The Mondegreen

Thoreau and Pierrot

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 19:33:00 -0500

Thoreau walks along the edge of the rails and ties drinking from several types of drinks he finds during his walk mixed together in a one gallon windshield fluid jug washed in the river and dried in the sun some days ago when he started the practice. There is nothing wrong with it. The sun is out and it is windy going through the steep grades carved through the hills for the intermittent, regular trains to run in. During the day’s walk he found the remaining contents of several cola type off brand soda cans, none of which had any ashes; the spit infused bottom of a malt liquor bottle’s dirty amber; and the bottom third of a tequila bottle filled with no amount of urine, he’s sure because he checked twice sniffing actively with his flaring, cratered nose. The body does need any solid nourishment for weeks on end notwithstanding detritus and gum.

The tracks lay from here across the entire nation, conceivably. Thoreau begins wandering these tracks when he ambles, trips, and fells weeks ago down a bare ravine. He reaches out for a scrap of something to grab onto and failing that to cradle in his arms his briny mop head giving up the ribs and soft flanks. When he opens his eyes he sees a tepid stream and the windshield fluid jug floating upon it. Thoreau is in pain as he reaches up his body to stand up again.

The stream runs parallel to the tracks for only a few days and then it swells proud and passes underneath the bridge the tracks are on. He never thinks of oncoming traffic, and he is across the river. Except for some shoes and tires, he doesn’t encounter anything that resembles life. Thoreau never wonders where the unevaporated liquid in the containers comes from.

It rarely seems right to sleep. Thoreau walks generally in a way resembling a heron or a coatrack granted as if by magic the ability to walk on its own. He is tall and gawky, but he moves without distinction.

Thoreau drinks from his jug and it subsides briefly, the constant visceral throb in his head. He hears a keening wail and then he sees a bundle swaddled and lying on the tracks. He walks to the bundle and bending at the waist brings his face near it. It is a baby and he thinks its name is Pierrot.

Thoreau walks ahead toward the embankment and rests his jug in the shade of a crevice. He returns to Pierrot and picks up the baby. He holds it against his chest, and begins to walk down the center of the tracks. His head is filled with heated rocks radiating and expanding under the sun and his sodden hair. The train cannot stop for at least a quarter of a mile.

"The Great Jane Fox"

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 19:27:00 -0500

The Great Jane Fox leaps over the
moon. Contemplates the past tense,
and did it again. But every time the
Great Jane Fox leaps over the
moon, she always wished that she
leapt over the moon. The Great
Fox is leaping over the moon continually,
paused, thinks, and each time finds
herself having leapt over the moon. Never
“leaps over the moon,” she thought.
The Great Jane Fox leaps over
the moon right now, but never,
“leaps over the moon,” to her.
Leaps still. And always leapt.

The Good Old Days

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 21:05:48 -0500

The students of the college roughly fell into ranks and files on a sunny, bright April day. The frats and sororities were nearly finished with their rush events, marking the end of some intense discomfort. And the comfort level of rush corresponded directly (though perhaps unintentionally) with the New England weather cycle. There were the typical foot-in-the-door events—parties, mixers, and real orgies of fun—that resembled ancient harvest time festivals. A total abandonment of care to prepare the spirit for the harsh winter forthcoming. Then midterms would mount; “In a word, ‘rush’ means recruitment.” Bids come like early Christmas presents, and as the pledge period begins in the cold winter months, many a pledge finds himself swaddled—quite literally, toga party?—like a baby Jesus or Moses hoping to persist to the promised land of the Greeks. Unspeakable tasks, humiliating requests and downright Brechtian performances: all are solicited with expectation and brotherly malice starting with the onset of winter and hailing down through its subzero nadir (which incidentally is the worse period for the pledges); they finish finally as the snow melts and the flotsam is scrubbed clean off the sidewalks by underpaid buildings and grounds officers weilding hoses and rakes like nature gods giving good tidings to heathens of the past. The correspondence between pagan ceremonies and Greek rush wouldn’t fail to suggest itself to a cultural anthropologist, perhaps. The connection would at least describe coherently the emerging popularity of lacrosse.

