In Which Vivienne Apologizes for the Lateness of This Post and Discusses a Great Many Things, Unwisely without Enough Coffee

Forgive the tardiness of this post, my dear friends.  Yesterday, the Dread Beast of Exhaustion wrestled me to the ground, and I could not resist.  Incidentally, the Dread Beast of Exhaustion led Vivienne to look exactly like Bette Davis in Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte, after evil Cousin Miriam’s dread medicine worked its magic and, after a vision of masked dancers and Dr. Drew (am I the only one who could not help but think of Loveline whilst Dr. Drew was onscreen in said film?) risen from his watery grave, she collapsed upon the stairs.  Vivienne is, in fact, surprised that she did not collapse upon her own stairs in her journey bedward, and is grateful that her stairs are carpeted, as she expects that this shall, indeed, occur at some point in the near future.  In the meanwhile, Vivienne greatly misses Zelda, who has been engaged in Fashionable Activities of Fashion which are far too Fashionable for Vivienne to even begin to mention when she has only had a cup and a half of coffee.  Fare thee well, Fashionable Zelda of Fashion!  If our souls are two, they are two so as stiff twin compasses are two!  My soul, the fix’d foot, doth not move except to bed after wrestling the Dread Beast of Exhaustion; thy soul far doth roam into the realm of Fashion.  But we shall end where we began, in Fashion, accompanied by Diamond Heart Necklaces and the melodious voice of Courtney Love!

And now, Vivienne unwisely begins the unwise portion of this entry, for which she is woefully unqualified and sorely undercaffeinated, but which she will nevertheless unwisely attempt.

Vivienne Perhaps Unwisely Enters into a Discussion of Religious Significances in the First Two Sections of Ulysses

First and foremost: the image of shaving, with which Joyce begins Ulysses.  This is, indeed, an image rich with Serious Religious Implications in many religions, the Serious Religious Implications being in the vein of beginning a religious quest. There is, of course, the importance of shaving in Catholicism, with which Joyce was obviously familiar: nuns having their heads shaved during Holy Orders, and monks with their tonsure.  Of course, shaving is also of great importance in Buddhism.  Take, for instance, Chikamatsu Monzaemon’s joruri plays of the shinju, or “love suicide,” or “double suicide,” variety, particularly The Love Suicides at Amijima and The Love Suicides at Sonezaki.  The lovers cut off their hair in order to become monks and nuns at the end of their multi-bridge journey towards death, an act which seems resonant here.

Secondly, Vivienne would like to take some time to further contemplate something which seems to be of great significance in the text: Daedelus’ use of algebra to discover that Hamlet is his own father.  Let her break down her thinking:

• Dedalus does not use textual implications to discover this fact.
• Dedalus must, instead, use algebra, or the language of mathematics, for this discovery.
• There is herein the implication that we must use a language other than our own, other than the language systems we’ve set up for daily communication, to discover Great Truths, particularly Great Truths of Religious Import.
• This also seems implied by Joyce’s use of Latin phrases from the Mass and from the Requiem Mass, which further implies that we cannot discover Great Truths of Religious Import or, in another sense, communicate with or about God in our own language.
• Both Latin and mathematics are languages which are either, in the case of Latin, no longer used to communicate, or which cannot be used in verbal communication.
• The implication here seems to be that God is something above and beyond us, not an existing part of the everyday world, which we cannot reach in our daily lives, and which few, if any of us, can understand.
• Dedalus uses this Other Language to discover that Hamlet is his own father.
• If we consider the Roman Catholic idea of the Trinity, with Christ as the Son and God as the Father and the Holy Ghost, and all being one, one can see that Christ also is His own Father.
• If, like Christ, Hamlet is his own Father, in avenging his Father, he is only avenging Himself, the implication perhaps being that any act that we perform on behalf of another is, in a very real way, simply an act we perform for ourselves.
• If, like Hamlet, Christ is his own Father, Christ’s appearance on earth can be seen as a form of revenge, avenging the world for forgetting his Father much as Hamlet exacts revenge upon Gertrude and Claudius for forgetting his Father.
• Indeed, Christ’s appearance on earth led human beings into roughly 2,000 years of warfare, which continues to this day — what could be greater revenge?
• There is also, herein, the implication that if God and Christ are one, and God controls all things, and God sent Christ to die for us, God committed suicide, in a very real sense.

If this is seen as logically true, it can also be logically construed that God killed his presence on earth, meaning that God is no longer a part of our daily lives.

