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?

Strategy is getting in the way.

Most Fashionable Reader! Since Zelda shamefully admitted to being Shamefully and Highly Unfashionable as of late, Zelda has discovered that it is quite therapeutic to reveal secrets of shame and great sorrow. So. Today, Most Fashionable Reader / Reader of Fashion, Zelda will reveal, for the first time publicly, one of her secrets that she deems Incredibly Shameful.

But first! A preface to the Secret of Shame! Let Zelda tell you, Most Fashionable Reader, that she has no problems talking about most anything that has to deal with her personal issues. Now, don’t get Zel wrong — she is NOT the type of person who goes up to strangers and says, “Well hello! My name is Zelda, and I am a sober alcoholic who has battled depression and anxiety all of her life! How are you doing this most fashionable evening?” Zelda does, however, have no qualms with discussing her issues when she deems such a discussion necessary.

But! There is one thing that Our Dearest, Most Fashionable Zelda has revealed to less than a handful of people. Here goes, Dear Reader. Are you ready? Zelda cannot believe she is actually writing this down, but oh well: Zelda has Attention Deficit Disorder. That’s right. Zelda has ADD. Now Zelda knows, Zelda knows: it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Why? Well, because, as every book on Attention Deficit Disorder tells you, most people with ADD are incredibly creative! Hooray! Wow! Awesome!!!

But here’s the thing, Dearest Reader: Zelda doesn’t want to be known as a creative woman. When Zelda thinks of creativity, she thinks of windchimes made from thriftstore silverware, potholders made from bottlecaps, wreaths made from dried apple cores, etc., etc. Zelda doesn’t want to be a creative person who happens to have ADD. She wants to be a successful person who happens to have ADD. She wants a baker’s dozen of personal assistants, she wants to dictate confidential memos to her secretary, she wants a Range Rover the color of gunmetal, she wants an executive chair covered with Italian leather at the head of a boardroom table, etc., etc. This is why she found Delivered from Distraction: Getting the Most out of Life with Attention Deficit Disorder so fabulous — because it gives profiles of highly successful businesspeople that include how ADD has helped their careers as well as the pitfalls of ADD.

Oh yeah! The FaOuLiPoWriMoFa [Fashionable OuLiPo Writing Month of Fashion] poem! Zelda has used a section of Judith Greenbaum and Geraldine Markel‘s Finding Your Focus: Practical Strategies for the Everyday Challenges Facing Adults with ADD entitled “How to Use Self-Talk as a Memory Aid” as her source text, and she curtailed each line.

Stop! Am I —

A quieter place. Too noisy in here.
Did I hear this time? Am I too
tired? Think. Before saying anything,

get angry, tense. What
is here? This.

Stop.

Stop!

Down the choices slowly and carefully.

I feel. I think.

Only concentrate. I’m finished.
We can go. I can —

Failing doesn’t mean. What
can I try again? Give up to keep trying.

Maybe I need this. Should I go?

The problem: the things
I need. If I go
slowly, solutions happen. Strategy

is getting in the way.

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.

In a Fashion vacuum, the Hyacinth Girls are here to bring Fashion

Vivienne has spent much of her evening dealing with a great deal of UNFASHION (where are you, wise and benevolent spirit of Anne Carson, to save me from the UNFASHION?!).  So much UNFASHION that she’s halfway convinced that the entire WORLD OF FASHION has been SUCKED UP INTO NOTHING BY THE NOTHING.  So much UNFASHION, in fact, that she and Zelda just had a Most Fashionable Conversation of Rage in which many Fashionable Discoveries were made, which may soon reach the blog, but, in the meantime, Vivienne is so unhinged by the UNFASHION she was forced to face that she cannot even talk about it, for spreading such UNFASHION to the world would be a serious act of UNFASHION.  And Vivienne detests UNFASHION.  And Vivienne instead loves Fashion.  And Vivienne loves you.  And so she gives you a Scene of Fashion, from Wigstock 2000:

And so she gives you a Fashionable Pet Shops Boys AbFab Mix of Fashion:

And so she lets you in on one of the Most Fashionable Revelations of The Evening, which is that PATSY IS FABULOUS with this Sponge Osmosity created from AbFab clips.  Enjoy, and remember, kids: BE FASHIONABLE AS OTHERS SHALL BE FASHIONABLE UNTO YOU.

