciousness that is rangy and unbounded; that, as he writes in A Wave (1984), “belongs where it is going / Not where it is”.

This book begins with versions dating from the 1970s of Jean-Baptiste Chassignet (c1571-1635). Ashbery had by then published, notably, The Tennis Court Oath, Rivers and Mountains and the Pulitzer prize-winning Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. This is the period of what he called “the French John Ashbery”, “a temporary phase of troubling the waters so as to be able to fish in them later”. It is a neat image, the poet-translator as fisherman casting his line for a Gallic catch:

If Chassignet sounds like Ashbery, it’s not because Ashbery takes liberties, but because he sticks to the original’s unnerving mattness of diction and resists the temptation to freshen up the cliche of Time-as-flowing-river. The result is a sequence of haunting, spiritual and oddly austere poems that seem at once close and far away.

There are many waves in Ashbery, and, more generally, as in Rimbaud, a lot of water. Water is Ashbery’s element; as a poet, he deploys a kind of liquid consciousness, sometimes slack, sometimes in spate, sometimes a flood and sometimes just a leak, that carries its flotsam of disparate feelings, observations, statements and states of mind, with apparent indifference to their size, shape and value. “Your form was that of a wave, only more truthful, more circumspect”, writes Jules Supervielle in Ashbery’s version of “To Lautréamont”. “You take the form of a wave so people think it’s all the same to you.” Making pronouns fluid rather than fixed also enables Ashbery to de-hierachise the poem’s different elements, so that an intimation of mortality reaches the reader on the same level, on the same wave, as noticing a fire hydrant or a hot-dog stall. For some critics this just leads to a tricksy poetry of surfaces; for others, it is a way of elegantly rendering the wavy ways we perceive a wavy world.

With many poems in the New York School lineage, the obscure and disjunctive energies of French surrealism become diluted into a sort of decaffeinated whimsy. The effect is like watching André Breton’s Nadja filmed by the makers of Ally McBeal. While Ashbery is not responsible for this, his poems, like Dylan Thomas’s, look easy and temptingly imitable. One result of reading his translations is to realise just how deep-rooted the superficiality of his poetry is.

• Patrick McGuinness’s The Last Hundred Days is published by Seren. To order Collected French Translations: Poetry for £16.96 go to bookshop.theguardian.com. or call 0330 333 6846.
  

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/15/collected-french-translations-poetry-john-ashbery-review

It's all an elaborate ploy to determine whether one is U or non-U.

Cut glass!

Even the French, about whose spelling and pronunciation I have complained, don't reduce what should be five syllables to two.

Nor do even ze French indulge anything quite like the British stiff upper pronunciation of the patronymic St. John as 'SINjun.'

... And 'Marjoribanks' is pronounced 'Marchbanks'.

And in an admittedly minor example known to all Bay Staters, Worcester is 'Woostah.'

Not to speak of swallowing final syllables, like the way they pronounce "Worcestershire" (woo-stuh-shir, approximately).

Or the proper name "Featheringstonehaugh" which is apparently pronounced "Fanshaw." (According to Guinness Book of World Records which lists it as the longest surname in English.)

There must be something of the same in the priceless Are You Being Served episode where, producing some mad party conceived by Young Mr Grace, our young-callow-buck salesman Mr Lucas has to wear a tuxedo shirt so short it displays his midriff (forgive, I searched but cannot find an image ) and therein announce one "Lady Weeble-Able-Smith!"

Now you're just getting ridiculous, Mr. Smith.

Only just now?

Or maybe she's just had it with his flaccid attitude?

She wanted a cock that matched his brass balls?

Arguing with a woman is like reading the Software License Agreement. In the end, you ignore everything and click "I agree."

Also no city income tax...

I thought near-to NYC towns in NJ were still subject to that double taxation thing. How far does the NYC overlay tax extend into NJ?

And I live there. Go figure.

Nothing personal of course.

Given stratospheric NYC rents, if I ever move back, I'll live in NJ too.

I was of two minds about posting this. If it's offensive, I apologize.

 

https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=595056904000330

 

Gman

LMMFAO

That was Funny As Fuck.

And dead-on accurate and Swiftianly serious in deploying appropriately and commensurately offensive social satire against how the poultry industry's routine practices torture its living products throughout their sad lives.

Part of the multifaceted joke was to say: "Look, can you believe? The poultry industry's depraved practices even give vegans a legitimate moral high ground. Could there be any more definitive proof?"

Is this referring to Bridgegate?

 

Gman

NO! Or, rather, YES!

Which is only to say: To anyone who has lived in the Northeast (even Rhode Island ), the ultimate laugh line to any joke is New Jersey!

Sorry!

(Except possibly Rhode Island. )