Is Obama helping Kamala by vocalizing about vomit on his sweater?

I'm reading "Obama raps lyrics to Eminem’s ‘Lose Yourself’ at Detroit rally/'Love me some Eminem,' Obama said after rapping lyrics to the hit song 'Lose Yourself; during a rally in Detroit as Michigan begins early voting" (WaPo)(free-access link so you can watch the video).

“I have done a lot of rallies, so I don’t usually get nervous,” Obama said as he took to the stage to promote Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday. “But I was feeling some kind of way following Eminem.... I notice my palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy, vomit on my sweater already, mom’s spaghetti, I’m nervous but on the surface I look calm and ready to drop bombs but I keep on forgetting,” Obama rapped as the crowd cheered. “Love, love me some Eminem,” he added.

I'm not sure who he hopes to influence with that, but what do I know? I'm only an undecided voter in Wisconsin. I'm not awed by celebrities, and everyone acknowledges that Kamala is the candidate with the most celebrities. Does it augment or diminish her? 

But I just want to say that I do not like the picture of mom's spaghetti vomited onto Obama's sweater. I can barely picture Obama wearing a sweater — as opposed to a beautifully ironed shirt with a casually unbuttoned collar and rolled up sleeves. 

And I don't like thinking about spaghetti-vomit on that sweater. I get Eminem's lyric about his pathetic self, who's not only vomiting onto his bad clothes but stuck eating his mother's home-cooked food. I saw the movie "8 Mile" when it came out. I understand the context of the lyrics

But Obama is not so in thrall to Eminem that the thought of encountering Eminem would physically overwhelm him. Obama was President and had to go head-to-head with Putin and Xi, and he's supposed to be vouching for Kamala, who's asking to do the same, so I don't want to hear about his getting weak-kneed over a pop star.

And most of all, I don't like "mom's spaghetti" as a marker of wretchedness. Many of us are bereft of a mother — including you, Barack Obama. To have mom's spaghetti, even upchucked, would be to experience one's mother alive in the world again.  

"I felt like I was imprisoned in my own body... I now have a psychiatrist. I now vomit a lot more."

"I’ve never vomited before like that, ever, before my pregnancy. My body’s never reacted that way."

Said Samantha Casiano, quoted in "Woman suing Texas over abortion ban vomits on the stand in emotional reaction during dramatic hearing/Three plaintiffs testified about the trauma they experienced carrying nonviable pregnancies" (NBC News).

Casiano's wanted an abortion after her doctor told her — at 20 weeks of pregnancy — that her baby had  anencephaly and could not survive. She did give birth to the baby, and the baby lived 4 hours.

"This Biennale, which runs through Sept. 18, is serious. Very serious. It verges on humorless...."

"[The curator's] statement notes that today’s 'profusion of sprawling, monumental exhibitions' mirrors 'the material excesses' of global capitalism, and asks: 'So why add yet another exhibition to this?' The answer he reaches is that art — perhaps uniquely — can reclaim our attention from algorithmically enforced social control.... Mai Nguyen-Long’s 'Vomit Girl' and 'Specimen' sculpture series... grapple with the aftermath of Agent Orange bombings in Vietnam.... Even blunter are Mayuri Chari’s vulvas sculpted from cow dung... address the shaming of women’s bodies in India amid conservative Hinduism’s obsession with purity.... This Biennale is... all over the place — one must study the scatter in an attempt to understand the collision that produced it. Its contradictions, I suspect, reflect those of the 'decolonial'.... Whereas decolonization in the classic sense was a political, territorial project with no inherent grievance against modernity, today’s 'decolonial practice' is about changing systems of knowledge — a woolier, potentially endless project. This Biennale is presented as a gathering of 'decolonial strategies.' The task... is tending 'all of the wounds accumulated throughout the history of Western modernity.'... This Berlin Biennale feels... overloaded by its own conceptual apparatus...."

From "Berlin Biennale Wrestles With Big Issues (and Itself)/A powerful and relentlessly political exhibition takes on all the world’s crises — at the risk of conceptual overload" by Siddhartha Mitter (NYT).

"Starting in 2020 she began having mysterious bouts of illness where she would throw up over and over again."