Lacroix, darling.  Lacroix.

Sweetie Darling The Stairwell

California lovely the roof off lovely
over it the road the road lovely

there used to be here your language
watch you foul you language I am

thin a bee is it where is it find it
we need more don’t leave right well

then a bee a bee is it a small hello
cut it off he’s very nice cut it off I have

to get out of here darling Mummy’s here
sweetheart I’m going to call the filth

the pigs just drink it sweetie no fabulous
no fantastic no I like this one no this

one is the one this one here what is this
sweetie we tried didn’t we we didn’t want is this

If there ain’t enough of me to go around, I’d rather be left alone.

The Careful and Quite Fashionable Reader may have noticed from Zelda’s previous posts that she is quite fond of the ocean. One might go so far as to say that Zelda is obsessed with it, since Zelda spends most of her free time on the shore and includes the ocean, sand, and/or pelicans in nearly every poem she writes. Now, Most Fashionable Reader, Zelda could lie to you. Zelda could lie and say that she is quite stunning on the shore with her plethora of Swimsuits of Fashion and her sunkissed brown hair blowing ever-so-seductively in the breeze. Zelda could lie to you, but she won’t.

Instead, Zelda will say that instead of being the Seductress of the Atlantic, Zelda is the Cutie Pie of the Atlantic, a sort of nouveau Gidget, with her pigtails and her thick bangs and her Stylishly Retro Swimsuits of Fashion. Zelda will say this, Fashionable Reader — but this, too, is a lie. Here is the Unfashionable Truth, Dear Reader: Zelda is an Utter Beach Disaster. Zelda can be seen from miles away as she approaches the shore, wobbling from the weight of her Beach Chair, her Beach Cooler, and her Beach Bag. Zelda always trips while she searches for the Perfect Spot on the sand, and sometimes Zelda falls. Zelda has great difficulties unfolding her Beach Chair. When Zelda finally settles down on the sand in her Beach Chair, nine times out of ten, she discovers that she has forgotten to shave a leg. When Zelda is not paying attention, dogs come up to her and pee on one of her legs — usually the shaved one. And, immediately after exiting the ocean after an ocean frolic, Zelda’s hair turns into this:

So you, Most Fashionable Reader, can imagine Zelda’s glee when she was delivered this Most Fabulous Piece of News from a Most Fashionable Friend of Fashion: a surfer finds Zelda sexy. (Clearly he has never seen Zelda, Utter Beach Disaster by Day, Wednesday Addams by Night, on the beach itself, but that’s beside the point.) O the joy! O the wonder! O the happy, happy day! Please try and understand, Reader of Fashion. This has been one of Zelda’s Secret Wishes for over two decades. And now, with just that tiny bit of information, Zelda feels that her life is quite close to complete. O happy day, Dear Reader! O happy day!

And here is a song to match Zelda’s mood! A song for all of us! Let’s all see that new horizon underneath that blazing sky! Can you hear the music playing? Can you see the banners flying?

Yes! The poem! Tonight, Zelda has taken Vivienne’s lead and performed line stretching on one of her favorite Guns ‘N Roses songs EVER: “Breakdown.”

Breakdown

I’ve come to know the cold. The beer
cans stack up against me like dominoes.

I am empty, an unmade bed, a form
without substance. A pelican nods itself

to sleep on a distant sandbar. An ice pick
being pulled from a freezer as the lone

taxi makes its way west. The night being
stuck to my back like a dying man’s fingers,

like a pair of hands struggling to regain sense.
The shape of you breaking me. The driftwood

bulkheads remain. I think of the crushed
ice in the corner of the cooler

as a hiding place, a place to rest
my heart on days like this when even the ocean

perspires. The cold shape of nothing
sifting through a swimsuit. There is beer,

there is nonalcoholic beer, and there is tequila.
The organ donors smirking their way

to the front of the line at the pier.
There is salt, and there is a wound. There are

cigarettes snuffed out by the tide. In time,
everything is pulled from the shore to the sea.

There is the scabbing over.
I think of it as home.

