Week 17 Wordzzle: All is Vanity
For explanations of wassup, I refer you to Raven here.
Let’s dispense with the mini first, shall we: marathon, the butler did it, curtain, hand cream, flatulence.
THE USUAL SUSPECT
The hand cream behind the curtain convinced us of the flatulence marathon culprit: once again, the butler did it.
And now for the ten-word offering: solitaire, pathological, grackles, alternative life style, manifest destiny, polarization, ugly duckling, folding chairs, flibberty-gibbet, hand grenade. (Miss Alister, guardian of the Wordzzle rubrics, will no doubt point out that them’s more than ten words, folks. I repeat: I just work here.)
The “ten” then:
EMPERORS NO MO
It’s an alternate life style, this manifest destiny of polarization, ugly ducklings flying flibberty-gibbet against grackles, Nubian hand grenades in the hands of pathological, solitaire-playing custards. Folding chairs bristle, the architects of ice cream (apologies, WS) knead their Towers of Pisa into the night’s drizzle, Fourier’s phalanx loud and clear, entropic, getting down with the Oneida-folk, male continence be damned, marrying the complex, complicating the stirpiculture and all that Noyes. Joint-stock cutlery’s the name of the game now, cuz: it ain’t rapture they wuz lookin’ for, in and out the beehive of 27 standings and 48 administratives. Bloomsday bureaucracy, macrocosmic peep.
I’ve no idea what a vanity wordzzle is, but here’s the ingredients: antennae, paper bag, schmuck, devotee, brass tea kettle, cactus, Rubbermaid dish drainer, rocking horse, buried treasure, fleet of foot, nomenclature.
Gussied up before the mirror, I give you:
RAINRIDDLED
Git your antennae out the paper bag, schmuck. I ain’t no devotee of brass tea kettles, Cactus, but then I ain’t no Rubbermaid dish drainer, neither. I likes my rocking horse as buried treasure, fleet of foot, all Augustan in the simpering rain, riddled with smarmy nomenclature. Call back later, after the vanity’s been struck, monocultures notwithstanding.
[Clearly I am missing something.]
posted by murat11 at 3:38 PM
9 Comments:
Male continence be damned. Female continence be damned. Go with the flow. Weave the words. After all, you ain't no Rubbermaid dishdrainer. Utilitarianism ain't your paper bag.
Damn, I dropped out of blogging to paint for a spell. Just today I put up a wordzzle from a few days back, and I see you've been wordzzling your brass tea kettle right off the gas jets. The whistling is insistent. You've been Sunday scribbling too, in double whammies, and God knows what else. Dare I look? Dare I listen?
Although I love seeing my name in blue lights, which means “special” in some venues, I must step aside, must suspend my campaign for Wordzzle Rubrics Guardian and throw my full support behind Wordzzle Queen Raven who once said, Please ignore the rumors that there are rules. They are totally false. Of course I’ve just taken those two sentences totally out of context! LOL!
Oh my man those were some hellaciously nonsense-acious entrys! That’s all I know. Besides knowing bristling folding chairs (been in one)…and Oneida-folk (used to be one)…oh, and being all Augustan in simpering rain riddled with smarmy nomenclature (makes me squirm). That’s all I know.
Good results there, Paschal. I like your "vanity challenge" best.
So I read, and then went and explored Raven's till I found out what a vanity wordzzle is. Seems it fits in with what you've been doing all along. She is pulling up old writings of hers that she claimed "no one would read if I didn't post them" and voila, a vanity wordzzle. Some of them were wordzzles when she wrote them. :)
Have you've seen San's outstanding offering? :) She did some awesome imagery and while I don't think of it as surreal I do think the images are bold and bursting off the page.
Peace! & Joy!
San: Figured you was gone to Flann's art boudoir, though we do so much miss your voice while you're in there (that's a statement of fact, by the way, not a supplication to stay more wired, I knows my Julia Cameron p's and q's when it comes to artists on retreat; that's what Ms T will be on while Quad and Baby Quad take to the road on Friday for Nashville and Mississip).
When you have a spare moment, you should check out the Oneida community for its 19th century attempt at being a quasi-Fourier commune, before they backslid into being just another capitalist tribe of cutlerists. Hoolawd.
San and Ms A: Apropos of things punctuational and nonsensical, I ran across these things regarding the semicolon in an article by one Trevor Butterworth in an essay entitled "Pause Celebre." I didn't realize that I was exercising some gross American chauvinism:
“'Let me be plain: the semicolon is ugly, ugly as a tick on a dog’s belly, I pinch them out of my prose,' says the American postmodern writer Donald Barthelme in his essay Not-Knowing."
"And in the August issue of Vanity Fair, readers are warned not to get the punctuation-shy, tough-guy novelist Cormac McCarthy 'started on the idiocy of semicolons.'"
Funny to run across that Barthelme quote. Sunday evening I was trolling the miles of Narnes and Boble aisles here in TL and I ran across the Barthelme book of essays and interviews in which Not Knowing appears. Not Knowing is also the title of the book. Apropos of non-sense, he posits the explorations available to writers via what appear to be ridiculous combinations: his offer off the top of his head (so he sez) is "mothball vagina." Not that I was looking for it, nor particularly needed it, but it was a nice bit of posthumous (his, not mine) validation for some of my rampant lunacy. I think "mothball vagina" should make an appearance in next week's Wordzzle challenge.
The mv combo was made in the transcript of a panel discussion that included DB, Walker Percy, Bill Gass (gas!), and the beloved Grace Paley, who gave Gas(s) continual hell, while at the same time being the clearest of thinkers at the table. The kiss Grace Paley gave me in parting from Gemini Ink one Friday night and the minutes we shared talking before her Autograph Series reading the night before are two of the most wonderful blessings I have received in a blessed life.
Lee, I agree with you that the vanity wordzzle seems to flow best of the three. Those words just seemed strung together without the least bit of effort. Thanks again for pointing our way to the wordzzle labyrinth. Peace/out.
I loved your punctuational, nonsensical addendum :-D
I’m 100% behind Barthelme, regarding semicolons, that is, not necessarily mv...although I of course embrace the concept that birthed that freakish combo! So semicolons, they are ugly. I can only stand to use them when I’m in a bacchanalian way and want to cram all of the most delightfully fermented words I can loot from the ether into one excessively desirable sentence. Quickly, in non-bacchanalian terms, these are the reasons I cannot abide semicolons: they suck the playful life out of babbling, rolling brooks of words with their damming curmudgeonry; they are eyesores like Ford Pintos, PT Cruisers, and AMC Gremlins and Eagles; and they interfere like boorish cads at baronial balls honoring the likes of dignitaries, grande dames, and Houston debutantes and such.
Paley? You crazy-lucky dog.
missalister
Miss A, I thought "dignitaries, grande dames, and Houston debutantes" WERE the boorish cads at boor-onial balls, no?
Nowadaze, maybe, but certainly not when pride, pomp, and circumstance was de rigueur ;-)
(best use for the semicolon right there, btw)
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