"At first she and her parents — and even her doctors — were baffled. During one episode, Elysse said, she threw up in a mall bathroom for an hour. 'I felt like my body was levitating.' Another time she estimated that she threw up at least 20 times in the span of two hours. It wasn’t until 2021, after a half dozen trips to the emergency room for stomach illness, including some hospital stays, that a gastroenterologist diagnosed her with cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome, a condition that causes recurrent vomiting in heavy marijuana users."

From "Psychosis, Addiction, Chronic Vomiting: As Weed Becomes More Potent, Teens Are Getting Sick With THC levels close to 100 percent, today’s cannabis products are making some teenagers highly dependent and dangerously ill" (NYT). 

About that psychosis: "Psychotic symptoms while high can include hallucinations, trouble distinguishing between fantasy and reality, strange behaviors (one young man would spend his days tying plastic bags into knots) or voices talking to them in their head...."

A reader sends an email at 7:29, commenting on the first post of the day, but it seems to fit even better on the post I put up at 7:33.

There are thematic convergences today, and I'll celebrate the phenomenon by making this a new post.

Here's what George just sent me, a propos of the mention of Howard Dean in the first post of the day, and with no awareness that I was working on a post about the monetization of the legalization of cannabis:

Former Gov. and physician Dean sits on the board of Tilray, a publicly traded company affiliated with Anheuser-Busch that bills itself as a "global cannabis-lifestyle and consumer packaged goods company" that sells alcoholic beverages and hemp-based foods, i.e. dope itself in the form of mints, chocolates, etc. (Vodka, by the same way of thinking, would be a 'grain-based beverage.') 

So, here is a family medicine practitioner selling booze and pot, which is far, far, far, stronger than anything he may have used as a teenager and causes scromiting, the mysterious new condition that causes screaming and vomiting in a third of dope users, according to a 2015 (!) study reported in Health.com. 

“Then it became pretty obvious that poor kids of color with bad educations, they already had three strikes against them and the fourth was having a joint,” said [family medicine doctor] Dean [in 2019]. “Which after all is probably not as bad as alcohol.”

The surprising news is that he had a greeting card.

"After Page Six reported that the Yankee legend [Mickey Mantle] once slipped a female journalist a greeting card mid-interview, that read 'Wanna f– k?,' we’re told that he also once thew up while having sex with Angie Dickinson" (NY Post).

ADDED: He "thew up." He talked like that while drunk.

AND: I think I have the explanation for why Mantle had a greeting card. I think women slipped him notes, and it was a woman who wrote "Wanna fuck?" in a greeting card. He had it in his pocket and thought it would be funny to hand it to the reporter. And — who know? — maybe it will get a yes. Basically: He regifted it!

Apple's new iPhone has a set of 3 camera lenses in back... and it upsets people with "trypophobia," the fear of clusters of small holes.

WaPo explains.

The backlash comes from people who say they suffer from an obscure and perplexing condition called “trypophobia” ⁠ — a fear of clusters of small holes like those found in shoe treads, honeycombs and lotus seed pods.... The phobia isn’t recognized in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders... But self-described sufferers and some researchers claim the images can evoke a strong emotional response and induce itching, goose bumps, and even nausea and vomiting....

Ah, yes. Of course. I've written about trypophobia twice already on this blog. In 2013, I told you about the subreddit devoted to the peculiarity, r/trypophobia. And I see that they're expressing themselves about the new phone:

It’s all camera from r/trypophobia

And here's my 2017 post, on the occasion of an "American Horror Story" poster that triggered trypophobes.



Back to WaPo and the new iPhone:

In 2016, Kendall Jenner raised the condition’s profile when she wrote a blog post saying the images give her “the worst anxiety.” “Things that could set me off are pancakes, honeycomb, or lotus heads (the worst!)," she wrote. “It sounds ridiculous but so many people actually have it!”

Pancakes! I know what she's referring to — the look of the batter when it's time to flip.



Flip the pancake. But for some people, apparently, flip their lid.



Back to WaPo:

Researcher Arnold Wilkins, a professor emeritus at the University of Essex, theorizes the mathematical principals hidden in the patterns require the brain to use more oxygen and energy, which can be distressing.... “We know the images are difficult to process computationally by the neurons of the brain, they use more brain energy.”