They call me the wanderer, yeah, the wanderer, I roam around around around around around around around.

Vivienne will make a confession in order to provide this Fashionable Poemlogue of Fashion with proper context: Vivienne does not DO scary. I mean, she absolutely does not DO it, in any form: books, comic books, newspaper articles about ghosts and goblins, movies, television shows (excepting, of course, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, for she knows that Her Future Husband Giles will always keep her safe), stories about men with hooks told around campfires during Girl Scout camp outings. In fact, Vivienne never joined said Girl Scouts, just because she knew said stories would be required, and she does not DO said stories.

Therefore and thusly, Vivienne avoids Scary Books — including but not limited to Stephen King, Dean Koontz, The Goosebumps Series, and the Baby Sisters Club Mystery Series AND Mystery Diaries — like the plague of her subconscious that such books are. Therefore and thusly the second, Vivienne was quite shocked and surprised when, upon finishing the last sentence of Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, she felt herself overcome with a cold sweat and a feeling quite like a scream rising in the back of her throat as she realized, right then and there, that she had just read The Most Terrifying Book Ever.

Another brief digression: see, Vivienne often likes to visualize herself, in the midst of The Single Life, as herself living the life of, say, Patsy on Absolutely Fabulous, bumbling around saying unintelligible but nonetheless miraculously witty things, happily puttering about her apartment above the OddBins and making conceptual art out of empty vodka bottles, smoking fashionably in fashionable outfits and heels which would never be practical for pushing a stroller, and somehow maintaining a Fabulous Career of Fashion in the meantime. But then Vivienne remembers that Ab Fab is a comedy, and that the reason Patsy is so funny as a character is that the general population is glad that they are not her. And Vivienne feels that strange echoing sound of sadness within her, the same sound she heard amplified ad infinitum after finishing Housekeeping and realizing that, just as the characters drift, she drifts, and drifts, and drifts. For weeks — I am not kidding you — for WEEKS Vivienne awoke in a cold sweat, moaning and sitting upwards in bed after dreaming that her apartment was filled with stray cats and newspapers and wild strawberry stems — and Vivienne does not DO that kind of nightmare.

Anyway.

Vivienne has recently had a number of Experiences (she will, for once, exercise restraint in not giving The Specifics here) that brought this feeling back, and is bracing herself for tonight, when her subconscious will surely throw back at her those cats and those newspapers and that old car of an unidentifiable color. And so, for tonight’s OuLiPoPoem, I’ve done what is essentially a sacrilege, for, no matter how unspeakably terrifying it is, Robinson’s novel is also the utmost in perfection: I’ve performed line stretching with two sentences from Housekeeping.

Keeping

She was not inclined to move.
Her eyes inclined themselves

upwards, counted the stars
spackle-blown to her ceiling. She counted

each ceramic girl caught mid-twirl
by their molds. She thought she could

hear her hands complain, their soft
urgent wish to be wings.

She was stillness until she became motion.
She knew what chores to do. She folded

the tea towels, tidied the spoons sunk
in the silverware tray’s shallows. It occurred

to her that the window was a screen
on which her face was projected, distorted

but clear. She could hear, if not the particular
words and conversations, at least the voices

of people in the kitchen, the gentle and formal
society of friends and mourners

that had established itself in her house
to look after things. They took her towels

to their own homes, laundered them, baking
soda and water. They tucked sprigs of lavender

between silk slips and underwear. The shelves
shone dustless, each ceramic figurine

a good little girl, happily motionless
in her happy motionless dress. She envied them

their plaster, their staid and solid calm.

Planet Earth Is Blue and There’s Nothing I Can Do

Fashion alert!  Fashion alert!  Vivienne has just now, through the Fashion of Facebook, discovered that there is a band … CALLED THE FASHION!  Vivienne posts The Fashion of The Fashion below:

Upon reflection, however, Vivienne is not sure how Fashionable The Fashion actually are.  For some reason, she was imagining moody boys wearing eyeliner, sighing into the microphone like David Bowie, perhaps with his electric red hair and white face paint, perhaps with very tight pants, and definitely, absolutely with lyrics about the dangerous temptation to simply steer one’s spaceship into space and let the circuit die, the engine go — oh, I can hear you, Major Tom.  Oh, I can hear.