Revelation of John, Chapter X, vv. 1-7

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 19:02:31 -0500

I heard about this guy who thought he was real hot shit. He had a nice third-floor walk-up (as nice as you could expect) from which he came one day. He was dress nattily, healthy tanned, wearing some exotic sneakers that seemed Japanese in origin. He set down his right foot on the sidewalk and left his left foot on his stoop. He stood there, and lifted up to the sky his hand, and he cursed out loud. Loud. And then he asked, Is this it? He put his iPhone earbuds in his ears tapping to the seventh track of the most recent Yeasayer album. Life is weird, sometimes.

The Invention of the Guitar

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 07:12:00 -0500

The guitar was invented in 1864 by Carter Doisnaeu. Its direct mechanical precursors were the Jew’s harp (also known as the gewgaw, guimbarde, Gedachtenverdrijver, Maultrumpe, mundharpe, marranzanu, mouth harp, jaw harp, juice harp, Ozark harp, Omaha Flapjack, and marranzano pancake), the upright piano (invented only a year prior by, or so it’s said, a distant cousin of Doisnaeu’s), and the Model 1840 Flintlock Musket (which had been rendered recently inferior and therefore obsolete by cartridge rifles such as the hated Henry repeating rifle, a .44 caliber rimfire , lever-action, breech-loading rifle favored by the more well-to-do Union soldiers). Its spiritual precursors had among them the Panama hat, the straight razor, and Vulcanized rubber. The guitar’s present-day existence owes much to these latter three items.

A Farce

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 16:56:55 -0500

Haven’t we ever had a presentiment in the night, of expansion and contraction, wind stretching itself through leaves, an icicle fall, or the sound the air makes as it settles on the dust. And who’s to say that our life hasn’t led up to this barely noticed—barely created!—sound, the sound of a feeling.

We’re talking about the word-concept “teleology,” as if it were a thing about which we could talk. A thing the subject of Cezanne, the teleology of the viewed; Woolf, the teleology of the sensual self; Schoenberg, the teleology of harmonic structure; Joyce, the teleology of city life; Pynchon, the telology of plot itself. But—.

When we are talking about “teleology” we are talking about what? And now you may argue we are begging the question: for what is meaning but repetition? The repetition of an unutterable trace, the non-existent trace, arche, origin, which is repeated without limit—not infinite, without limit—until—?

If we give, offer, or submit that repetition of the [sous rature] source of meaning, and meaning that of existence [existenz], then mustn’t we admit teleology a so-called place in the canon of meaningful concepts? No. Until you feel ready to admit a place for the engauntled hand of justice concealing the withered hand of farce dictatorship; until you care for presence more than absence; until you yourself are the one “calling the shots,” so to speak, you cannot and must not acquiesce to “teleology,” as little as acquiesce to tumbling now living, then dead into a cold, unremoseful non-being, non-living, uncared-for state of dread fear.

The fear birds know the sound of a feeling as they trace the apsis of the knowing globe.

In The Beginning

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 16:53:00 -0500

Park used to think that the development of one’s intellect mirrored his growing understanding of a city’s layout. That is, as the mind matured it gained a better sense of how faster to get where, which restaurants to frequent and the streets one ought to avoid after dark. The easy link between thought and action—as if the mind could be schematized and illuminated, filled in, like a map of the new world—this link and its fallacy wouldn’t dawn on him until much later. But at the time the image of a mind’s education mirroring its facility for navigating unfamiliar terrain seemed itself like a beacon, a waypoint to keep him on the right path of progress, like a grandly intelligent idea that only a grandly intelligent youth would harbor. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy if there ever were one, and its significance remained undiminished even as Park lost himself every time he tried his way around the city.