Photos of honeycombs and strawberries — common sources of the creeps, or worse, for people with trypophobia — also share those mathematical qualities with more sinister sights like mold and skin lesions. Other research suggests the discomfort might come from an innate drive to avoid infectious diseases and contaminated food. Some have also hypothesized the fear could stem from an evolutionary response to dangerous animals like poisonous frogs and insects, which often display patterns similar to those seen trypophobic photos.

Camera lenses are a special problem, I think, because they're sort of eyes. When we look at eyes, we have the feeling that it's a living thing, and if it's not 2 eyes, the living thing feels alien — heartless or cruel:



Have I triggered your arachnophobia? Again?

Back to WaPo:

What can you do if you want to wretch every time you see the new iPhone?

Is it "wretch" or "retch"? It's retch.  Fortunately, wretched editing doesn't make me want to throw up. "Wretch" isn't even a verb. You wretch.

ADDED: If "wretch" isn't a verb, why does the word "wretched" exist? "Wretch," the verb, is obsolete. The OED has it as a transitive verb meaning "To render miserable" and as an intransitive, Scottish verb meaning "To be or to become... parsimonious." From 1633: "As the wretch wretcheth, the more he is enriched."

So WaPo's spelling is fine if these iPhones are making you parsimonious (in Scotland in the 17th century).

MORE: To be wretchedly precise, the OED does not say that the adjective "wretched" comes from the obsolete verb "to wretch." It says the etymology happened "Irregularly" by adding the "-ed" suffix to the adjective "wretch." "Wretch" was once an adjective that meant "poor, miserable, deeply afflicted" (that is, having the qualities of a wretch). Thus, in the 1400s, one might write: "Allas! I, woful creature,..I, wreche woman."

By the way, originally, the noun "wretch" referred to a banished person, an exile: "Goo naked vngry and bare foot.., as wrecch in werlde þou wende." As you wend your way through the world, you wretch, go naked, hungry, barefoot, and phoneless.

"You flew? Aren't you going to blog the experience? Did you have to go thru Security? Did you take your shoes off? They search your laptop and purse/wallet."

Asks Nice in the comments to last night's "Hello From New York City."

1. I finally had a flight experience in which I was not chosen to be felt up by a TSA official. I believe this is because I changed how I dressed. Instead of a long flowing skirt, I wore non-baggy pants.

2. I did have to take off my shoes, and I had to stand in that plastic cylinder with my feet apart and my hands raised over my head which I presume allowed somebody somewhere to look through my clothes.

3. I paid an extra $100 per flight to get first class on the kind of plane that has 3 seats per row in first class and 4 seats per row in coach. I had the middle seat, with a completely non-annoying person right next to me. Across the aisle, there was a man in shorts with very hairy legs, and the socks that he wore with his sneakers had images of lobsters on them.

4. I did not commit the intrusion of snapping a photograph of these socks, even though I did, later on in the day, as you can see in "The Imp Café," snap a picture of a woman in a tie-dye t-shirt that had an image of Donald Trump with the word "impeach" stamped on his face. I liked how the green bottle hid part of the word revealing the little-noticed component "imp." Usually the included word "peach" gets your attention and keeps you from seeing the option of putting the "p" with the "im" to release the little devil inside the word.

5. Some people think Trump is a full-scale devil but an "imp" is (according to the OED) "A little devil" or "A mischievous child (having a little of ‘the devil’ in him); a young urchin: often used playfully." Jonathan Swift used the word in "Gulliver's Travels": "I once caught a young Male [Yahoo] of three Years old,..but the little Imp fell a squalling, and scratching, and biting."

6. "Yahoo" is "A name invented by Swift in Gulliver's Travels for an imaginary race of brutes having the form of men; hence transferred and allusively, a human being of a degraded or bestial type... Frequently in modern use, a person lacking cultivation or sensibility, a philistine; a lout, a hooligan." And that sounds like the way people think of Trump too.

7. I'm here in NYC on my own, staying in a hotel that has a name that's interesting for a reason that I'll reveal after I've checked out.

8. I took a cab from LaGuardia to Manhattan, and you might think that because it was Sunday, the traffic would be easy, but the Puerto Rican Day Parade was going on. The cabbie informed me that the Puerto Rican Day Parade was the worst parade of the year. Second worst was St. Patrick's Day. Wanting to soothe any incipient ethnic animosity — the cabbie was maybe Filipino — I said, "Maybe because of drinking?" He seemed to confirm that theory, then expressed approval of the 2 ethnic groups associated with those parades because unlike other drinkers, they don't vomit in the cab. He didn't use the word "vomit," but I did, to make sure I had the story straight. He spoke of "messing up" the cab.

