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
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.
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.
I Wish We’d All Been Ready
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.
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!
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.
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.
The Most Fabulous and Always Fashionable Vivienne and I interrupt the Fashionable Oulipo Writings because we have news, Readers of Fashion!
News of Fashion!
Vivienne and I, the Most Fashionable Hyacinth Girls, now have our Very Own Most Fashionable URL, TheHyacinthGirls.com. Our WordPress URL will still work, of course, but now Vivienne and I are the Utmost of Fashion, the Fashionable Utmost.
Fashionable News!
The Most Fashionable Vivienne and I have created a 9 Fashionable Must-Haves page for you, Most Fashionable Reader. It will eventually include 10 Fashionable Must-Haves, or perhaps 10 Thousand. One cannot place numerical limits on fashion! As an added Bonus of Fashion, each Fashionable Must-Have includes a Fashionable Poem Tip of Fashion.
Well hello!
Are you looking for poems?
Are you looking for fashion?
Are you looking for fashionable poems and poems of fashion?
Are you looking for poems, fashion, fashionable poems, poems of fashion, Courtney Love, Bret Michaels, Slash, and Brenda Dickson?
Then you've come to the right place!
The Hyacinth Girls welcome you to their blog.
It's very dramatic.
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.
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 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.
Posted by zeldafitzgerald 
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:
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.
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).
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.
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.
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).
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.
News of Fashion!
hyacinthgirls.wordpress.com 