IN FACT, let’s all take a moment to reflect upon the following Undeniably Fashionable Fashion Beyond Any Other Fashion:

IN FACT, let’s all take a moment to, perhaps, take another look at that Undeniably Fashionable Fashion Beyond Any Other Fashion.  IN FACT, let’s all take a moment to, perhaps, remember that moment in our childhood when our parents finally could afford cable and gave us the gift of MTV, and, upon a rare unsupervised moment with this new wonder, we began flipping through channels, and found this Fashionable Apex of Fashion broadcast over the air waves, making the very air itself an Air of Wonder and Fashion, and let’s remember that moment when Bowie’s anguished visage appeared on the screen, and his anguish became such that he could no longer manage playing the guitar, and, instead, stared straight into the camera — no, not straight into the camera, straight into your eyes — no, not straight into your eyes, straight into the Very Most Fashionable Part of Your Very Most Fashionable Soul of Fashion, and you could see the concern in his eyes, and the care, and the deep and intense yet gentle desire, and the love, yes, yes, even the LOVE in his agonized hand gestures, and something melted within you that would never ice over again, and you for the first time felt that Strange Tingle you would later feel every day in Geometry class when David came in and you caught a whiff of his Cool Water, that Very Strange Tingle that would never quite be the same or as glorious as it was, just then, with David Bowie directing all of his Fashionable Fashion through his Impeccably and Exquisitely Fashionably Kohl-Rimmed Eyes of Fashion at your soul, your Soul, your SOUL.

MAN.  I need a cigarette now.

Oh, yeah.  The poem.  The following is a poem made with the constraint of homoconsonatism.  The source text?  The towns I passed during my road trip.

Museum of Appalachia

Laid on_____line_____cut
as a quay_____oh_____eker_____I’d go
cool_____I’ll hone_____raccoon evil_____lie
ice_____lain onto guard_____guest park
my same people_____chalk city
cove_____licks to prick
come_____be real_____undo
gaps_____joy’ll candy
haunt_____save_____I’ll
sit_____ink ice_____irk red
rare time_____not on roads.

I Wish We’d All Been Ready

Zelda had great fun with her apocalyptic post yesterday evening — so much fun, in fact, that she decided to continue the apocalyptic theme of her last post. Zelda has decided to feature a song that was featured in the previously featured Apocalyptic Film of Fashion, A Thief in the Night. Most Fashionable Ladies and Gentlemen: Zelda shall forewarn you. Should you choose to watch the video below, the song in the video will remain in your heads for years after you have heard it. Should you choose to watch the video below, you will be humming and whistling this song for the rest of your entire life. It’s a risk, but it’s worth it. Oh, it’s so, so worth it.

The video below features DC Talk, a now-defunct Christian rap and rock group singing “I Wish We’d All Been Ready.” This song was originally sung by Larry Norman, who was a very popular Christian musician in the 60s and 70s (odd fact: Zelda just discovered that Black Francis happened to be a huge Larry Norman fan, and this fact has given Zelda the courage to admit what awful taste in music she had during her youth — much more detail revealed later in this post), and Larry Norman’s version was the one used in A Thief in the Night.

Enjoy!

Zelda would like you, Most Fashionable Readers, to know that she is not being mean-spirited when she discusses Popular Christian Contemporary Pop Music of Fashion, for she listened to Popular Christian Contemporary Pop Music of Fashion for quite a long time during her youth. She went to the Stephen Curtis Chapman concerts, she purchased Sandi Patty sheet music and played Amy Grant songs for piano recitals, and she nursed an innocent adolescent crush on Michael W. Smith for many years (mostly because, Zelda admits, that aforementioned Michael W. Smith looked remarkably like a pop star of the same era. Zelda is not going to tell you which pop star she is talking about; instead, she is going to let you, Dear Reader, figure it out for yourself by examining a Michael W. Smith album cover from 1990, posted at left).

[By the way, Most Fashionable Reader, Zelda has just received a text from Slash. Slash was very distraught that Zelda was writing a post about music and had not included him. Slash was so distraught that he inserted himself into this post without Zelda’s knowledge. Can you find him, Dear Reader? Can you find him?]