9. Remember the old episode of "Seinfeld," "The Puerto Rican Day Parade"?

Drexel professor resigns, citing "harassment by right-wing, white supremacist media outlets and internet mobs."

George Ciccariello-Maher, a professor of politics and global studies, says his "situation has become unsustainable," and "Staying at Drexel in the eye of this storm has become detrimental to my own writing, speaking, and organizing," CNN reports.

He became a target after he tweeted this joke last December: "All I Want for Christmas is White Genocide." What's funny about that joke, he explains, is that racists are paranoid about white genocide, which, in fact, "does not exist."

He also tweeted that when he saw someone on an airplane give up a first-class seat to a soldier, he was "trying not to vomit." People should have understood that he meant that he opposed the killing of civilians in the Iraq war.

Now, he says, "the forces of resurgent white supremacy have tasted blood and are howling for more," and universities should "refuse to bow to their pressure, intimidation, and threats." But he himself is resigning. If I assume Ciccariello-Maher is rational, I infer that he means to imply that his university did not support him enough.

ADDED: On reflection, I identify with this guy (or at least with one image I have of him). He leaves his university job because he wants to be free to speak in a challenging way, using sarcasm and surprising concision. You have to stop and think: What's he really saying? Or: Not sure exactly what he means, but here's what he's making me think. Or: He's making me so mad but if I try to say why he's got a way to tell me I'm wrong.

Trump does similar things, but he won't withdraw to a safe distance from which to freely gibe.

"But this time, it was clear to me he would never let me finish this movie without him having his fantasy one way or another.... I had to say yes...."

"I arrived on the set the day we were to shoot the scene that I believed would save the movie. And for the first and last time in my career, I had a nervous breakdown: My body began to shake uncontrollably, my breath was short and I began to cry and cry, unable to stop, as if I were throwing up tears. Since those around me had no knowledge of my history of Harvey, they were very surprised by my struggle that morning. It was not because I would be naked with another woman. It was because I would be naked with her for Harvey Weinstein. But I could not tell them then. My mind understood that I had to do it, but my body wouldn’t stop crying and convulsing. At that point, I started throwing up while a set frozen still waited to shoot. I had to take a tranquilizer, which eventually stopped the crying but made the vomiting worse. As you can imagine, this was not sexy, but it was the only way I could get through the scene."

From "Harvey Weinstein Is My Monster Too" by Salma Hayek (NYT).

Bucket news.

1. "An 'improvised explosive device' was detonated on a Tube train in south-west London during Friday's rush hour, Scotland Yard has confirmed... Eighteeen people have been taken to hospital mostly with burn injuries.... Pictures show a white bucket on fire inside a supermarket bag, with wires trailing on to the carriage floor" (BBC).

2. "A Norfolk school that advised teachers to provide buckets for pupils to vomit in during lessons has backtracked, telling parents that 'genuinely unwell' children will receive proper treatment... The bucket guidance surfaced in a document given to teachers at the start of the year at Great Yarmouth Charter academy.... 'We all know children say things like that to get out of work. You never pretend to be ill to get out of work because we expect you to work through it. If you feel sick we will give you a bucket. If you vomit – no problem! You’ve got your bucket. That’s probably all your body wanted – to vomit. If you are really ill we will make sure you get all the attention you need,' the document said'" (The Guardian).

3. "If Roald Dahl had his way, his eponymous 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory' hero would have been black, the author's widow revealed. Liccy Dahl said that when her husband first wrote the golden ticket-hunting character of Charlie Bucket in the 1960s, 'he wrote about a little black boy.' 'I don't know why (it was changed). It's a great pity,' Dahl told BBC Radio 4 Wednesday" (NY Daily News).

4. "Prince Harry watched on as school children got soaked during a visit to a conservation project that aims to teach youngsters to value the countryside.... An instructor threw a bucket of water over one shelter as children sat inside it to test whether it was waterproof, and there were shrieks and giggles from the children as water poured through a hole in the roof and drenched them. As children clambered out of the den Harry shook the instructor’s hand and said 'that’s cruel!' One of the children quipped 'we survived'" (Daily Mail).

