"Hundreds of intrepid people would organize themselves into themed gangs and set out in homemade crafts of dubious seaworthiness..."

"... through Jamaica Bay to compete, 'American Gladiators'-style, with various props and pseudo-weapons. The 'boats' disintegrated once the shenanigans were over.... Mr. McNeill’s most ambitious project was... a 500-mile trip along the Ganges River... called... 'The Swimming Cities of the Ocean of Blood.' Mr. McNeill and a group of collaborators built five metal pontoon boats in Brooklyn — three of them powered by motorcycles, one by sail and oars, and another by paddle wheel — which he would captain. The boats were designed to lock together for camping on the water.... It was an arduous monthslong trip. Marauding monkeys attacked their camp..... Mr. McNeill’s godfather was the author William S. Burroughs, with whom the elder Mr. McNeill had collaborated on a graphic novel. Mr. Burroughs baptized Orien with a dab of vodka from his afternoon drink...."

From "Orien McNeill, Artist Who Made Mischief on the Water, Dies at 45/He was the pied piper of a loose community of DIY artists homesteading on New York City’s waterways, which he used as his canvas and stage" (NYT)(free-access link, so you can see the photos).

McNeill died on May 15 on his 52-foot-long ferryboat, and we are not told the cause of death.

"If you can’t annoy somebody … there’s little point in writing" —Kingsley Amis/"Whatever they criticize you for, intensify it" —Jean Cocteau.

A couple quotes that jumped out at me from "Garner's Quotations: A Modern Miscellany," a book I'm enjoying immensely. Garner is Dwight Garner, a NYT book critic. It's a very smart sequence of quotations. 

Just a few more:

"I don’t care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it."—William S. Burroughs 

"Thank God for books as an alternative to conversation" —W. H. Auden 

"Almost nobody dances sober, unless they happen to be insane" —H. P. Lovecraft 

"A monster is a person who has stopped pretending" —Colson Whitehead, “A Psychotronic Childhood”

"When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split" —Raymond Chandler

"If you removed all of the homosexuals and homosexual influence from what is generally regarded as American culture you would be pretty much left with Let’s Make a Deal" —Fran Lebowitz, in The New York Times 

"Don’t own anything you wouldn’t leave out in the rain" —Gary Snyder 

"All I want to do is sit on my ass and fart and think of Dante"—Samuel Beckett 

I hope that annoyed some of you or what's the point?

Getting high on Imodium.

The poor man’s methadone.

The active ingredient, loperamide, offers a cheap high if it is consumed in extraordinary amounts. But in addition to being uncomfortably constipating, it can be toxic, even deadly, to the heart.

That reminds me of something I read long ago:

William Burroughs said he would never have been a heroin addict if he had realized how badly constipated it would make him when he got to be an old man.

"I always thought it was a little unfair how much she was made fun of for her 'just say no' campaign against drugs."

"I actually think the reminder that you can always just say no can be pretty effective."

I know, I'd been thinking about that myself, just last Saturday, the day before hearing that Nancy Reagan had died. I was blogging about a NYT column telling about women leaving the field of science because they'd received email expressing desire for an intimate relationship and couldn't figure out what to do about it.

These women had never, as far as I could tell, just said no — I'm not interested. The NYT author wrote of the women deciding "[p]erhaps... to ignore the first email," then getting further efforts at closeness from the man, after which "any objection on her part... would seem heartless." I said: "Why isn't it also 'heartless' to deprive this man of the basic information that he is not experiencing a successful response to his attempt to go on a date?" The column author spins out a nightmare: "On and on it goes, and slowly she realizes that he’s not going to stop because he doesn’t have to." I said: "Why is this smart woman so absurdly slow?"

There are, I'm afraid, a lot of people out there who need to be bonked over the head on a regular basis with the stunningly simple advice, "Just say no." It sounds crushingly stupid, but an awful lot of people — including very smart people — become stupid in social situations. These days, there's an effort to pick up the slack left by those who've forgotten the magic of "no," and they'd like to institute a system in which the failure to say "yes" counts as a "no" (and a silent sexual encounter becomes rape).

We wouldn't need such an oppressive, twisted regime if people kept in the front of their head the go-to advice: Just say no.

Nancy was, of course, speaking specifically about drugs...



... and the message looked really ridiculous to those who were already into drugs. I remember some comedian — perhaps Bob Goldthwait — doing a routine about the idea of Keith Richards attempting the "just say no" solution to his all-out addiction. But Nancy was — like most First Ladies — talking to children, and "no" is most effective when you say it early on — to drugs, to sex, to whatever it is you have a right to decline.

Which reminds me of my old motto. Nancy had hers. I have mine: Nothing is a high standard.

I couldn't find the old Keith Richards joke, so here's William S. Burroughs, "Just Say No To Drug Hysteria":

Confused logos of feminism at Bust.

I don't normally read Bust, but I was trying to go to Buzzfeed and mis-auto-completed the address. I clicked on a couple feminism things: 1. "How To Create A Women's Empowerment Club At Your School," and 2. "Men's Rights Movement Misunderstands Feminism." Upon seeing #1, I contemplated blogging just about the big logo displayed at the top:



Then I clicked on #2, and here's the illustration at the top:



"Bust" suggests a punch in the face as well as a couple of breasts, so take care, Bust. Get your story straight. Or at least pay a little attention to making it look straight. I know breasts don't always match. ("Even if your girls are the same cup size, they are likely to hang differently.") A good editor, like a good bra, can create the appearance of balance and support. Please try harder.

