A preface to "Humor, Facades, and Dignity."

This little article serves as my warm up for an essay about humor, how it ties into facades, and what role, if any, does dignity play into this relationship. As of now, the ideas are still coming together, so if you want more specifics, wait for the Bigger Essay…I have yet to know how it will end up, except for the overall tone and concept.

The first purpose of this post: to remind people that the Phlog is going to be updated on a regular basis, and that Mr. Schwartz’s poetry post is the beginning of a good thing. So, hello, bitches. For now…

The second purpose of this post: to set establish the context for the Bigger Essay. The following list of people includes a few things I want you to know about them. My main point: humor does not always come from a place of bliss. In fact, it often doesn’t.

(I may or may not reference these individuals in the Big Essay. You may read the essay and wonder why I even mentioned them here. Again: I just want to set the tone.)

***

George Carlin: In a recent televised performance, he said, “…I have absolutely no sympathy for human beings whatsoever…no matter what kind of problem humans are facing, whether it’s natural or man-made, I always hope it gets worse.”

Joseph Heller: Yes, his novel, Catch-22, is a comic-masterpiece, but after the half-way point, it becomes as somber as grave full of Holocaust victims. The use of humor can seem problematic and surreal (even disturbing) in the midst of death, rape, and all kinds of moral depravity. But, understand that Heller’s work shows an appreciation for life as sincere as Carlin’s disdain.

Dorothy Parker: A-class smart-ass. “I’m too fucking busy, and vice versa.” Also, attempted suicide thrice.

Richard Pryor: this man dealt with drug addiction, lit himself on fire, and let everyone know it. And he had seven marriages, and had (at least?) four kids. Also, one of the most respected comics ever.

Jonathan Swift: wrote an essay about eating Irish babies. Yes, he was only being a smart-ass, but just because he felt that the Irish were getting the shaft in terms of economics. So, like any A-class smart-ass, he shoved this fact in everybody’s face.

Mark Twain: hated a lot of people. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn seems like a kind-of-grandfather to Catch-22; full of murder, child abuse, and all kinds of moral depravity. Yes, it is funny, but any one who calls this a children’s book, thinking it’s like Barney, has not yet read it.

Kurt Vonnegut: tried to commit suicide. In World War II, witnessed the aftermath of the bombing of Dresden, and wrote a novel about war's traumatizing effects (Slaughterhouse-Five).

***


- Alberto

PS. Read more Phlog.

Chance Encounter

Do you remember the
day we met? You
might; it was not so long ago to forget
easy easy— isn’t it odd
how the more television we watch,
that our minds, once deeply crevassed
now become slick and smooth;
water beading, sliding off like a car
racing down a highway to more highway.
and your mind—it’s calm
only when the gears change
in that magical moment
peace while the world rattles
about you.

Do you remember how
on television, we watched
that day
temperature, hostage countdowns,
the national debt, baby counts—
all sorts of things rising.
While flipping the channels,
we noted how the world’s getting
faster, harder, scarier, deadlier,
but also so slick and pretty to watch
But as the windows proliferate,
the walls, they grow and grow,
SO high and so thick,
That we need to punch to embrace,
I need to kill to say hello.
Because—

Do you remember the
day we met? You
brushed my shoulder, knocking my coke
from my hands,
and I said I’m sorry.

~jss 6/07

Kilmer 2007: cum laude

"Umbrella" in Latin
by Miranda Elliot, CC '10

Ahuh Ahuh (Yea, Rihanna!)
Ahuh Ahuh (Mala fieri potest bona puella.)
Ahuh Ahuh (Cape tres...Actus.)
Ahuh Ahuh

In tempestas mei nullae nubes
Pluat, in mensam publicam hydroplanio.
Veniens cum Dowo Jonibus
Cum nubes venient, ivimus, Rocafella sumus.

Alte quam caelum volat.
Et G5 melior sunt, tu me novisse,
Anticipatio, praecipitato
Assulae cumulatae pluvo diu
Jay, Homo Pluviae, cum parva femina solis redit.
Rihanna! Ubi es?

[Rihanna]
Meum corem habes.
Numquam mundis seorsum erimus,
Forsitan in ephemeris
Sed stella mei tamen eris.
Infante, quod in obscuro lucidi carri videre non potes
Illeque est cum ibi me eges.
Tibi semper partis.
Quod

[Chorus]
Cum sol lucat una lucemus
narravi te hic perpetuo futurus esse
dixi amicum tei semper futurus esse
Dejeravi, adherebo donec finis est.

nunc quod imber pluit quam umquam
Nosce nos tamen nos habituros esse
Tu stare potest sub umbella mea
ea, ea
e, e, e
Sub umbella mea
ea, ea
e, e, e
sub umbella mea
ea, ea
e, e, e, e, e, e

Hi eleganti rei numquam inter venturi sunt.
Pars entis es, hic infinitatis
Cum suum partem bellum cepit,
Cum suas chartas mundas dividit,
Si durus manus est, una tuum corem emendamus.
Quod

[Chorus]

Tu currere in bracchia mea potes.
"Okay" est, ne consternare
Veni in me.
Nulla distantia inter nos amorem est.
I pluviamque pluas.
Ero omnis quid eges et plus.