5. "An ex-fugitive builder who held a complaining labourer in position as his compatriot colleague chopped his ear with a trowel was sued on Thursday.... 'I was working at the ground floor. The colleague was carrying a bucket full of cement from the upper floor. Some of the cement was falling from the bucket onto me. I begged him to carry the bucket with care and walk down slowly. He refused to listen to me. He went up and returned with the builder who immediately seized me. He hit my face with a trowel...'" (The Gulf Today).

6. "[Hillary] Clinton has little doubt that Assange was working with the Russians. 'I think he is part nihilist, part anarchist, part exhibitionist, part opportunist, who is either actually on the payroll of the Kremlin or in some way supporting their propaganda objectives, because of his resentment toward the United States, toward Europe,' she said. 'He’s like a lot of the voices that we’re hearing now, which are expressing appreciation for the macho authoritarianism of a Putin. And they claim to be acting in furtherance of transparency, except they never go after the Kremlin or people on that side of the political ledger.' She said she put Assange and Edward Snowden, who leaked extensive details of N.S.A. surveillance programs, 'in the same bucket—they both end up serving the strategic goals of Putin.' She said that, despite Snowden’s insistence that he remains an independent actor, it was 'no accident he ended up in Moscow'" (The New Yorker).

7."Two Nova Scotians have been charged criminally in unrelated horrific animal death cases — a man who allegedly drowned a litter of kittens in a bucket, and a woman who allegedly left a dog to die in an abandoned car.... 'It's what we refer to as breathlessness — so when an animal is drowned, it's basically the worst sensation you can ever come across is you know you're about to die,' [said Jo-Anne Landsburg, chief provincial inspector for the Nova Scotia SPCA]" (Guelph Today).

8. "How This Woman Retired at Age 32 — and Says You Can Too.... After graduating from the University of Chicago's law school, [Anita Dhake] decided she would work hard until she paid off her debt and saved enough to retire as soon as possible. She did the math, and that meant quitting once she had saved 25 years' worth of living expenses, which she would keep relatively low. She wouldn't have a fancy car or house, but would make up for it with the personal freedom and energy to check off her personal bucket list" (Popsugar).

"Keeping his own gray suit immaculate and his tone emotionless, O'Brien calls intermittently on a team of hazmat-suited torturers, issuing such concise instructions as 'Fingertips' or 'Teeth.'"

"Bursts of strobing light and jackhammer sound effects follow those orders, but even though we see the bloody aftermath and not the acts, the carnage is not for the faint of heart. Even worse is the ghastly anticipation fed by O'Brien's one vivid description of the ultimate torture, which plays on Winston's pathological fear of rats to make him surrender all sense of self.... There's no doubt that this imaginative production conveys the claustrophobic terror of a totalitarian state. But, especially right now, when many of us read the news each morning with a sick feeling of dread, who wants to go there?"

From a review of a New York play based on Orwell's "1984."

From "Why Broadway's '1984' Audiences Are Fainting, Vomiting and Getting Arrested":

The cast knew how the shocking scenes would be presented, but “it wasn’t until we got in front of an audience, when I saw and heard people responding, that I was suddenly aware of how powerful it was,” said Reed Birney, who has previously yelled back at a ticketholder who pleaded for his character to stop the torture. Meanwhile, Tom Sturridge, whose character bleeds heavily while being electrocuted, told THR that he makes a point of staring into the eyes of individual audience members, calling them “complicit” as they watch him suffer onstage.

That seems to be inciting audience members to come up on stage and save the character. I'm thinking of that protest at the "Julius Caesar" performance recently where a woman went up on the stage and denounced the performance. Here, the actors are breaking the 4th wall and begging the people in the audience for help. 

The 4 beards of Tom Wolfe's "Kingdom of Speech," ranked in order of the prominence of the bearded one.

1. Charles Darwin's beard — which appears twice in Wolfe's delightful new book about the politics of linguistic science. First, when Darwin is 54: "[H]e had cultivated a so-called philosopher’s beard of the sort that had been the philosopher’s status symbol since the days of Roman glory. Darwin was forever pictured sitting slightly slumped in an easy chair… his philosopher’s beard lying on his chest all the way from his jaws to his sternum… like a big old hairy gray bib." And second, when Darwin is 60: "Vomiting three or four times a day had become the usual. His eyes watered and dripped on his old gray philosopher’s beard. The chances of his leaving his desk in Down House and going out into the world looking for evidence, as he had on the Beagle, were zero. Instead he chained himself to his desk and forced himself to write... So he wound his imagination up to the maximum and herded all the animals together in his head, like some Noah the Naturalist...." (I'm picturing Noah's beard now too, but Wolfe didn't mention that.)