For this evening’s FaOuLiPoWriMoFa (Fashionable Oulipo Writing Month of Fashion) exercise, Zelda has taken the aforementioned song, “I Wish We’d All Been Ready” and created a permutation out of it. A permutation is the “action of changing the order of a set of things lineally arranged,” and it is described most fashionably in the Fashionable Oulipo Compendium of Fashion on page 210. Zelda permutated each line of the song and came up with the poem below.

With guns and war, life was filled,
trampled on the floor, and everyone got

ready. I wish we’d all been.
The days grew cold, children. Died.

Buy a bag of gold; a piece of bread could.
Ready? I wish we’d all been

your mind. There’s no time to change,
and you’ve been left behind. The Son has come

in bed. A man and wife asleep.
Her head? He’s gone. She hears a noise. She turns,

ready. I wish we’d all been
walking up a hill. Two men walking,

left standing. Still, one disappears, and one’s
been ready. I wish we’d all

your mind. There’s no time to change;
come, and you’ve been left behind. The Son has

your mind; there’s no time. To change,
you have been so blind. How could you?

The demons dined. The Father spoke,
left behind. The Son has come and you’ve been

behind. You’ve been left,
left behind. You’ve been.

Sunshine, Lollipops, and Rainbows

Though Vivienne is still on her road trip (and missing Zelda terribly, as she cannot find a way to phone convee with her, but promises, promises a convee soon soon SOON), she wants you to picture the following: a pony.  Now make it a really, really happy pony.  Now give that pony a plush pink teddy bear.  Now make that plush pink teddy bear be overjoyed to be given to the pony.  Now make that pony frolic with his plush pink teddy bear through the fields.  Make him gambol.  Make him roll with joy.  Make the fields be fields of clover and cotton candy and little singing hearts on stems that hum the tune of Leslie Gore’s “Sunshine, Lollipops, and Rainbows.”  Take all of the gray from the sky.  Let the gray, instead, be replaced by sweet and fluffy clouds which could be nothing, nothing over than cotton candy, and make those sweet and fluffy clouds take the shapes of hearts and Funshine Bear and ponies frolicking through fields with plush pink teddy bears.  That, my friends, that, that, THAT is the kind of day that Vivienne has had.

And so she gives to you this OuLiPoem, inspired by the Fashionable Masterwork of All Masterworks of Fashion  which is at the start of The OuLiPo Compendium: the Holy Father of All Fashionable Holiness Raymond Queneau’s 100,000,000,000,000 Poems.  The premise of said Fashionable Masterwork of All Masterworks of Fashion is this: as heads, bodies, and legs are interchangeable in the children’s game Heads, Bodies, and Legs, so the lines in one sonnet are interchangeable with the corresponding lines in other sonnets.  For instance, line six of “The world is too much with us” is, essentially, interchangeable with line six of “What lips my lips have kissed.”  Inspired by the idea, I combined the corresponding lines of 14 separate sonnets, editing punctuation when necessary, but keeping the text otherwise the same.

14 Sonnets

Moist. With one drop of thy blood, my dry soule —
what I have treasured in my memory!
The root at heart, and my chief hope, quite. Kill,
seem faltering, downward from each hard won place.
Sheer, o’er the torrent frowns: above the mead
just rebels and the party line,
as I have heard that, somewhere in the main,
love wept and spread his sheeny vans for flight.
Thou that art now the world’s fresh ornament,
thy soul hath snatched up mine, all faint and weak.
She was within all Nature, everywhere,
Unbroken glory, a gathered radiance.
Yet ever upward through the night I go.

Kirk Cameron, eat your heart out.

