Intellectually speaking, there is no real reason why my hearing “Shiny Happy People” playing on the house stereo at the liquor store should reduce me to silent wracked fits of giggling. Yet this is what happens to me today, while traversing the wine aisles. Perhaps it is the idea that drinking does make one shiny and happy. Shiny not in the sense of luminous but in the sense of feverishly sweating whiskey?

Still no sign of Wild Turkey on the LCBO shelves around here. I have stepped into stores all over Hamilton and surrounding, week after week, but our dindon sauvage is determined to remain elusive here in the Upper Canadas. Shaping up to be an entirely Turkeyless summer if we let matters lie. Perhaps it is time for a Turkey-recon trip to beautiful Buffalo. Speaking of which: Yesterday I learn that the B-52s are playing at the Albright-Knox in Buffalo next month! And: B-52 Kate Pierson of course duets with M. Stipe on “Shiny Happy People”! Another loop completed. Yahtzee.

An endnote from the Fagles translation of the Odyssey, glossing the bit where Telemachus lets out a “lusty sneeze”:

Ancient Greeks regarded a sneeze as an omen, since it is something a human being can neither produce at will nor control when it arrives. Hence it must be the work of a god.

For me this dredges up a factoid from Encyclopedia Brown’s Record Book of Weird and Wonderful Facts, a book I sort of obsessed over as a kid, which factoid warned that if you try to hold back a sneeze, you might snap a muscle in your face or give yourself a stroke. My impressionable elementary-school self was freaked out after reading this — sneezes were suddenly sinister brushes with death or disfigurement! — and as such it remains one of only two items from that book that’ve stuck with me. (The other item was about how the blue whale is so large that some of its blood vessels are wide enough for a small child to crawl through. My elementary-school self found this image awesome. Now it seems surreal and nightmarish. Wouldn’t it be dark in there?)

Happy birthday! Now please step on me.

When Laura Jo.
Was age 2-0,
She whupped me to a fare-thee-whoa!

When Lauraloo
Reached twenty-two,
She kicked my carcase black and blue!

And now that Laur
Is twenty-four,
She beats me like a Bangkok whore!

With swoons and sighs
I await Julys
When she blows out her candles
      then blackens my eyes.

Last week: quick pants. This week: loud pants. Now it’s the weekend, so it’s time for: no pants.

That is Don Albert and His Orchestra doing “The Sheik of Araby (With No Pants On)” in November 1936. It’s a swinging version of the popular Tin Pan Alley tune “The Sheik of Araby”, featuring a hilarious, honey-throated, and possibly loaded Merle Turner on vocal, in which, following a New Orleans jazz tradition of obscure origin, the band (also possibly loaded) calls out “with no pants on!” after each verse.

I’m the Sheik of Araby … with no pants on!
Your love belongs to me … with no pants on!
At night when you’re asleep … with no pants on!
Into your tent I will creep … with no pants on!

The stars that shine up above … with no pants on!
Will light my way to love … with no pants on!
You’ll rule this land with me … with no pants on!
I’m the Sheik of Araby … with no pants on!

The tune is still performed with the no-pants call-out to this day (often on the second repeat only). And apparently some musicians prefer to use the alternate phrasing “without no pants on”. I don’t know … somehow it’s not the same.

Last weekend we watch G. Paltrow and J. Gyllenhaal being lovestruck tormented mathematicians in the film version of David Auburn’s Proof. Their characters commiserate and argue and have sex and agonize grandly over mathematical proofs. In an indirect way it keeps making me think of a brilliant scene at the beginning of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, when precocious teenager Thomasina and her witty twentysomething tutor Septimus, circa 1809, talk of Fermat and the facts of life:

THOMASINA    Septimus, what is carnal embrace?

SEPTIMUS   Carnal embrace is the practice of throwing one’s arms around a side of beef.

THOMASINA   Is that all?

SEPTIMUS   No … a shoulder of mutton, a haunch of venison well hugged, an embrace of grouse … caro, carnis; feminine; flesh.