2. The beard of the Creator: In Apache myth, there's a void and then a disk. "Curled up inside the disk is a little old man with a long white beard. He sticks his head out and finds himself utterly alone. So he creates another little man, much like himself... Somehow, up in the void, they take to playing with a ball of dirt. A scorpion appears from nowhere and starts pulling at it. He pulls whole strands of dirt out of the ball. Longer and longer he pulls them, farther farther farther they extend, until he has created earth, sun, moon, and all the stars.... The big bang theory desperately needs someone like the scorpion or the little man with a long white beard curled up inside a disk." (You might question my ranking the Creator of the Universe second, after Darwin, but Darwin is ultra prominent, and the Creator in question is not the God of the Bible or the Quran but a little tiny man who needs not only another tiny man but a scorpion to pull off the big creation trick.)

3. Alfred Wallace's beard: "Our story begins inside the aching, splitting head of Alfred Wallace, a thirty-five-year-old, tall, lanky, long-bearded, barely grade-school-educated, self-taught British naturalist who was off— alone— studying the flora and the fauna of a volcanic island off the Malay Archipelago near the equator…." (Alfred Wallace, do you even know who he is? He's the man you would know about if Darwin hadn't worked to eclipse him.)

4. The beard of  Daniel L. Everett (Everett is to Wallace as Noam Chomsky is to Darwin): "Everett was everything Chomsky wasn’t: a rugged outdoorsman, a hard rider with a thatchy reddish beard and a head of thick thatchy reddish hair.... He was an old-fashioned flycatcher inexplicably here in the midst of modern air-conditioned armchair linguists with their radiation-bluish computer-screen pallors and faux-manly open shirts. They never left the computer, much less the building." Later we see Everett's beard in a scene of terrible squalor, tending to his his suffering wife and daughter on a miserable boat: "The Brazilians couldn’t keep their eyes off the gringos who were gushing gringo misery out of their hindsides... The redheaded, red-bearded gringo kept taking the pot of sloshing diarrheic rot through crowds of passengers, constantly bending way down with his reeking pot to pass under the hammocks...."

"... I’ve already been asked by several different people, virtually verbatim, 'Have you seen the movie where Daniel Radcliffe plays a farting corpse?'"

"Yes, I did, dear reader. I did indeed watch a movie where Daniel Radcliffe plays a farting corpse that Paul Dano rides across the ocean like a jet-ski, propelled by the power of Radcliffe’s post-mortem flatulence. This is also a movie where Dano and Radcliffe make out underwater while Dano is dressed like Mary Elizabeth Winstead, a movie where Radcliffe pukes up buckets of water that Dano eagerly swigs, and a movie where Radcliffe stares at a musty Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue and then grows a stiff and mighty erection, which Dano then uses as a compass to point the way back to civilization...."

***

By the way, there was a farting corpse in the critically acclaimed 1976 Lina Wertmuller movie "Seven Beauties." ("[W]hen the anti-hero kills the gangster who has humiliated him and sent his sister into prostitution... the corpse farts incessantly as he tries to dispose of it. Wertmüller seems more comfortable to revel in the grottiness of humanity than consider anything even slightly uplifting.")

"I just do my work, and I work every day, and my ambition is just to do something better than I last did."

"I’d like to write something as great as ‘Pinocchio’ or ‘Little Women.’ I won’t say ‘Moby-Dick’ because that’s impossible. I’d like to write a book that everybody loves. I’d like to take a picture that someone wants to put above their desk so they can look at it while they’re writing a letter or doing whatever they’re doing while sitting at their desk. I’d like to do a painting that would astonish people."

Says Patti Smith, quoted in the NYT in an article that coincides with the publication of her new book "M Train." We're told the book is "elegiac," and the author of the piece, Penelope Green, seems to be trying to write in an elegiac manner. For example:

Meanwhile, her cat throws up on her pillow. Her clothing betrays her; her pockets are torn. Her shoelaces come undone and trail in rain puddles. Her socks get tangled in her jeans, and escape at inopportune moments. Walking through Washington Square, a lone sock breaks free from her pants (stuck there from the night before), and a giggling teenager returns it to her. Small losses echo the larger ones: She is undone when a woman commandeers “her” regular table in her favorite neighborhood cafe, retreating to the bathroom and wishing upon the interloper a spectacularly gruesome death, like a victim in one of her beloved crime dramas.

