Sestet

I did not know what “Lots of Sand” meant,
did not know this thing until
I watched the movie Ten Commandments,
filmed by Cecil B. DeMille
(Charleton Heston’s eyes were lambent;
Brynner’s voice, a fire drill).







(still finding stuff on my hard drive from ten years ago that I only have the vaguest recollection of doing)

BoobieWatch!

Um this was a sonnet I wrote in the comments of a post on The Awl wherein Alex Balk wrote a poem summarizing Lynn Hirschberg's profile on Megan Fox. [?]

I know no one cares about inside-jokey sonnets I write in the comments on other blogs (this is not Recursive Fimoculous! I think Rex Sorgatz used to include his comments on other blogs on his site, but I just looked and he either doesn't now or never did; anyway) or even on this blog, but it's the only thing I've "written" all week, so I'm putting it here mainly because sometimes I forget the last time I typed "boobies" and the answer is this. It was this time. I am sorry you have to read this.

And in fact you should use this whole "post" as a means to just click over to the actual post, because it is great and there are more great things in the comments. I love the Awl comments, maybe even more than Videogum comments; I want Karen UhOh to follow me around saying things.
WE COULD SOLVE MYSTERIES!

So, OK:

That cherry made my brain scream “Sherilyn Fenn!”
When I saw it in GQ magazine.
I never will forget her; then again,
I had to google “Brian Austin Green”.

I guess that Hirschberg’s point is Things Transmute..?
Both crushes and the crushees take a bow.
The kneepad leggings gone that were so cute.
The Jolies meet the Jolier Than Thou.

Red Lobster Biscuits yield to Truffled Fries
And a propensity for bad tattoos
(“We L.O.L. at gilded butterflies”)
Give way to smarts, re: “boobies on read-thrus”

So in this way one changes tit for tat:
There ought to be a German word for that.

Adwear

This is only allowed to work once every fifteen years[*], specifically I refer to:
USING POETRY TO SELL ME PANTS

And I don't know how they (= advertisers) know when the fifteen years is up (maybe Start>All Programs>Accessories>Calculator? I DON'T KNOW) or whose turn it is to employ said advertising technique, but Max Blagg shilling for GAP from 1992:



..has toootally been replaced by Walt Whitman unknowingly (?**) shilling for Levi's, a pants concern:



(N.B. remember when Gap was called "The Gap" and remember when they announced they would no longer be selling Levi's and would instead sell their own brand and our moms were like, "Whaaaaaat?" and then it turned out to be a good idea (for a while)?)

I'm all like:
On the one hand it would seem that in the course of using a poem for advertising jeans, anything is likely to happen.
But on the other hand, this apparent arbitrariness is belied by the astounding similarity between poems used for advertising jeans collected in widely different ad agencies.
Therefore the problem: If the content of advertisements for pants is contingent, how are we to explain the fact that ads from different agencies are so similar, LOL?

(You guys! Did you know French anthropologist Lévi-Strauss is different from jeans maker Levi Strauss?)

(Develop this thought.)



*(Shaggy's "Boombastic" doesn't count)

**Or maybe knowingly; I may be confused.
SPOILER ALERT: DON DRAPER'S REAL LAST NAME IS "WHITMAN"!
SPOLIER ALERT II: RACHEL MENKEN REJECTS DON DRAPER NÉE WHITMAN AND MARRIES A GUY NAMED "TILDEN KATZ", WHICH IS LIKE THE 1960S WAY OF SAYING "ADAM GOLDBERG" SO THIS MAKES ALL OF THE DEUTSCHER GRUß IN THE ADVERTISEMENT AT 0:27 OK? OR MAYBE IT MAKES IT NOT OK IT IS SO HARD TO TELL WHAT TO THINK WHEN I AM THINKING ABOUT BUYING PANTS


Anyway, this just makes me want to wear more pants.

SORRY, FANS OF ME WITHOUT PANTS.

time flies like an arrow

fruit flies like a banana

Stan Apps, at whatever his blog is called today, has a post about reading text backwards.

which post brings to mind an Anecdote:

When I first moved to Chicago (the first time) (in 1996), I went to the Loop to what was then Marshall Fields to look at the Christmas display and not knowing that the window displays would tell a narrative, I started on the wrong end and worked my way backwards. The window display that year was based on A Christmas Carol, and so the story went something like:
A repentant man buys a goose, then grows increasingly cynical.

(I did this in subsequent years; all Christmas stories backwards are depressing, which is to say more accurate, except for The Nutcracker, which evades explanation in either direction.)

I am also reminded of sitting in a movie theater, which I would have spelled "theatre" at the time, with my friends, waiting for Arachnophobia (‽) to start and talking about running movies in reverse (Kurt Vonnegut does this in Slaughterhouse Five, but we didn't know that): my friend said, "Jaws is about a shark that keeps throwing up people until they open the beach."

This is great!

But is it too great? It seems stolen from something he would have seen on HBO, which I did not have. Googling it now, I find references to it in basically these exact words, though not many, so maybe it is true that we were all funnier a long time ago. Reading old Outlook archives seems to confirm this.

n.b. The picture above of Stan Apps holding a sword is one that I found looking through an Outlook archive. He is not holding a sword because he is about to cut some Gordian Knot of Poetry by reading it backwards; but he is holding it hilariously because this is around 1994, a time when everything was hilarious.

W/R/T poetry, though
Other than liiike Philip Larkin, who for some reason I find hard to get enough of, I don't read much poetry, unless it's in the NYer and it's short enough (sorry, @Erato!) and is hopefully about someone who used to be a dog, but if a poem does manage to get itself read, I usually forget I'm supposed to be paying attention and when I get to the end, I definitely read it backwards (but it's cool: I think we all know that Leonhard Euler figured out the Seven Bridges of Königsberg problem by starting at the end and working backwards), based on my misunderstanding of the way "poetry" works, viz--:

(1) a good poem is one that has a real sockdolager at the end
(2) find the sockdolager, and you will "unlock" the "key" to the poem (note: these are metaphors)
(3) then you can go back and reread it with "what you were supposed to have gleaned from it" the first time through in mind

BECAUSE APPARENTLY POETRY IS THE DEATH STAR
It is all defensive and tricky, but there is one hole you can shoot your "photon" into and then it explodes (it is possible I read that narrow fellow in the grass thing too many times in school).

AND SO WITH THIS IN MIND WHAT CHANCE DOES READING FORWARD HAVE:

For: reading bottom to top will increasingly be the practice as we all start going through old email threads in our Outlook Archives to see how funny we used to be and to try to figure out what happened (I was really funny over email in 2000.) (i.e., before the events of 9/11) (but after Kurt Cobain died! Strange!)

All of this to say:

if you sometimes find yourself missing the Silver Age of the Internet when everyone was funnier (before they "bought the goose") (see what I did there?), and regret specifically the deletion of the entire tmftml blog at popfactor ("popfactor"!) and more specifically regret that the Elizabeth Skurnick "Ballad Of The Love-Scorned Anywoman" post is gone: fear not, it is also here on her own blog.

Note: even though it is poetry that is not about a dog, it should be read forward, due to the sockdolager.