Quod

[Chorus]

Pluit.
O infante, pluit.
Infante, in me veni.
In me veni.
Pluit.
O infante, pluit.

Kilmer 2007: The Third Runner-Up

For Abbot
by Jeana Poindexter, CC '11

This
is
existential
spewing self-righteousness into the face of capitalism
Neo-libertarianism is the way of the future
and it looks even better when it’s written in a tiny four dollar moleskine that I bought from the bookstore as though this school doesn’t suck enough money out of the pockets of my rich—but liberal—parents who also graduated from here
with honors
This
is
existential
a retrospective introspection into the expository proposition of the theoretical existence of a hypothetical combination of righteousness and wrong-ness…ness
and I’ve read some books so I know what I mean when I say that Darfur
is really bad
and veganism is a conscious decision not to propagate the instigation of agricultural desecration on a totally
you know,
like,
organic level
So go green for fair trade and fuck Bush and buy a tiny journal
because everyone knows that writing about the issues in a really great way
while casually smoking a Marlborough Light and sipping a Venti half caff made with Soy milk, of course, is the only way we can like
change the world…
or whatever

Kilmer 2007: The Winner

My Husband Was In There, Like A Kumquat!
or, Explosion At The Poem Factory
or, 364 Days Without A Lost Rhyme Accident
or, St. Elmo's Fife
or, It's Definitely One Of These Titles, We Haven't Conclusively Determined Which Quite Yet, But Don't Worry, Forensic Poets Are Already On The Scene And We'll Be Sure To Keep You Posted
or, This Just In, It's Not The Fife One
by Amitai Schlair, GS '09

Poetry is like sausage.
Venison villanelles, saucisson sestinas, braunschweiger ballades, kielbasa couplets,
Pure pork pastourelles.
We simply go to the book-tcher shop and point to what we want:
"The summer sausage and the sunshine patriot ale..."
Some say it is best, for fullest enjoyment, not to know how our poems are prepared.
We hear the glorious end result and imagine the ink, the sweat, the blood, the eyeballs, the gizzards, the salvaged anuses
That went into it.
But only metaphorically.
Today we are reminded that it is all too real.
For today, in a quiet neighborhood unaccustomed to strife,
Tragedy has hungrily struck.

It is true that the great poems of canon are wrought by artists of the highest order,
Artists willing to sacrifice for every gleaming word their ink, their sweat, their blood
And occasionally their other stuff.
Yet those exalted poems are but a small sliver of the poetic ecosystem.
We could not have our teeming multitudes of lesser poems, were they wrought artis-anally.
Today, we must come full facial with the very real, very human, and very dead
Real humans who have given us so much.

In a bygone era we would have lost our local poemsmith and his trusty apprentice,
And would have relied on monthly shipments of scrawled parchment by horse from the Bronx.
A great loss, to be sure, but we would have overcome.
Changing economic conditions forced the poem manufacturing industry to consolidate
And outsource to former British colonies with proportionally fewer white people.
So it was a real point of pride when Amalgamated Verse and Strophe
Decided to build a poem factory right here in Morningside Heights
Despite knowing full well that a handful of conscientious objectors would vocally oppose the move.

In its first year, the factory brought jobs and economic stability to the area
And increased the quantity of mediocre multipurpose poem output by 47% without any statistically significant increase in quality.
Times were good for the poem industry and its industrious workers.
But this morning, for reasons as yet unknown, things took a turn for the bratwurst.

Right now, all we know is that the metaphor mixer malfunctioned,
Yielding metaphors well above acceptable purity levels.
The poem-production system was not designed to withstand this kind of artistic improvement
And the machinery failures cascaded catastrophically
Starting with the top-of-the-line Mephistropheles 9000.
The spring fell out of the sprung rhythm onto the shop floor;
The amphibrach broke;
The enjambment jammed;
The anacrusis, encrusted;
And the kenning ceased to ken.

The employee nearest the delivery dock, who operated the meter meter, observed the assembly line moving slow as molossus
And immediately knew something was a foot.
"Wait a minute," he says he said. "Iamb quite certain even our sweetest poems contain no molossus!"
And he drove off in one of the delivery trochees, a converted Nissan Stanza, moments before the factory's structural concrete verses shattered and splattered acrostic the shop floor.
If only his coworkers had had the good sestina to do limerikewise, perhaps more of them would be alitterive todouble-dactyl.