Like Reverb But More Heartbreaking

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 06:56:14 -0500

I one day left Albuquerque riding on a Greyhound bus. My expectations were unsatisfied. You’d think that it was an easy proposition—I’m riding on a cheap A to B vehicle, one out of many that happen to operate over a nation-wide network under a single corporate moniker, an aegis. But I had in mind a mythical animal. Not at all like the dogs inspiring the name; more like the associations around the dogs (which I hadn’t seen often but of which I knew the way people tend just to know things, like that New York City throbs with excitement while simultaneously it withers, decays). I thought it would be like a greyhound dog: fleet and lean. I thought riding the Greyhound would be capturing a little of the American Dream. Total freedom of movement. But it didn’t seem like the mythic vehicle of discovery that Maurice Kenny waxed poetic riding on. It wasn’t at all a vehicle of discovery. It was just a regular tour bus with the same patterned seats and narrow aisle with rubber piping that’re in all tour buses. The Albuquerque bus station foreshadowed this discovery, and I thought that it deserved its meager station, run down but not really seedy, it was small and sad.

But once we got going outside of the city, though, I felt different. On the one hand we were traveling—it all of a sudden didn’t seem like a one-hour commute. And it was beautiful to look through those big polarized bus windows at the dusty country between Albuquerque and Santa Fe. A road I’d driven on a hundred times before looked different when I was a total, passive passenger. I didn’t have a driver to make small talk with nor a car to drive. I was on a tour bus and the trip therefore assumed the character of a tour. The Sandia Mountains dominated the east side of the bus where I was seated. They looked like absurd hills—sand hills, even—the way they started and stopped so abruptly on the otherwise flat plain. They looked bulbous and obscene, a middle finger to the dead gods of the flatlands. Ranches and corrals carved up the space near the foothills, but closer to the road lay squat roadhouses, tourist-trap restaurants and general stores all under powerlines. They all looked desperate. Cloud shadows floated on the wide empty land. They made the sky look like a fake or a negative. I’d seen the ocean reflecting the sky, the up above imprinted on the down below, but I’d never seen the scene’s reverse. All of a sudden, the particular Greyhound I was riding didn’t seem so sad.

We were traveling on the one hand. But after a while, maybe ten minutes or fifteen miles after we left the city the landscape failed my eyes, let them down. The countryside did kind of look all the same. Like the universal concept of New Mexican flatland, its Form. I was less interested in the universal, more interested in getting personal, meeting everyone and seeing everything. And there was on the other hand a loud conversation behind me. I had on my big sunglasses and my hat. I didn’t bother turning around. I just listened. There was a woman whom I pictured to be a blonde. A man who sounded like a mexican, and a young woman, who turned out to be a bit player only. The mexican was a recovering alcoholic who had been shot and stabbed. Being stabbed was much worse, pain-wise, he said. The young woman agreed and said that she’d heard that from a friend. Affirmed, the mexican went on about the amounts of blood and pain and all the great things they put with a needle into your body after being stabbed. But it turned out that the girl was pregnant and the pain of pregnancy is of course nothing to fuck around with nor is there any pain outstripping it. Such is the mythological force of childbearing. It’s actually not the worse pain ever: consider torture, having to cut off your own limb (to escape, for example, being pinned down by a large object and starving to death) or being burned alive—all things that happen to have happened. But the psychical associations—we’re all expelled from the womb—the cultural importance and universality of childbirth keeps it the reigning champ of pain. The myth of woman and her reality bear the same shape, share some aspects, but they are two entirely different things. But they’re often confused. Woman menstruates, she pisses sitting down, and she’s the one who bears babies. The myth of woman has her being the matriarch, a title earned in no small part by her undergoing the Worst Pain which is not necessarily just physical but has to do with the importance of birth to the human species—and we’re told since we’re born that important things are hard, even sometimes painful. This conversation about childbirth was the overture to the real story. It hit the main points and brought the myth of woman into the fore. After a while I couldn’t tell if I was myth-making or decoding or just reading a little too much. But at a point I was sure that just one seat behind me and chattering almost like one who’s done a little too much coke sat an instantiation of the mythological woman—Cleopatra, Ophelia, Molly Bloom and this woman whose name I never even caught. She was like one of the Sandias which we were driving quickly by getting up close and personal, too ready to tell you that it wasn’t just one with the whole range: it had its own character, a story. The woman behind me was the universal and the particular coming beautifully together, a Hegelian wet dream if ever there were such a thing.