[...]

SEPTIMUS   I thought you were finding a proof for Fermat’s last theorem.

THOMASINA   It is very difficult, Septimus. You will have to show me how.

SEPTIMUS   If I knew how, there would be no need to ask you. Fermat’s last theorem has kept people busy for a hundred and fifty years, and I hoped it would keep you busy long enough for me to read Mr Chater’s poem in praise of love with only the distraction of its own absurdities.

[...]

THOMASINA   I think you have not been candid with me, Septimus. A gazebo is not, after all, a meat larder.

SEPTIMUS   I never said my definition was complete.

THOMASINA   Is carnal embrace kissing?

SEPTIMUS   Yes.

THOMASINA   And throwing one’s arms around Mrs Chater?

SEPTIMUS   Yes. Now, Fermat’s last theorem —

THOMASINA   I thought as much. I hope you are ashamed.

SEPTIMUS   I, my lady?

THOMASINA   If you do not teach me the true meaning of things, who will?

SEPTIMUS   Ah. Yes, I am ashamed. Carnal embrace is sexual congress, which is the insertion of the male genital organ into the female genital organ for purposes of procreation and pleasure. Fermat’s last theorem, by contrast, asserts that when x, y and z are whole numbers each raised to power of n, the sum of the first two can never equal the third when n is greater than 2.

(Pause.)

THOMASINA   Eurghhh!

SEPTIMUS   Nevertheless, that is the theorem.

THOMASINA   It is disgusting and incomprehensible. Now when I am grown to practise it myself I shall never do so without thinking of you.

SEPTIMUS   Thank you very much, my lady. Was Mrs Chater down this morning?

THOMASINA    No. Tell me more about sexual congress.

SEPTIMUS   There is nothing more to be said about sexual congress.

THOMASINA    Is it the same as love?

SEPTIMUS   Oh no, it is much nicer than that.

Old and busted: avuncular malevolence. New hotness: tonsorial schlepper.

Above: Box of online hoes. We are conducting a sort of Summer Cleaning and putting many piles of boxes into self-storage, to get them and their contents out of our way. The self-storage facility we’re using this time is an ancient, dungeonlike complex of bombed-out-looking converted warehouses over in the vapor-pluming, flame-spitting, scorched-earth depths of Hamiltonian Industrial Hell. On one of our trips I walk the corridors while recording video, hoping I don’t look too much like some destinationless spying creep to the goon up in the office watching the closed-circuit monitors. Viewing the video now, my chief reaction is: I have loud pants.

MacLeish, opening “Lines for a Prologue”:

These alternate nights and days, these seasons
Somehow fail to convince me.

OK, so we’ve been over what you get when you cross an ouroboros with a Möbius strip. But what about when you cross an almost-ouroboros with a sort of halved caduceus, then combine the result with a giant floating nut and bolt in homage to the cover of Rush’s Counterparts, then spiff the whole thing up with nonsensical stippled drop-shadows and a bad beveled frame? Answer: You get some cheesy pen-and-ink art that yours truly did at age nineteen for the cover of a 1996 Rush bootleg concert CD.

Wallace, Infinite Jest, a food-prep bit that is often in my mind when preparing pasta:

Gately is an unlikely choice for Ennet House chef, having fed for most of the last twelve years on sub-shop subs and corporate snack foods consumed amid some sort of motion. He is 188cm. and 128kg. and had never once eaten a broccoli or a pear until last year. Chef-wise, he offers up an exceptionless routine of: boiled hot dogs; dense damp meat loaf with little pieces of American cheese and half a box of cornflakes on top, for texture; Cream of Chicken soup over spirochete-shaped noodles; ominously dark, leathery Shake ’N Bake chicken legs; queasily underdone hamburgs; and hamburg-sauce spaghetti whose pasta he boils for almost an hour.*

* (Never yet having checked the side of a box of pasta for possible directions.)