Mine Telemachus

– The man who come for his ax.  I seen him.  Grizzly beard and face and all, I seen him.  Sissy from down the street, you remember?  The one what got her teeth knocked in that time.  Well she was running down the sidewalk and her heel slipped on iceorsomething and she felled against them bricks and then they’s gone, bow, knocked clean out.  Them teeth.  Front ones.  Front four.  Knocked clean out and she never gottem straight again.  Went for two years straight with them front four teeth knocked clean out, telling everyone it were an accident, them front four teeth knocked clean out and when she smiled you could see straight to the back of her mouth, you could see straight to her skull, that space where them front four teeth was missing.  Clean knocked out.

Across the street and the graveyard, the graves sprouting up like teeth already rotted.  Across the street and the graveyard and its pack of wild dogs wildrunning, lifting legs on the grave sprouting out like teeth already rotted, sprouting out like teeth that mean ill for their owner.  Like in the nightmare she had every night for two weeks that sent her sheetsweating, that send you to look it up in the dictionary well says here that means fear of virginity taken so must not be the case har har and she crying, and she taking the sheet from the bed to the couch, and the cold matress, and the cold glass of water you’d gotten beforebed going slowly warm, going taptemperate, the glass of it sweating like she sheetsweating what was missing what was missing what gone.

– Got her teeth knocked clean out then you remember just the day she’d gotten them back by the Wal-Mart carrying groceries she saw him.  Dropped the bag and it don’t hold well anymore, since they done the switch from paper to plastic you know, paper done held but plastic ain’t gonna, her dropped it and the eggs splattered all over.  Them eggs splattered and her just standing there looking at them dumb, and the teeth in her mouth with that bad feeling like something just not right.  With them new teeth and all he followed her all the way home and she tell me, she tell me she can hear his exhaust behind all sputtering but she weren’t gonna change her way — she ain’t never changed, Sissy, and she ain’t never going to — sputtering all the way and she came home to a fist, she did, and that fist knocked them dentures wrong, and she smile all crosswise to this day.

Across the street and the graveyard and the stones sprouting up like wrong teeth.  The house to the side of the house collapsed in on itself, walls unwalled and the raccoons waiting with their fur and their teeth.

It Feels Good to Be a Gangsta

Vivienne has always felt a special affinity for that particular scene in Office Space in which Peter, Michael Bolton, and Samir take an office machine (Vivienne’s memory is not particularly good about this — could it be a fax machine? A printer? A copier? Printer sounds most likely) into a field and beat the everliving daylights out of it with baseball bats. Vivienne felt a particularly special affinity for said scene this afternoon, when a malfunctioning Office Machine of this kind trapped her into an encounter with her Ultimate Nemesis.

Now, encounters with Ultimate Nemeses are bad enough, especially when said Ultimate Nemesis resembles The Nothing much more than any other human being, animal, plant, rock, or anything composed of electrons, protons, and neutrons known to exist upon the planet. Encounters with Ultimate Nemeses should occur only when one is dressed as fabulously as Bette Davis in her early career and has had enough cocktails to be spontaneously witty. Encounters with Ultimate Nemeses should never, ever, never occur when one has not done one’s hair. Encounters with Ultimate Nemeses should never, ever, never, EVER occur when accompanied by Office Machine malfunctions which require one to be viewed in profile (which is really not the way that Vivienne wishes to be viewed, due mostly to her Roman nose, which has, more than once, been cleverly described as “yeah, ROAMIN’ AROUND YOUR FACE!”), and when the aforementioned profile view allows the Ultimate Nemesis a clear view of a Very Serious Blemish. I’m talking, the kind of Very Serious Blemish that might appear just before one’s prom. I’m talking, the kind of Very Serious Blemish that invariably appeared right on the tip of your nose on the morning of school picture day, that no amount of toothpaste would dry, that no amount of carefully applying your mother’s industrial strength under-eye concealer would cover. THAT kind of Very Serious Blemish.

Nonetheless, Vivienne has Sucked It Up, and her encounter with the Ultimate Nemesis has inspired her. See, when Vivienne encounters the Ultimate Nemesis, she tends to think of fire-breathing hell beasts, and all kinds of terrifying mythological monsters whose sole purpose is to suck the souls from well-meaning human beings. Which got her to thinking about the chimera, which got her to writing one. The base text of this chimera comes from I Can Read About Weather, a very informative textbook on just the same subject published by Troll Press in 1975. The nouns come from the aforementioned Two Women, so that the I may receive a mystical visitation from the spitfire fabulousness that is Sophia Loren. The verbs come from Effective Small Group Communication, Second Edition, an instructive text that my Ultimate Nemesis has much need of reading. The adjectives come from Sonya Fitzpatrick’s, THE PET PSYCHIC’s, master oeuvre, Cat Talk: The Secrets of Communicating with Your Cat, whose gentle words will probably lull me to sleep tonight.