This is a story of sundering and reconciliation.

The woman and the mexican talk for a while about New Mexico; how fucked up it is. She’d spent a good amount of time in the destination, Santa Fe. Sowed her oats, I imagine she was still sowing them on as she moved on back to Colorado. It turns out that the blonde worked as a stripper at the only strip club in Santa Fe. In the southside of town there is a strip club without a pole, just a single stage backgrounded by mirrors. Vomit lay like a welcome mat on the floor before the men’s room. It’s to this kind of place that you go to be a government whistleblower. Privileged information is offered in its rear parking lot. But if you drive around to the back, there you are beaten near to death and then allowed to retire due to medical disability. Things happen there, bad things.

Did she know Rita who worked there, too? No, she worked there in ninety-nine, no, eighty-nine. I picture lots of makeup on the blonde, tight skin with little capillaries showing like stress marks on her face in lieu of wrinkles. Crows’ feet walk over all women’s faces in New Mexico young and old alike. A teenager looks twenty, a forty-year-old looks like a grandmother. The mexican wonders, did she know about that blonde guy, the bouncer who was gay and who was the owner’s boyfriend? Yeah, she did. He got killed there. My buddy Rico killed him. Why did he kill him? I dunno, but he’s in jail now. I didn’t really know him I worked there so long ago now, the blonde says. She didn’t know why a faggot owned a stripclub and hired his faggot boyfriend to work the door. Seemed like he was asking for trouble, he thought. I knew why a faggot would own a stripclub. Why he would give gift of troubled sight to his lover. The troubled sight of lonely men standing at attention giving dollar bills to ugly women with titties exposed barely dancing. I thought it was funny. I didn’t think that men who love men would automatically then hate women. I love women and I love men alike—I love people. But I love women more. I knew the sight of ugly strippers could reaffirm the strength of love’s bond through this zero-sum thinking: I’m better off than them. The lovers of pock-marked, fleshy women are less tolerable—more disgusting—than any amount of sagging flesh. Lovers can’t stay the gentle, incremental eradication of wind and death but they are better off. Aren’t they? I would guess that the satisfaction of bouncing from the club a burly small-armed man, bouncing him for the singular crime of licking a stripper’s breast, the only firm flesh on her body, that satisfaction would have to be life-affirming to any man in love. It doesn’t matter if he loved man or woman; the sin against love that the crime represented—a dirty act perpetrated upon a dirty woman, an unloving act of animal desire flying in the face of aesthetics or emotion—stomping out that sin would make the vomit and jiggly ass-revealing mirrors palatable. Would make the low hourly wages seem to be just the icing on the cake. That he would be mowed down, stabbed or shot likewise seems to be logical. The real mirror of nature isn’t hung on a wall. It is in that poor, dead gay man’s face illuminated by normal love for another person. I didn’t know him but I knew he wouldn’t be bounced from any strip clubs. He was the bouncer.

The mexican asked her what she was doing in New Mexico.

It turns out to be interesting. I gather that the blonde had left her husband and kids in Colorado Springs not too long ago. She makes comments on her wanting to be a regular housewife and cook and have a garden, the whole nine yards. A few months ago, she said, she’d left her husband and kids went to San Diego. That is, the blonde up and left. Once she got to San Diego she bought a new car, a Cadillac. I hear her purse open and plastic things shake against themselves. She says, here, look at this. She took a picture of it on her cell phone, and the caption read, “Don’t Worry Be Happy”. She shows it to the mexican. The young pregnant girl is asleep. She doesn’t get to see the ocean in the background. There are a few seagulls floating above the car above the ocean circling. It seems like it was a nice looking car. Well, the very next day, after she snapped the photo staring off her phone, she got a DWI and wrecked her car all in the process. She was fine. But her car was wrecked. Now she’s on a bus back to Colorado Springs. That explains it all.