Zelda has a confession to make, Most Fashionable Reader. Zelda has many Secret Obsessions. One of Zelda’s Secret Obsessions, Most Fashionable Reader, is the Apocalypse — the horsemen trampling down the skies of fire Apocalypse, the holding in her hand a cup full of abominations Apocalypse, the foul spirits spewing forth from the gaping maw of the dragon Apocalypse. Zelda collects fashionable apocalyptic literature-in-fashionable-quotation-marks, and she is quite fond of her collection. Zelda views this collection as a reclamation of her childhood, as most of her early years were spent poring over tracts and pamphlets not unlike the ones she collects now, then squeezing her eyes shut as tightly as she could and praying please please please Jesus I have to be Raptured please please please Jesus don’t leave me down here with the Beast; memorizing the Book of Revelation, then furtively scanning the bodies of everyone she encountered for anything that could be interpreted as a Mark of the Most Unfashionable Beast, be it heart-shaped birthmark or bar-code tattoo; and waking up in cold sweats in the middle of the night, then screaming PLEASE PLEASE O PLEASE JESUS PLEASE LET MY NAME BE WRITTEN IN THE BOOK OF LIFE.

Needless to say, Dear Reader, Zelda’s childhood was fraught with paralyzing fear. Each time she cursed (and in those days, Most Fashionable Reader, cursing to Zelda was saying the word “butt”), each time she told a little white lie, each time she spoke out of turn in class, each time she told her older brother to just shut up and leave her alone, she envisioned a dreadfully stern and unsympathetic heavenly envoy dipping his hand-cut phoenix quill into an inkwell filled with the blackest of inks made from the burnt bones of the damned and using this inkstained quill to, with a solemnly dramatic flourish, strike her name from the Book of Life.

Zelda finally began to distance herself from her paralyzing fears when she was a freshman in college. A film was mentioned in passing in one of her religion classes, and Zelda, on a whim, rented it. She persuaded a Most Fashionable Friend of Fashion to watch it with her, so they sat on the carpet remnant on the floor of Zelda’s dorm room, surrounded by an Ansel Adams poster (belonging to Zelda’s Unfashionable Roommate), two pairs of Doc Martens (one belonging to Zelda, the other to her Most Fashionable Friend of Fashion), a Pulp Fiction poster (Zelda’s), a vase full of iridescent rocks (Unfashionable Roommate’s), a half-empty carton of Camel Lights (smoked surreptitiously by the window, as Zelda’s Roommate of Unfashion disliked it when Zelda smoked in the room), sorority sweatersets (Unfashionable Roommate’s), and a hunter green JCPenney twin comforter (unfortunately Zelda’s), and they began to watch the film. And their mouths dropped open in disbelief as soon as the film began. And their mouths stayed that way for the film’s entirety. The film? A Thief in the Night.

Kirk Cameron, eat your heart out. Left Behind’s got nothing on this:

Oh yeah! The poem!

The most recent addition to Zelda’s Fashionable Collection of Apocalyptic Literature-in-Quotation-Marks, a booklet entitled The Atomic Bomb and the End of the World by Hyman J. Appelman, was given to her a few months ago by a Most Fashionable Friend. Zelda has taken this booklet and created a cento, or a patchwork verse, from it. Zelda has taken liberties with punctuation, but no words have been changed.

All Things Shall Be Dissolved

I. The Failure of Science

Science has failed in trying to build a world.
It taught us if the world could only be,
all of the fearful evils would come to an end.
I am not decrying God. Here is the proof:
the leading scholars of the world
towered head and shoulders above the rest.
Synthetics, plastics, guided missiles, war.
Educated demons wrote a page.
An educated devil is terrible.
The houses of our land were so equipped.
War broke out. The generals: tried.
Science failed in trying to build a world.

II. The Faithfulness of Scripture

The atomic bomb is a revelation. It took
up the sword once. God got tired of it.
Where is the boasting that shook its fist to shout
around the world that it was peace? God got
tired of it. It took up the sword once too often.
The devastation in the moving pictures.
The wreckage and ruin is still terrible.
For miles there was nothing but ruin, corpses found.
Torn apart, the sword left its scabbard.
An ignoble end! The wages of sin!
The earth transformed by the last visitation.

III. The Future of the Saint and the Sinner

The rest of the lesson: prayers about the bombs.
Out to lunch: appetizers, bombs
for the salad, bombs for the main course,
mention of the bombs, tired despair.
The future of the saint: deliverance.
Deliverance from past, present, future.
There is also a word, but one word for you.
The bomb spells, preaches, proclaims DOOM.
The bleakness of DOOM! The blackness of DOOM!
The frightful curse, the terrible eternity of DOOM!