I Emerge, Divide Up the Cloth Wrappings

When you laugh at the face, do you smile
out of the squall to see what kind of road

it’s responding to give? Do you tell
the suitcases and pantomime about

the napkins? Some towns watch acutely.
Some sums like calming and daunting.

And on some heads, enlightened, lost
shoes of stockings try out the provisions.

All of these take different kinds
of parcels. The war, all around

you, demonstrates part of the stones,
too. So when you accomplish in

and when you notice out, you are ignoring
a case of the Rome. There continues

some kind of Ciociara in pregnant cloaks
of the grass. Somewhere, distances insult

sunbathing. Somewhere else, a soul is raging.
People groan and the countryside ought

to knock the city. What will be
the dweller? What will expect

the signs? What releases beloved
kinds of frankness?

The Probability of Unfashion

Careful Readers of the Blog might’ve noticed Vivienne’s conspicuous absence. Careful Readers of the Blog might also have said to themselves, Oh, dear. Vivienne must be going through “a time.” Careful Readers of the Blog would, indeed, be correct in their assumption that Vivienne has been going through “a time,” so far as Careful Readers of the Blog do not define “a time” as an enjoyable period of sunshine, lollipops, rainbows, and daffodils, or as a brief period of slight unfashion that can be cured by an evening with the Lifetime Network, Ben and Jerry’s, and All-Natural White Cheddar Cheetos. Careful Readers of the Blog, however, will probably realize that any “time” which prevents Vivienne from practicing OuLiPo must be quite a time indeed.
And, indeed, Vivienne has been buried in the rubble of an earthquake of Unfashion. Vivienne feels as though her very body, her very soul, her very essence — nay, her very WORLD — has been sucked into the mouth of The Nothing like so much spaghetti.  Vivienne has been having the kind of “time” where she feels she has much more in common with a two year old collapsed in a sobbing pile of anguish at having been denied a cookie and throwing her favorite stuffed animal repeatedly against the wall than anyone else.  Vivienne has been having the kind of “time” which results in her driving home at night listening to “Back in Black” at top volume and belting I-I-I-I go baaaccckk tooooo uussssssss along with Amy Winehouse at top volume while feeling jealous that Amy Winehouse has the sweet release of crank and crack and smack and whatever the hell else she’s smoking these days, also at top volume. Vivienne has been having the kind of “time” that results in her not only singing Amy Winehouse songs at top volume but simultaneously weeping at top volume, so that, by the time she reaches the gas station by her apartment, her carefully-applied smoky eye make-up has turned into the kind of racoonish wreck once made fashionable by the ever-fashionable Courtney Love, only she’s taken things one step further, as her glitter-specked black liquid eyeliner has stained her cheeks and tear-wiping hands as black as Amy Winehouse’s crack-crank-smack-stained fingernails. Vivienne has been having the kind of “time” that results in her not even bothering to spit-wipe the glittering black liquid eyeliner stains from her cheeks and tear-wiping hands before she enters the gas station by her apartment, and Vivienne has been having the kind of “time” that results in her looking the gas station attendant straight in the eye and saying, what? What? You got a problem? when, with cheeks and tear-wiping hands covered in glittering black eyeliner stains, she comes to the counter to purchase a bottle of red wine, an extra-large bag of peanut M&Ms, a bag of cat litter, and a pack of Marlboro Ultra Lights.
Which means that Vivienne has been thinking a great deal about probability. For instance: how, purely through probability, and seemingly without a choice of her own, she has ended up In Her Station — the gas station mentioned above, for instance, which works as a Fitting Metaphor. And Vivienne has been thinking about OuLiPo and potentiality, though not necessarily actuality. But Vivienne has been thinking about the part of probability theory which states something like this (all of Vivienne’s understanding of mathematics generally boils down to “it’s something like this,” by the way): how the probability of a sample set adds, in a sense, up to one. So Vivienne got to thinking about how there’s sort of a sum that each x in this kind of set adds up to. So Vivienne got to thinking about how this might apply to text: how, for instance, each word x in a certain position in a series of lines of text might add up to a poetic sum. So, Vivienne experimented with an invented constraint she is going to refer to as Sum Probability. She took the first word in the first line, second word in the second line, third word in the third line, and so on until the series ended and had to repeat, in a text to see if it would add up to a poetic sum. The text in question is one which also deals with probability: Alberto Moravia’s Two Women, later made into a Film of Fashion featuring that ultimate icon of all Fashionable Things Which are Fashionable, Sophia Loren, which deals with the ways in which two women’s lives are changed drastically by the chance occurrence of war.  Here is the result:

Then Later –

Man’s walking and one –
many – they but are dragged

that people laden — that
in the weariest –

along which valley
national? — via mouthed -

say it – filled green. America
brings its power, motorcars

that — kind soldiers, armored
boughs — large curving of a pair

noticed — recovered. With dear
wind distantly — we too in

would– fire – come on – mine?
Out. Anti-aircraft is the only

clean. Be jumble — lawyers
apprehensive. Lieutenant –

uniform stretched –
a yellow alert.

I Am An Introvert, An Excavator

Oh, my, my, my.

Vivienne is experiencing a rare moment of posting regret for her Unfashionable Rampage last evening. Vivienne apologizes for her Unfashion. Vivienne also apologizes for the fact that WordPress, apparently, neglected to post her comment about the glory that was Zel’s Epic Post.  She shall try to recreate said comment.

First, however, she attempts to make up for her Extreme Lack of Fashion by posting this video, sent to her by Zelda yesterday, and watched approximately ten thousand times in the past twenty four hours.  Even when Vivienne lapses, Zel is there to bring the passion, with the pow-ah pow-ah.

Vivienne also posts a poem in which she makes a scientific text dirty.  This is a new OuLiPo restriction entitled Implicit Nastonomy.  Enjoy!

The Origins of Nest-Building

Remain obscure. Provide evidence, clues
found in play, the movements

during mating, such incessant pulling
or scraping. The early play.

Preparation continues, attempts
at construction, an instinctive

adaptability with sticks of unsuitable size
and virtually any movable object: three

shirts, a bath towel, one arrow.

Visual images that are superficially attractive but intellectually undemanding.

Zelda dreamt of Axl Rose this weekend. And the setting of this dream, Dearest Reader, was the church from the Most Fashionable Music Video of All Time, “November Rain.” This, Most Fashionable Reader, was most certainly a sign. It was a sign that Zelda should post Part the First of an epic N+7 + Other Edits Zelda Feels Are Appropriate at the Time she has been working on since the beginning of FaOuLiPoWriMoFa (Fashionable Oulipo Writing Month of Fashion).

This epic poem is not completed, and Zelda hopes with all hope that it will not go the way of the Guns ‘N Roses album Chinese Democracy, which has been in the works for around 14 years now. But Zelda is posting Part the First, for she is loving the fact that there is a slender-bodied dragonfly in it.

November Raincoat

When I look into visual images that are

superficially attractive and entertaining

but intellectually undemanding, I can see

a love child restrained. But when I hold

the long, slender-bodied dragonfly –

don’t you know I feel?

Because notion lasts forever, and we both

know broken hearts can change, and it’s hard

to hold an evergreen tree while you’re in a cold

November raincoat. We’ve been through this –

that long, long timothy grass, that grass

widely grown for grazing and hay — just trying

to kill the painted bunting, but low-borns

always come, and low-borns always go,

and no one’s really sure who’s letting go

today, walking away. If we could take

the timothy grass and lay it

on the lingerer, I could rest my health

just knowing that you were mine. So if you want

to love me, then don’t refrain from that long,

slender-bodied dragonfly — or I’ll just end

up walking in a cold November raincoat.

Do you need do you

need everybody

needs don’t you know

you need

I know it’s hard to keep an open heart

broken when even frigates seem out

to harm you, but if you could heal

a broken, a heartbroken — sometimes

I need sometimes

I need everybody needs

don’t you know you

need

And when your feats subside and the shag

carpets still remain, I know that you can

love me when there’s no one left

to blame. So never mind the ryegrass,

we still can find a we. But nothing lasts –

Vivienne builds the labyrinth and escapes.

(The title of this, of course, is derived from a Most Fashionable Quotation from the Emperor of Fashion, Raymond Queneau: “Oulipians: rats who build the labyrinth from which they plan to escape.”)