But I wonder if she wouldn’t be on the bus if she hadn’t wrecked her car. I guess that she would be able to drive back to Colorado if she hadn’t wrecked her car. That’s obvious. Who would want to travel on one of these damned tour buses if she could drive in style in a Cadillac? But I think maybe that she might have blown her getaway money on the car. She blew her money on the car and she wrecked the car, therefore she wrecked her money: she wrecked her getaway. Driving around the coast in a new Cadillac must have been liberating. In fact, there’s just about nothing more thrilling than driving fast, really red-lining it, with a bottle of bourbon between your legs or a gin and tonic in the cup holder. Once you’ve drank your head away and you keep drinking and shifting when the engine roars like a chainsaw, then you can get that transcendent feeling the birds might feel flying over the same road. Birdbrained, drunk, you can drive through hairpins and switchbacks like blood running through a vein, fast and pumped by an involuntary and inexorable force, like one’s heart, for instance. First gear, thump-thump. Round a corner of the coastline road. Second gear, thump-thump, and you’re propelled along a rare straight-away. A dazed driver gives you an unfeeling, vague look that you barely can discern before… Third gear, thump-thump. You pass quickly by a diamond-shaped sign, a glyph implying curves with squiggly lines and an arrow’s head. It looks like an invitation to go faster, to propel or reach lift-off like a rocket. Turning, your two passenger-side tires lift off the pavement and you get a sense of flight, finally. Fourth gear, a beat is skipped, the clutch grinds. Looking down at the gearbox you see that your cup has spilled on the shifter and your hand slipped off. There isn’t anything to wipe it with. Sucking some gin out of the U-shape between thumb and index finger, you look up at the road. The engine whines unbearably, stuck in third and going seventy miles-per-hour. And then—

It’s a good thing you were wearing your seatbelt, the mexican says. The blonde admits that if she were going faster, or if she weren’t drinking and therefore loose like a goose, then she probably would have died. As it was, her car glanced off the guard-rail, ricocheted and fishtailed right into the side of a large truck bearing a load of oranges to some environs east. She was fine, but many oranges were lost. The road was sticky and smelled of rotten, fruity musk for the rest of the day. After her accident she spent a few weeks in California drinking, recovering. She must have settled her DWI or else been on the lamb. I hoped that she’d done the former. Then, she hitched a ride with a friend to Albuquerque. I have no idea what she did there, but now she’s going home. She wants to be a regular housewife.

A phone call. I hear her talking to her husband in waiting—her husband who is, let’s be honest, more of a Penelope-type than any man I’ve heard of—on the phone asking him what they were barbecuing for dinner and to get ready for her arrival and whatnot. And then she said, I love you, and it sounded like every other I love you ever uttered by a woman left wide open with vulnerability or desire. Her voice’s timbre was the same. It had the same quietness, like a bubble formed around the words, dampening the acoustics but preserving their meaning. Lacuna. I love you. Lacuna. Coming like that, all breathy and slow. I felt I’d heard that same effect hundreds of time, breathes in like she’s going to blow out a birthday cake, the words, their sound. Make a wish. The words I love you always washed over me easy and fine like running through a sprinkler on a hot day. Childhood and innocence. And now this woman who left her husband and kids, bought and wrecked a car in San Diego, and from what I’d gathered had called every ex and one-night-stand thus far en route—this woman had at her disposal the same vocal effect. It seemed like a knob on an amp or a studio control board, one that’s not even especially rare or expensive. There are probably quite a few knock-off brands that aren’t really so bad, a good bang for your buck; and they all have the same effects knob, like reverb but more heartbreaking. This woman is quite obviously a slut and an alcoholic, and she has at her disposal the voice all women have, the voice of pain and desire. I couldn’t quite set this all straight in my mind.

I Am Not A Shape

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 06:43:19 -0500

As I rode my bike home last night I felt my descent as the slow rising of my surroundings.

