Today in Porn: Sinfest Edition Redux
Bird’s Nest in Your Hair is for Real
And it’s coming soon. Seriously! (Just like Jesus is coming soon, yo.)
And this here is the first prong of our marketing strategy:
The Grand Inquisitor rendered into an Onegin Stanza
Christ came, and seen by all Seville,
distracted good folk from feeding sticks
to a hot fire under an iron grill,
where lay well-done, screaming heretics.
Amidst His miracles passed the Roman
Catholic cardinal, erect gnomon
to His shadow, Grand Inquisitor,
finger pointed at the visitor.
“Is it thou? Be silent! Off to prison!
For fifteen hundred years, we ate bread
blessed by thou. Really now; the dread
spirit of dessert supplies the frisson
de plaisir we require. Enough tricks! We
prefer fire, crackling and whistling. Dixi!”
Korrektiv: Medieval Edition
The Means of Communication issue of Lapham’s Quarterly contains a fabulous collection of complains and marginal notes by the monks assigned to copy manuscripts in the era before the printing press. With their bitchy complaints—“I am very cold,” “Oh, my hand”—they insert themselves into the holy texts and often, in the process, disrupt the sanctity of the words they’re supposedly copying: “Now I’ve written the whole thing: for Christ’s sake give me a drink.”
[...]
Marginalia might include comments like the ones from our miserable monks, but also an entire free-flowing range of artistic flourishes and doodles that make up the edges of medieval manuscripts. “Once the manuscript page becomes a matrix of visual signs and is no longer one of flowing linear speech,” Camille writes, “the stage is set not only for supplementation and annotation but also for disagreement and juxtaposition—what the scholastics called disputatio.”
[...]
That these psalters and books of hours often contained sacrilegious sentiments right alongside their holy piety, it seems, was perhaps the point: “We should not see medieval culture exclusively in terms of binary oppositions—sacred/profane, for example, or spiritual/worldly,” Camille explains. “Travesty, profanation, and sacrilege are essential to the continuity of the sacred in society.”
[...]
A 1323 missal illuminated by Petrus de Raimbeaucourt [...] contains [a] picture of a scribe harassed by monkeys: while he tries to copy, they mimic him, drink his ink, and distract him. One moons him, an obscene gesture suggested by a suggestive line break in the Latin above: the word culpa, “sin,” is cut at cul, so that the line reads instead Liber est a cul—“the book is to the ass.”
More good news coming out of Wisconsin…
And just in time for the summer! In a rare display of bipartisanship, Cheeseland politicians came together, pretty much unanimously, in a political climate that is (to put it mildy) contentious. Both the governor and many senators are up for recall this summer; the state supreme court has allegedly come to fisticuffs on at least one occasion, and the Packers lost to the New York Giants in the playoffs.
So this bit of news, reported in the Milwaukee Sentinel, comes as a welcomed break in the tension for all four branches of Wisconsin government: the executive, legislative, judicial and domestic!
From the YouTube Music Video Archives: From the Indies to the Andes in his Undies
While trying to get the lowdown on Fair Use laws, I came across this old gem from the Hoosier Hot Shots. As is typical of the music videos genre, there’s a fair amount of debauchery in this epic of Otto Zilch. So consider yourself warned.
From the Indies to the Andes, What a mission! / Stopping only now and then to do some fishin’ / And he went without a copyright permission / Was a very daring thing to do
“When You Feel Shame, Get Your Shit Together”
“It’s as old as the bible”. Go to 2nd Samuel, or, if you have nine minutes and thirty-four seconds, have a listen. Warning: Adult Content
Ars longa, caenum facile…
RIP Mike McGrady – aka one-part Penelope Ashe.
“It came after a night of reading ‘Valley of the Dolls,’ ” he later told Newsweek, “which I couldn’t put down because I was asleep.”
JOB