I looked up "bust" in the (unlinkable) OED, and I see that it has a lot of negative meanings, for example "A binge, a drinking bout," as in:

1939 H. H. Child Poor Player 22 Every now and then I went a bust, walked into Pagani's..and demanded devilled kidneys.

Also: "A financial crash; a sudden failure or collapse of trade."

1894 Alpha Tau Omega Palm Apr. 156 At present in Virginia it is easier to bust a boom than to boom a bust.

Or: "A raid or arrest by a law-enforcement agency."

1938 New Yorker 12 Mar. 38/3 ‘One whiff [of marijuana]’ said Chappy, ‘and we get a bust.’ (‘Bust’ is Harlem for a police raid.)

1959 W. S. Burroughs Naked Lunch 15 Provident junkies..keep stashes against a bust.

Or: "A failure, a flop; a disappointing person or experience."

1859 J. R. Bartlett Dict. Americanisms (ed. 2), Bust, a burst, failure. The following conundrum went the rounds of the papers at the time the Whig party failed to elect Mr. Clay to the presidency: ‘Why is the Whig party like a sculptor? Because it takes Clay, and makes a bust.’

As that old riddle shows, a "bust" is also a sculpture of the upper part of the body, and it's this meaning which leads to "bust" meaning "woman's bosom or breasts."

1858 T. De Quincey Secret Societies (rev. ed.) in Select. Grave & Gay VII. 250 Oh, that dreadful woman, with that dreadful bust!—the big woman, and the big bust!—whom and which to encircle in ‘a chaste salute’ would require a man with arms fourteen feet long!

The sculpture/bosom meaning has a different etymology from the drinking/collapse meaning, which began as a variation of the word "burst."

"And I never touched a living body cold as the Rube there in Philly... I decided to lop him off if it meant a smother party."

"(This is a rural English custom designed to eliminate aged and bedfast dependents. A family so afflicted throws a 'smother party' where the guests pile mattresses on the old liability, climb up on top of the mattresses and lush themselves out.) The Rube is a drag on the industry and should be 'led out' into the skid rows of the world. (This is an African practice. Official known as the 'Leader Out' has the function of taking old characters out into the jungle and leaving them there.)"

Something William S. Burroughs wrote in "Naked Lunch," which I was reading this morning in my iPhone after running across this in today's NYT:

In 1965, Mr. de Grazia went to Boston to appeal a court ban of William S. Burroughs’s sexually explicit novel “The Naked Lunch.” He summoned literary lions like Norman Mailer and Allen Ginsberg to testify about the book’s artistic worth and won his argument, that genius should never be curbed because of differences over taste or morality.

The book, published in 1959, was the last work of fiction to be censored by the Postal Service, the Customs Service and state governments.

Edward de Grazia — who also fought in the Supreme Court for our right to read Henry Miller's "Tropic of Cancer" and to see "I Am Curious (Yellow)" — has died at the age of 86.

Here's his book: "Girls Lean Back Everywhere: The Law of Obscenity and the Assault on Genius."

"If you'll take thunder and lightening, and a steamboat and a buzz-saw, and mix 'em up, and put 'em into a woman, that's jasm."

Wrote J.G. Holland in "Miss Gilbert's Career," published in 1860, the oldest historical use of the U.S. slang word "jasm," which means "Energy, spirit, ‘pep,'" according to the Oxford English Dictionary (which, unfortunately, I can't link to). I clicked on "jasm," because I was reading about the origin of the word "jazz," for an earlier post, where I noted that I had believed that the word "jazz" originally referred to sexual intercourse. That chronology is unlikely, according to the OED, and in fact, the word "jazz" first appeared in baseball.

But this "jasm" definition gives the etymology: "Apparently a variant of jism." Now, come on. That has to be sexual. But jism originally meant "energy, strength," going back to 1842:

"When I Was Cool." I had to drive from Chicago back home to Madison today, and I was glad to turn on the car radio to find the very beginning of a Fresh Air interview with Sam Kashner about his book "When I Was Cool," which I've been reading--along with a bunch of other things--for the past month. The interview got me half the way home and was just great, with Kashner telling the story of being enamoured of the beatniks, going to study at the Jack Kerouac School for Disembodied Poetics, and then finding them all old men, somewhat addled and shambling, and himself not quite so much a student as an apprentice.



Ah! Too bad there weren't video cameras everywhere, because that could be the perfect reality show, combining The Apprentice and The Osbournes!

You can listen to the show here today, and click on the archive after today. Memorable revelations from the interview:

1. William Burroughs said he would never have been a heroin addict if he had realized how badly constipated it would make him when he got to be an old man.

2. Allen Ginsberg made a pass at Kashner and, after Kashner declined, started to find Kashner's poetry terrible. Kashner is still angry ... about the poetry critiques.

3. Ginsberg's guru ordered him to shave off his beard because he was too attached to it--and he did!

4. Kashner's first assignment was to finish one of Ginsberg's poems and when it turned out to be a poem about having sex with Neal Cassady, Kashner went to the Boulder Public Library to ask for information!

5. It was Kashner's job to do Ginsberg's laundry, and the method he used was to ship the dirty laundry in a box home to his mother. She did the laundry and shipped it back!

Oh, listen to the interview. And read the book.