Inside my stomach, something knew that I had motion, but my eyes and skin felt fooled. I was listening to music so the wind’s normal dominant aesthetic component—sound—had undergone a phenomenal reduction. The air that I moved through felt like the same temperature as the air inside me, although I knew that as well couldn’t be true. It was a warm night, but it was late and I thought it had to be about 70 degrees outside. It’s been a chilly summer, but the air felt warm and like a garment cut only for me. The wind as it wraps around your body bears an ironic likeness to the emperor’s new clothes because it is one of the only things that truly fits me. And there’s a secondary irony, because of course, the map is not the territory. This transcendent idea of ‘fit’ still fails to describe me. I am not a shape.

Where We Compose A Poem In The Shower: Catastrophe

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 07:25:20 -0500

Apostrophe wouldn’t rhyme
With catastrophe if
Possession didn’t lead
To a ruinous end, and
Contraction weren’t a part
Wretchedly deserving.

My First Religious Experience

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 08:59:01 -0500

I had my first religious experience tonight, but its possibility was contained in a sermon I had heard a few weeks ago. It was during the homily or sermon—whatever they call it. I’ve been to a lot of differently denominated and non-denominated churches, lately. I’d been trying to find one that stuck. At this service, the priest made a point about prayer. He said that a lot of people treat prayer as a way to ask God for things. Like, ‘Hey God. It’s me, Brian. Please give me a new car, pay my bills, and make sure my kids don’t cut class.’ This approach to prayer is the exact opposite of what we should be doing, though. The priest didn’t go into why this approach is wrong, but I imagine it has to do with God’s omnipotence and the fact that He knows the things you know, and therefore He knows you want those things; if He should want you to have them, then He would provide them. Getting back to what the priest said. He said that instead of asking God for things you want, you should ask God what He wants. We are the ones, after all, who are born imperfect by nature, who can never been whole, who cannot know with transcendent certainty, who bear Original Sin. It’s fitting, then, that we should spend our prayer and contemplative moments wondering at what God wants of us.

I have recently been trying to integrate prayer into my life, but it’s very difficult. I can’t pray at night for a variety of reasons. The primary one is that when I go to sleep, I read or watch something on my computer right up to the moment I fall asleep. I could change my habit, and maybe I should, but there seems to be little room for prayer at night. I thought of praying in the shower and I even tried it once, but my showers are too brief, the water too powerful. It seems unlikely that I should be able to pause my day to pray. I was stymied. My difficulties lasted only briefly, though. Today I thought of the ideal time to pray. I run nearly every day for any time between twenty and ninety minutes. That is plenty of time. Running is solitary and self-directed. It’s supposedly a contemplative activity, although it’s generally not for me. Despite having heard many and many times every song on my vast running playlist, I generally still focus on the music I listen to while I run. And if I run without music, my mind is as empty as a syllogism.

I have of late been faced with a rather large difficulty. I began my run late this afternoon planning on running sixty minutes and thinking for sixty minutes how to dissolve my particular difficulty. I eased through my warmup reaching the point where the pores of my body just started to open up, letting out the first suspiration of exertion. It was just at this point when I realized that I could likely solve my dual problems of being unable to fit prayer into my life and unable to dissolve this difficulty from my life by praying while I ran. My prayer wouldn’t amount to parading a litany of desires in front of God, as if He didn’t already know my life’s material deficits and embarrassing moral lacunae; I could simply ask Him with every stride and breath what He wanted me to do. My mind turned toward’s God’s ends.

Why should someone be good rather than bad. Goodness will be rewarded in the eternal completion and badness will be punished, but the mere seeking of reward or avoidance of punishment is trite in a simplistically rational manner. Faith isn’t a function of reason. It’s a function of madness: It dictates the normative rational stance. I shouldn’t be good because something good will happen to me. I should be because it is good. It occurred to me that God created everyone damaged in comparison to Himself, but that doesn’t mean everyone isn’t a manifestation of the Him, which is to say a manifestation of the Good. Why should I be good rather than bad. The reason, if you should want to call it that, is contained in the question: To be is to be good, because all of God’s creation is good qua ontologically. Conversely, if one were to be bad he would be negating his own existence, since to be is to be good.

