<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office” />le Bleu = the Blue out of which come the comets of ideas; see pogblog's Glossary for fuller definition;
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Put An Icepick In Nice
A friend whom I treasure as much as one might treasure one’s next-to-last breath or the sudden sight of the red bird in the dogwood tree just after one first learned the word scarlet – a treasured friend knows to a tedium how beowulfianally besotted I am with assonance.
When you’re standing on a cliff looking down way across a beach at the froth of breaking waves, you can perhaps hear the concussion, that muted thunder of the waves. You climb down a steep staircase of many small steps to the beach and make your way across the sand. Now after a wave crashes, that lace of foam that slides up the beach purrs over the small pebbles in a glistening glissando that you couldn’t hear from back up on the cliff. It is that woven song of more intimate sound that is assonance, the echoy sweet nothings of vowel sounds that privately and with wicked whisper seduce you.
Staccato consonance is the other wing of alliteration, the condor of sound whose high flight mesmerizes the reader.
So when le Bleu dropped the condor feather, “Drive an ice pick into the right eye of nice” at pogblog’s feet this morning as she went to hand out little pogblog posters at a farmer’s market, the assonance seemed whipped cream on the meringue of the deliciously unpleasant sentiment. Drive an icepick into the right eye of nice.
Beowulf, the ancient epic, was addicted to alliteration. It’s like in the Depression of the 1930s – you had to put all the sugar you had into the teacake to show your hospitality. Alliteration showed that the poet bothered, cared fully that you’d come to visit.
Of course in the mid-late 20th century, like the harsh architecture – gods forfend you have a turret – any playfulness with the language was haughtily frowned upon. (I am sure Hemingway shot himself in metaphysical recoil at being forced by the fashion he created to write another corseted sentence in a writer’s world in which slutty decoration had become sin. That puritanical tyranny of enforced spareness was an aridity that parched poor Ernest in the end and death became preferable to the desolation.)
Anyhow, pogblog has a good friend we’ll call Velv Eeta who has gone out in a nearby city carrying a Teach Peace sign every day since <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />October 9, 2002. Velv has guts in her own doggéd, eccentric way. She says that a vesuvial irritation out on the protest-hustings is that if you say something tart, least of all a remark flagrant with battery acid, one of these birkenstock people will say, aggrieved as if deceived, “How can you carry that Teach Peace sign and be so mean? You should be nice.” No, the sign doesn’t say Teach Nice, you tepid cow. I’m out here every day nudging people to quit letting their tax dollars be spent on blowing kids’ faces off. That’s the not-nice to worry about. It’s about bombs, triple imbecile, not the normanrockwellian horrors of being compelled to listen to Larry Whelk with you.’ Velv doesn’t say that but it runs through her mind.
“I know it’s awful,” Velv told me, “but I find myself longing to give them a single swift jab to the nose just to wake them from their cottoncandy daze”
What cathartic solace may a pacifist have except the stiletto satisfactions of verbal violence? (From which, unlike the bombs thing, the victim may rise from the crypt in the storied three days to have a banana split or mow the lawn.) Niceness can be a vice.
Actually, most people aren’t smart enough, full of care enough to be skillfully, jocularly mean. Vile as an excess of belligerent niceness certainly is, the bludgeon most amateurs wield as wit is even worse. But we’ll flay them another day. Let’s stick with the nazis of nice for this tutorial in the glories of assonance.
So, my devilish darling dervish, let’s drive an icepick into the right eye of nice, and all manner of things will be well.
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6-18-05 7:59:39p.pdt.us ….4 Earth . Earthquake . Heron tzol 17 sat
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I know what I want to put in the pogblog June contest. (I'll go leave a note in the Contest Comments like a good citizen.) But it came from reading this article. Euphemism kills.
We say passed away instead of died. Their scruffy intrepid militia with blunderbuss-equivalents are terrorists. Our proper killers in uniforms are “a new tradition of noble soldiers” as Time magazine put it this week. (To the jury of the dead recently blasted through the pitiless tunnel of white light, they both equally stink of a major rupture in the sewage main.) If you've been mutilated, the resounding rhetoric of the mutilator is no balm whatsoever. Whoever's collateral damage I am, I'm still dead.
snopes
Your, as we learn from pogblog, 12 ft tall Lizards in human disguise Administration has fortune cookie Happy Talk down to an art so scurrilous and Machiavellian that Europe cringes in grim anticipation of the next imperial pre-emptive attack. If Chirac says something pithy in his riparian way, is that grounds for a nuclear take-out? Please, Jaques, zip it, we all say in our prayers. King George may take spontaneous offense and then we all join you in the mushroom cloud.