When the cafe closes, its owner gave Ms. Smith that table and chairs. These and other totems are in the bungalow... A Chinese rug rescued from her townhouse on the edge of Greenwich Village, where she has lived since the late ’90s, because the cats were urinating on it....

"In order to source her materials, Meza-DesPlas runs her fingers through her hair every morning, holding onto the strands that fall out."

"She also collects her hair from the shower and, when it’s time to get to work, she sorts it from shorter hairs to longer hairs. It’s become a ritual for her."

“I like the dichotomy of using hair because there’s the idea that hair can be sexy and engaging to people and then on the other hand it can be repulsive, like a hair in your soup or a hair on your hotel pillow,” Meza-DesPlas explained....

“Hair has an unruliness to it, we try to control it and make it do certain things and hair has a mind of its own, it snakes out when it wants to and does certain things when it wants to,” she said. “It has a sense of life to it and I feel like my drawings have a sense of life to them."

Making art out of things that are not art materials is a very old idea. The trick is to support the old idea with verbal bullshit. And I'm sure people have made drawings/paintings out of actual bull shit.

Googling for something to link to support my assertion that this is a very old idea, I found a Cracked listicle titled "7 Horrifying Uses of the Human Body to Create Art" ("#4. Drinking Painted Milk and Puking It Onto a Canvas"). And I'm not going to use this precious segment of a Friday morning to research all the feminist art that has been made from menstrual blood.

IN THE COMMENTS: Lemondog says "Nothing new just a different style," pointing to a page showing the work of modern day practitioners of something called Victorian hair art, which I'm guessing had something to do with remembering the dead, similar to hair in a locket, but much more labor intensive. Okay, here's "The Lost Art of Sentimental Hairwork":

Suddenly, 10 things.

1. The blog has a theme today. This is something that happens sometimes, and at the point when I notice I use my "blog has a theme today" tag and — if I'm in the mood — I try to construct a 10-item list on that theme. As the post title indicates, the theme is: "sudden."

2. "Three gunmen, who have been hired to assassinate the President, hold a family hostage while waiting for their target. Interesting B film which focuses on psychopathic killer well-portrayed against type by Frank Sinatra." It's titled "Suddenly," and you can watch it in its hour-and-15-minute entirety here.

3. In the phrase "all of a sudden" (or "all of the sudden"), "sudden" is a noun. But we never use the noun in any other context. It's hard even to try to do that, even though it's obvious that the noun means something that is sudden. I challenge you! (By the way, I grew up around people who used the less common "all of the sudden," and it took me a long time to accept the dominance of "all of a sudden.")

4. Good writers should know that "suddenly" is a cheeseball word. One of Elmore Leonard's 10 rules of writing is "Never use the words 'suddenly' or 'all hell broke loose.'" I agree but would make an exception for intentional and delightful cheesiness, as in: "Why do birds suddenly appear/Every time you walk near?"



5. Hearing that, Meade suddenly says "Hey, don't forget, Bissage named his blog Suddenly Bissage." Bissage was a dearly beloved commenter on this blog who disappeared one day, when the uncooperative dear became uncooperative. I've tried to call him back: "Come back, Bissage. We're counting oranges again. Remember? 42. 42. 42..." To no avail.

6. Analyzing sentences in "The Great Gatsby" — the old "Gatsby project" — there was a day, a couple years ago, when we lit upon: "Through this twilight universe Daisy began to move again with the season, suddenly she was again keeping half a dozen dates a day with half a dozen men, and drowsing asleep at dawn with the beads and chiffon of an evening dress tangled among dying orchids on the floor beside her bed." About that "suddenly," I said: "This lone female is suddenly joined by numerous men. Though the unnamed men never get definition as individuals, they presumably get one-on-one dates with her, since the numbers match up: half a dozen dates a day with half a dozen men. This is the kind of 'dating' one associates with a prostitute." What would Elmore say about that? I'm inclined to justify anything in "The Great Gatsby" as exactly what it has to be, so I want to say that the "suddenly" is hilarious, but why? Perhaps because it's absurd — 6 men popping up in a sequence on each day within a season of days. Presumably, those men and more are always there, seeking dates with Daisy. It's her whimsical option — exercised suddenly — to accept the dates and put them in sequence, 6 per day, day after day. It's an endless flow, not sudden at all. The suddenness is in Daisy's waking up again in this twilight universe.