As I ran, I focused on an idea of existence at large characterized as an assertion, extension, or implication of God. Ignoring the question of free will (it’s rather obvious: we have it), it seems logical that human’s place in life’s milieu is to be, which means that being is a manifestation of God. That is, everyone’s being’s meaning is to make his meaning (that is, express himself) express himself as a being of God. I realized that my aesthetic existence, that is, my existence in time and space, is a realization of the transcendent existence of God; therefore, my aesthetic existence is a diminution of God’s existence. Personal existence is necessarily a diminution of God’s existence, but not a lessening, distillation, or minor reflection of God’s existence. Personal existence is a positive function (the ontological is of existence), a positive function that is in the form of God yet diminuted; it is made less in the sense of being made as less (than). It is the condensation on the side of a glass on a hot day. It is the child’s scale model of the Arc de Triomphe. It is the now disintegrated portion of the sole of my running shoes, an invisible trail left behind by moving.

Wanted: One Girl

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 08:53:00 -0500

Wanted: One girl [Age 19 to 24. Into art, New Expressionism preferable. Into music, knowledge of post-Reich minimalism required. Must smoke American Spirit cigarettes. No hard drugs except on occasion. A runner. Required, between 95 pounds and 115 pounds (inclusive). Into art, must dislike Ed Ruscha. Into music, past (or over) the indie scene. Should have migrated all physical artifacts to digital. (Books/7”s excluded.) An opinion on the serial comma appreciated, semi-required. Into art, must prefer design to advertising, advertising to television, television to theater. Into music, proficiency in two instruments (flute/piano excluded) encouraged, not required. In school, recently out of school, dropped out of school. No psychology majors. Futon owners acceptable. Must own several (read: more than four) striped sweaters, vertical/horizontal. Into art, considers commercial art to be a necessary evil. Into music, goes to at least one show per month. Posters. Tea. Ottoman. Claw-foot bathtub. Riesling. Never takes a ‘to go’ cup. Must recycle.] for occasional sexual intercourse.

Yeasayer“Mondegreen” Yeasayer is our biggest fan.

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 08:44:46 -0500

Yeasayer
“Mondegreen”

Yeasayer is our biggest fan.

Mondegreens.

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 19:48:00 -0400

A mondegreen is a misheard lyric, saying, catchphrase, or slogan. The word was coined by the Scottish writer Sylvia Wright in a 1954 article in Harper’s Magazine. There she wrote that, as a child, she had misinterpreted the lyrics of a Scottish ballad called “The Bonny Early of Moray.” One of the lines in the song is this: “They hae slain the Earl o’ Moray and laid him on the green.” She had thought it went, “They hae slain the Earl of o’ Moray and Lady Mondegreen.”

Indeed, many mondegreens are essentially children’s misinterpretations. Consider the examples just from the Christmas season. A child sings “Silent Night” in this way: “Holy imbecile, tender and mild.” Of course, the actual words are “Holy infant, so tender and mild.” In the same song, “Christ the sailor is born” is a mangled version of “Christ, the Savior is born.” […]

Many mondegreens occur in transcribed speech. A secretary or court reporter doesn’t quite hear the words and comes up with a plausible guess. “Attorney and notary public: becomes “attorney and not a republic.” “County surveyor” becomes “Countess of Ayr.” “Juxtaposition” becomes “jock strap position”

Perhaps the most interesting of all, though, are those that result from listening to songs. Often the lyrics aren’t readily available to listeners, and often the lyrics are sung a little indistinctly. So listeners create their own plausible versions, some of which in sheer creativity rival the originals.

This gloriously square entry from Garner’s Modern American Usage is a cipher for The Mondegreen, which is about evocation through ambiguity and simultaneously valid readings of past and current events.