In this time of grief, we are left with many questions.
Could the tragedy have been averted?
What caused poem quality to rise so dangerously high?
What's molossus mean, anyway?
We may never have satisfactory answers to these questions.
Even so, we must honor the memory of those who died so that ordinary poetry might live.
I ask each of you now to recall a particularly empty cliché,
A tenuous metaphor,
A tenuous rhyme,
A repeated adjective,
A breath taken between lines
Where there was no intervening punctuation --
Or to conjure a new and inelegant turn.
Just something to recall the eminently imitable style of those who are now gone from us.
We will now observe a moment of silence for the deceased poem-laborers.

Amen.

Kilmer 2007: The First Runner-Up

I Got a Post-Modern Woman
Or: I Got Ninety-Nine Problematizations, and a Bitch is One.
Or: Martin Heidegger? I Hardly Know Her!
by Everett Patterson, CC '06 (if a poem can be said to be "by" anyone)

I wish I could find an old-fashioned woman,
The kind I could bring home to daddy and mommy,
Who likes to read James Joyce and listen to Webern
And loves Jackson Pollock and Salvador Dali

I thought I had found her; I'd actually done it!
When I looked in her eyes, it was more than a feeling.
We met at a modern museum exhibit,
The kind where they hang hunks of meat from the ceiling.

I knew that this girl represented the Real;
Between Beauty and Truth there was not one disjunction.
The flesh incarnation of Plato's ideal,
Lemme tell ya', her form really followed her function! (wink)

No Schoenberg sonata could sing my felicity,
Until it was silenced by vexing perplexity;
When I mentioned a world of Socratic Simplicity,
She spoke of a matrix of sprawling complexity.

She's so fascinated with knowledge and power,
She evaluates me when I do something dignified.
We went on a date and I brought her some flowers;
Instead of accepting, she asked what they signified.

Our romantic dinners are so referential,
I have a hard time keeping up intellectually.
Her conception of love is a vast differential,
And to make matters worse, she's unsatisfied... textually.

Now I'm not Saussure, but I have my suspicions
My cunning linguistics do not satisfy her.
No matter how much we revise our positions,
I can't seem to ignite her sigini-fire.

The bedroom, like Jean Baudrillard, is depressing
And when we Foucault, there's a lot of confusion.
She often will still be rephrasing the question
By the time I have already reached my conclusion.

She creates simulacra of fake spontaneity
Whenever we're doing the Jacques Derri-deed.
I suspect she dissimulates simultaneity
(If you didn't just hear what I Edward Said.)

And during our interrelational forays
She grabs Mr. Wiggenstein, refusing to let go.
She screams "deconstruct me, you Whore Luis Borges!"
"I Immanuel Kant!" is my Umberto Echo.

Our love's metaphizzled; I'm not sentimental,
But I don't want a girl who's so purely performative.
She needs to acknowledge a few transcendentals.
I'm not asking for normal; I'd settle for normative.

I feel like a chauvinist racist imperialist
Since this whole non-Platonic relationship started.
Why didn't I date that dialectical materialist?
I must have been Jean-Francoise Lyotarded!

Outchorus:
Got a postmodern woman, she treats me so mean (harmonica solo)
Got a postmodern woman, Lord*, she treats me so mean (harmonica solo)
She's the meanest old woman that I ever done seen (The harmonica solo never happened.)

*who doesn't exist except as a network of metanarratives

Kilmer 2007: The Second Runner-Up

the shape of my love
by Joshua Schwartz, GS '08

I would be a harp for you
that you may play your fingers across my strings
send shivering vibrations up my spine, an addictive fever
under the blankets of your warmth.

i would be sharp for you
like a knife, glittering ethereally in the night
like a brilliant question from the mouth of
a promising young student
or a delicious cheddar cheese
mmmmmm... cheddar
how is my love like a cheese?
well, cheddar cheese is hard... and pale yellow to orange,
and: after heating, the curd is cut into cubes
to drain the whey, then stacked and turned.

i would be a B-sharp for you
an impossible note, hovering over the staff...
of possibility.
why not just call me a middle C?
because i love you. that's why.

i would be a tarp for you
to keep you safe from the storm and the wet
to save you from catching a chill
and becoming ill
and while you sleep, i would look over you
while you sleep, all bundled up in your sleeping bag
while you sleep, i am watching you.
while you sleep.

i would be an Arp for you
an alsatian artist and poet who was cofounder of dadaism in zurich
noted for abstract organic sculptures...
and loving you all up on your body.

i would be a carp for you
a proud white fish
with scales gleaming like the rainbow
you could raise me in your bathtub, and
you could grind me up all sexy like
together
we could feed a hungry jewish family
because who doesn't think gefilte fish is hot?
no one doesn't think that. that's who.

I would be a Garp for you
the bastard son of a technical sergeant and a castrating mother
living a life of "lunacy and sorrow"
learning painfully from my sexual relationships
until you.
and the world according to me
would be one of our love.

but i would never LARP for you
because it's for nerds,
and i am one of the cool kids.