Readers, visitors, and disappointed Googlers: today, Vivienne has achieved the Ultimate Feat of Fashion. There was, in fact, an absolutely unspeakable amount of Fashion in the Feat Vivienne achieved, a Feat of Fashion which will, surely, soon make National Publicity and will absolutely play an important role in Viv and Zel’s upcoming talk show (still in development — watch out for it soon). Vivienne, today, managed to combine all 8 Fashionable Poem Prompts / Poem Prompts of Fashion into one magnificent Opus of Fashion. Vivienne used a type of candy in all lines, including but not limited to JuJuBees. Vivienne made use of phrases from Martin Buber’s I and Thou, nouns from Jacquelyn Susann’s Once Is Not Enough.  Vivienne made use of the text of six in-depth interviews with Paul Newman and the lyrics to Britney Spears’ Blackout.  Vivienne made use of receipts found in Padma Parvati Lakshmi’s bathroom trash can.  Vivienne reduced the entire body of Tony Hoagland’s work to a haiku, and used that as well.  Vivienne conducted an interview with fierce Project Runway winner Christian Siriano, performed N+7 on it, removed all of the consonants, and then performed a semo-definitional translation of it.  Vivienne then took this ream of work to the beach, allowed the waves to do their work on them, and transcribed the verses that remained.  It was, in a word, orgasmic.  However, Vivienne has elected to keep this work to herself.  Why?  Because, when cleaning out a drawer, she found it — the CRAHNK.  And in order to rid her home and her life of all CRAHNKS and all vestiges of CRAHNK, Vivienne knew she had to make a sacrifice — a sacrifice of her most brilliant work, of the OuLiPo to end all OuLiPos.  And so it goes.  And so it goes.

After the fall from innocence, the legend begins. . .

Dearest Reader: I do believe I have let it be known that I am quite obsessed with the Most Fashionable Movie, Legends of the Fall. I will admit that, even though unmentionable lusts run screaming through my head each time I think of Brad Pitt, Brad Pitt is not my primary obsession when it comes to Legends of the Fall. My primary obsession is, of course, Brad Pitt’s character, the tortured and achingly melancholic Tristan Ludlow. I do not lust after Tristan Ludlow, Most Fashionable Reader. Instead, I find in him a kindred spirit — a Soul Brother, if you will. When Tristan Ludlow was young, he fought a bear. Both lived, and both were injured. Legend has it that since Tristan and the bear shared blood, Tristan would have a wildness deep within him until the end of his days. It could be dormant for years, but it would inevitably rise up within him time and time again, crushing everyone in its path, destroying relationships with the swiftness of a sledge-hammer. But it could not be helped, Dear Reader. It could not be helped, because this wildness was a part of Tristan, like a heart, or a set of lungs, or a kidney. This, Most Fashionable Reader, is why I feel connected to Tristan Ludlow. I feel Tristan Ludlow’s pain. I feel it!

For the poem below, I have used the OuLiPo exercise of noun implantation. I have taken One Stab’s last words in Legends of the Fall (for those Most Unfashionable Readers who do not know One Stab, he is the narrator of the Most Fashionable Movie, Legends of the Fall) and extracted the nouns. I have replaced those nouns with nouns from “The Idea of Order in Key West” by Wallace Stevens.

Legend

That motion we buried. The rage,
we dumped. The wind in a deep shadow
in the upper horizon, I remember.
When he was a sound, I thought summer
would never live to be an old song.
I was wrong about that. I was wrong
about many demarcations. It was those
who loved him most who died young.
He was the night they broke
themselves against, however much
he tried to protect them.
But he had his spirit and a long body,
and he saw his voices grow and raise
their own songs. Summer died in the sea
of the popping coral. He was last seen
in the north boats, hunting. His speech
is unmarked, but it does not matter.
He had always lived in the sky, anyway,
somewhere between this atmosphere
and the other. It was a good distance.

What is it she does now? Look how she rubs her hands.

Zelda’s ring finger on her left hand still has faint marks where her engagement ring and wedding band were for many, many years, even though she has not worn a ring on that finger for almost seven months. Zelda sometimes wonders if she is the only one who can see these marks. When she requests that others look at the ring finger on her left hand to view aforementioned faint marks, the others scrunch their eyebrows, squint their eyes, put their faces inches from Zelda’s hand, and say things such as “Yeah, that’s weird, huh,” or “Wow, I can’t believe that.”

Zelda does not know whether or not to believe these people. Zelda is glad they agree with her, but sometimes she gets a prickly feeling that the others are attempting to appease her, just as nurses would try to appease raving lunatics at an asylum by saying things like “Of course the sky is grass and the ground is made of clouds NOW OPEN WIDE AND TAKE YOUR MEDS!” or “Yes, the sofa is a living breathing beast that runs around the television at night NOW OPEN WIDE AND TAKE YOUR MEDS GODDAMMIT!” But still. But still.