7. "Sudden death" — to refer to a method of tie-breaking — goes back to 1834, according to the OED, which found the quote: "‘Which’, said he, ‘is it to be—two out of three, as at Newmarket, or the first toss to decide?’ ‘Sudden death’, said I, ‘and there will soon be an end of it.’" Wikipedia has a page on the topic, with specific details on 16 different sports/games and: "Sudden death may instead be called sudden victory to avoid the mention of death, particularly in sports with a high risk of physical injury. This variant became one of announcer Curt Gowdy's idiosyncrasies in 1971 when the AFC divisional championship game between the Kansas City Chiefs and Miami Dolphins went into overtime." Ha. That didn't catch on. If you're that anxious about someone getting hurt, why are you watching?

8. Meade laughs at something he wrote in the comments to "We vomit on all these people who suddenly say they are our friends": "I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes/And just for that one moment I could be you/Yes, I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes/You'd know what a drag it is to have vomit in your shoes." And my response to that — because I'm working on this list here — is to do a word search for "suddenly" at bobdylan.com. One of the great ones comes up — "It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding":

You lose yourself, you reappear
You suddenly find you got nothing to fear
Alone you stand with nobody near
When a trembling distant voice, unclear
Startles your sleeping ears to hear
That somebody thinks they really found you

9. Sudden infant death syndrome. To be distinguished — we hope! — from infanticide. "The misdiagnosis of infanticide as SIDS 'happens all over... A lot of doctors and police don't know how to handle it. They don't take it as seriously as they should.'" Said Jamie Talan, co-author of "The Death of Innocents: A True Story of Murder, Medicine and High-Stakes Science." That book is from 1997. That's a controversy that seems to have melted away.

10. This is a 10-point list so we must stop here. Did I miss something you were hoping for? "Suddenly Susan"? "Suddenly Seymour"? "Suddenly, Last Summer"?

"We vomit on all these people who suddenly say they are our friends."

Said the Dutch cartoonist Bernard Holtrop, AKA Willem, about all of Charlie Hebdo's "new friends."

"We have a lot of new friends, like the pope, Queen Elizabeth and [Russian President Vladimir] Putin. It really makes me laugh.... Marine Le Pen is delighted when the Islamists start shooting all over the place.... We vomit on all these people who suddenly say they are our friends.... A few years ago, thousands of people took to the streets in Pakistan to demonstrate against Charlie Hebdo. They didn't know what it was. Now it's the opposite, but if people are protesting to defend freedom of speech, naturally that's a good thing."

Why is Holtrop still alive to vomit on the new friends of Charlie Hebdo? He doesn't like meetings:

"I never come to the editorial meetings because I don't like them. I guess that saved my life."

"Honey, I just think it speaks volumes about you, about what a real creature of the theater you are that the only time that you ever had an orgasm..."

"... was saying the words of a homosexual man. It was as far from a heterosexual orgasm as you could possibly get."

Said Alec Baldwin to Elaine Stritch after she described having "an orgasm for the first time in my life" on stage in a very emotional moment of Edward Albee's play "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" ("You know, that big scene? ‘Our son,’ he yells in my face, ‘is dead.’ And I went ‘No!’ At the height of my force, I said no to him.")

That's in the transcript of the May 13, 2013 episode of Baldwin's podcast "Here's The Thing." Here's the audio, with Stritch doing a very dramatic yelling of "Nooooo!" She was 88 at the time, suffering from diabetes, and a year and a month away from her death.

"I want this chick to throw up on me in front of the world, so that I can tell them, you know what?"

"You could never, ever degrade me as much as I could degrade myself and look how beautiful it is what I do."

Said Lady Gaga, talking to Howard Stern, about her video for the song "Swine" and revealing that, years ago, she was raped.

"I don't want to be defined by it... I'll be damned if somebody is going to say that every creatively intelligent thing I ever did is all boiled down to one dickhead that did that to me."