Same page:

Any sort of culinary comments are always extremely oblique … [Wade McDade and Doony Glynn] have this bit they do on spaghetti night where McDade comes into the living room right before chow and goes ‘Some of that extra-fine spay-ghetti tonight, Doonster,’ and Doony Glynn goes, ‘Ooo, will it be all lovely and soft?’ and McDade goes ‘Leave your teeth at home, boy’ in the voice of a Kentucky sheriff, leading Glynn to the table by the hand as if Glynn were a damaged child. They take care to do the bit while Gately’s still in the kitchen tossing salad and worrying about course-presentation.

B.W. Powe, “The Unsaid Passing”:

He slammed the bookcover shut
and shoved it back at me
as if I had passed on
something infectious.

That’s just fine. Thanks very much,
his voice abruptly mingled sorrow with sarcasm,
I’ve just read another
goddamned perfect poem.

Classic headline in the Journal: I want my book back arrested man says.

The arrested man is the Englishman who recently strolls into the Folger Shakespeare Library in DC brandishing an allegedly stolen edition of the 385-year-old First Folio of Shakespeare’s works. The Folger people flip out and call the Feds, and shortly thereafter the guy is tracked down again and arrested in England. The Folio’s recovery makes international headlines last week, and a lot of hoist with his own petard quotations presumably fly as we all wonder what this guy was thinking.

So this week the guy has been talking to the British press, proclaiming his innocence, insisting his Folio is not the stolen edition, and confirming he’s a Grade-A fruit loop. I’m not sure whether it helps or hurts his case that the press photos (1, 2) show him posed hilariously beside a fluteful of bubbly (despite the apparently unopened champagne bottle), gripping a Magnum-sized unlit cigar in faux nonchalance, sporting a schmaltzy GQ smile that falls somewhere between H. Hefner and C. Kramer, and wearing a t-shirt that looks like either a bubble gum mishap or a bad acid trip.

Further details on his fruit-loopiness from the Daily Mail:

Neighbours describe Mr Scott as an eccentric who, it is claimed, is often seen emerging from his home in a silk dressing gown and wrap-around sunglasses to iron the seats of his yellow Ferrari before taking a bus to go shopping.

He said: ‘I was described as having a love of Armani suits. I have many fine suits but I am not fond of Armani.’

He also manages to make that acid trip t-shirt look comparatively handsome, next to his Bizarro Bono outfit shown in the slightly more lurid Mail story on him: ‘I’ve done nothing wrong’: The Shakespeare suspect and his Cuban cutie. Money quote:

‘The police are welcome to ask me anything, including my inside leg measurement, which for the record is 31-and-a-half inches, but I’ve not done anything wrong.’

Oh man. I like this guy. And a gift-wrapped Measure for Measure joke setup to boot. The question now is: What other Shakespeare quote to abuse?

• Two Gentlemen of Verona: “And yet she takes exceptions at your person.” “What, that my leg is too long?” “No, that it is too little.”
• Timon of Athens: “I doubt whether their legs be worth the sums that are given for ’em”
• Antony and Cleopatra: “I would I had thy inches”
• Twelfth Night: “Taste your legs, sir”
• Othello: “love’s quick pants”

Alberto Manguel, A Reading Diary, writing about The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis:

Brás Cubas explains to the reader that his memoirs proceed from ideas that hang from the trapeze of his brain and demand his attention with the words “Decipher me or I’ll devour you.”

( … followed immediately by an appealing spin on the short attention span:)

Devour: Bioy Casares recalled that the Argentinian writer Enrique Larreta once assured him “that his intelligence was so active that it did not allow him to read; each sentence would suggest to him a mass of ideas and images that led him astray through the worlds of his own mind and caused him to lose the thread of his reading.”

( … and a bit of feel-good nerd theatre:)

Decipher: Today, during an interview on French radio, Catherine Henri, a teacher who has written a memoir of her high-school experience, defined a good student as “one who allows himself to be astonished.”