Which leads us into tonight’s OuLiPo exercise. I decided to use Fashionable Poem Prompt / Poem Prompt of Fashion 8 — found in my previous entry. I took Alison Townsend’s poem entitled “The Habit of Its Fit,” which is a poem about a wedding band — or, rather, the absence of a wedding band — and rearranged its lines. Alison Townsend’s poem can be found by clicking here.

The Habit of Its Fit

But I think it takes the body a long time,
still accommodating the shape of the wide
absence becomes presence
who has never been touched by a man,
girded by an iron ring but still growing.

When the fit cinched me, like a maple I saw,
the way I once arranged it around
to forget sixteen years with another,
reminding me how stubbornly wedded I am –

Insistent as the thing itself,
one of my friends says, Buy yourself a new ring
of dust and light, the habit of its fit
assumes alone, lying down in bed on spring nights
like the gravitation field of a new planet,

one of your own. She promises a friendship band,
or an invisible cushion of air,
ever since I took off my wedding ring,
but with the knowledge of a woman intent
to learn solitude and the shape of the soul
spiraling around my finger like bands
that are half sea and half forest –

Something floats around my finger,
and I arrange my life around emptiness,
yours, struggling to fit even
in a white cotton nightgown like a girl

with my birthstone, like those we traded as girls
memory makes room for despite me.
My other fingers splay slightly aside,
silver band engraved with leaves,
on loneliness — that ghost ring –

I’m Mrs. American Dream Since I Was Seventeen

The lovely, fabulous, and perpetually fashionable Zelda’s last post set Vivienne to thinking of her own recent Breakdowns. To wit: her tendency to Breakdown in Target upon passing cart after cart piled with toddlers pushed by 24 year olds with their smiling, be-polo-shirted husbands (though Vivienne must admit that part of her Breakdowns, in this situation, may have to do with the unfashionable disaster of unfashion that is the typical polo shirt). Also to wit: her tendency to Breakdown during That Diamond Commercial. O, you know the one. That one. The one with the old couple walking hand-in-hand. The one where the young couple walks hand-in-hand by them. The one where the female member of the young couple turns to look at the old couple and smiles, knowing that she and her hand-in-hand will — after thousands of perfect breakfasts with perfectly soft-boiled eggs sitting primly and perfectly in perfect egg cups, and two point five perfect doe-eyed children receive perfect marks at their perfect private schools which the perfect hand-in-hand couple can easily and perfectly afford — she and her hand-in-hand will, at this perfect point, become the old couple. When Vivienne sees this commercial, Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy, she’d better kiss her eye make-up behind, she’d better prepare herself for falling face-down in a pillow so The Neighbors don’t hear the sobs, she’d better prepare herself for a morning of eyes so puffy they scare the cucumbers away.

Vivienne would, at this point, post That Diamond Commercial — if she were not instead going to make a covenant with you, gentle readers: THAT DIAMOND COMMERCIAL SHALL NEVER HERE BE POSTED. She is also going to make with herself the following covenant: THAT DIAMOND COMMERCIAL, WITH ITS FALSELY PERFECT PROPAGANDA, SHALL NEVER AGAIN BY VIVIENNE BE WATCHED. Instead, when That Diamond Commercial rears its hideous chimera-like head on Vivienne’s television screen, she shall invoke the great power of the great remote control, and she shall banish it to an unwatched darkness of unreceived signals swimming in the deep depths of fiber-optic cables, and she shall turn, instead, to her computer, and to the delicious sounds of the happily-tragic-yet-brilliantly-productive Britney Spears officially giving the finger to everyone and everyone. You, Britney Spears. You just might have the most cake.

Oh, yeah. The poem.

The following poem is constructed from blending two texts: Sylvia Plath’s “Morning Song” and the 1961 hit by The Coasters (later to be covered by the Most Fashionable Elvis Presley), “Little Egypt.” As a child, I was fascinated by Little Egypt, particularly by the picture of a cowboy tattooed on her spine, which signaled, I knew even then, the Height of Fashion. But I was always saddened by the last verse, in which Little Egypt has to stop the hoochie-coochie, cover her tattoo, and do all of the mopping and shopping at the sto-o-o-o-ore. This is for you, Little Egypt. Let that tattoo free!

Mourning Egypt

If you haven't heard the Coasters' version, you really, really should!