What a Metaphor is For

Stealing Thunder Y'all

Like a thief in the night.

How many otherwise good songs have been ruined by that awful metaphor? Dum dum dum, need something that rhymes with “alright.” Tight? Fight? Might? Black and white? Strunk & White? This sounds like shite?

And who is this thief operating under the cloak of darkness? Why, it is the scoundrel who stole some young girl’s heart. Like a thief in the night he / she stole my heart. Damn. You need a better security system or a big dog. You need a Colt 45.

Songwriters need to come up with some new material, pronto. Bitch done crushed my soul, y’know. That’s better. Drop-kick my goddamn heart before you leave the field. Even that. Baby just pickpocketed my whole life. Slipped his hand in mine and there it went. Palmed my soul like a wallet and walked away. Just stop using the words “like” or “as” because similes aren’t as strong as metaphors. When it comes to your broken heart, you don’t want to be dealing with weaksauce verbiage.

While we’re at it, let’s punt Roget in the ass and find some new rhymes. Heart rhymes with start. With apart. With fart. With cart. If you’re really clever, with can’t. Love rhymes with above, glove, shove, dove and have, on a good day. Rodgers and Hart rhymed "spoil" with "girl" in 1929 by squeezing the singer's tongue around until it pronounced it "goil." That's inventive. And funny. Especially as the joke was a double entendre, the song being about Manhattan. 

The only good cliché featuring the word “night” is in the still of the night. Sung by either David Coverdale or the Five Satins. It gets better. It gets meta. It shoulda, woulda, coulda. For fuck’s sake sing a new song.

Four of the Five Satins. The early days of lip syncing were rough on performers and audience alike.

No-one's paying any attention to the lyrics anyway. 

Mastering The Art of Bargain Hunting

$1 < $850 = AWESOME

The original

In order to feed and care for my blog about horrid cookbooks, Yuckylicious, I must constantly be on the lookout for new material. The best worst cookbooks can’t be found at normal bookstores. They pop up on the shelves of used bookstores, charity shops, library book sales and yard sales. The very best ones are donated when an old lady dies and no-one wants to be reminded of the awful dishes she once cooked from them.

I get a great deal of satisfaction when I come across a book from the early 1970s (a golden age for grotesque cookbooks) dedicated to one kind of food: cookies, say. There is no end to the horror of nastiness one can wreak on a family with dull or ill-conceived cookies. I even prefer that the books be obviously and lovingly used, with notes written in the margins, and spattered with crusty stains. Occasionally you’ll find recipes torn from newspapers and magazines stuffed between pages.

Messy

But among all those bad cookbooks are some real gems — the genuinely classic cookbooks real foodies love to have in their own collections. A Mrs. Beeton, say, or a Larousse, or a Ma Cuisine. More contemporary must-haves include one I picked up (finally) this week: Julia Child’s eponymous Mastering The Art of French Cooking, which is said to be responsible for changing the American food landscape from the ground up. I’m not sure that anyone actually uses it anymore as a recipe book, but its fame requires that it be there as a reference guide. It’s spawned a movie, Julie & Julia. It’s never been out of print, and the delicate fleur-de-lys cover is instantly recognizable; indeed, contemporary editions have done away altogether with the original dust jacket.

I’ve always put off seeking out this one, partly because I am not a huge fan of Mrs. Child, and partly because I like my books to come to me, rather than go to them. This is one people tend to hold on to, so you don’t see them that often in the kinds of places I hunt for books.

So it was with resigned interest that I spotted a copy of what became Volume One for sale for a whole American dollar at the library sale. It sat among copies of the New York Times Cookbook (Craig Claiborne’s classic) and something called The Book of Cheese. It was worn, the spine loose and supple, torn a little at the ends, and grubby, as if it had been picked up for fifty years or so by wet, work-stained hands. Inside, the yellowed pages bore the scars of many dishes whose ingredients had spattered across them, flung across stoves and countertops while the book lay open and exposed. Penciled notes dotted the margins and back flyleaf. It made me wonder if the person who donated it was the last of a long line of cooks, if the family that remained used only the microwave to heat up frozen meals from Trader Joes. It seemed shocked at being unwanted and a little lonely, separated, as it must be, from its former tomes. So I tucked it under my arm, paid my dollar, and brought it home.

Later that night I perused it in more detail. It turns out that this grand dame of a book is rather an aristocrat: a first edition. A quick but thorough bit of online inquisition told me it is worth over $800. Most people would consider the majority of my collection utterly worthless (“you paid 50 cents for that?”), so I am rather chuffed. I might even bring it out of retirement and add some stains of my own. 

Feeling Qwerty?

A Key Question:

The button you press on a computer keyboard to go to the next line is, on my Mac, labeled return, with the word enter in smaller text above it. PC keyboards just say enter.

One can see the reasoning behind this. Once you have input data (typed shit), you then “enter” it by moving on to the next line. Never mind that the text you have typed already appears on the screen. What the cursor is doing, then, is “entering” a new, blank space in which one may input more data (type more shit). It often comes with a helpful bent arrow pointing to the left. This a visual remnant of an earlier age (see below.)

The Mac, on the other hand, which wants to be more intuitive and connected to older methods of inputting data (typing shit), uses a word which has lost all meaning with people young enough never to have known a manual typewriter: return.

Here’s how it worked: when you wanted to move down a line, you had to press in a handle on the cylindar the paper was rolled around (the carriage), and physically slide it back over to the left so that it could march, one keystroke at a time, back over to the right. If it was already in the far left position, disengaging the handle meant the paper would go up a notch, bringing the keys into a blank space. To write (type shit), you literally had to “return” the carriage to the left.

Nowadays, we don’t have metal keys on long, thin fingers waiting in a semi-circle like an orchestra to strike an impression onto paper through an ink-soaked ribbon or ink-lined plastic strip. We have a flashing cursor, a vertical hair awaiting our bidding on a screen. It’s temporal, like a ticking clock, blinking at you expectantly.

It appears when you move into a rectangular text entry area on Facebook, waiting patiently against the left-hand wall, ready to become a witty remark or status update. It used to be that Facebook required a deliberate click on a dark blue “comment” button to post your comment, which could just as easily have been called the “are you sure you want to say this?” button. It naturally assumed that anything you typed was in fact a comment, and not, say, a series of sad face emoticons or a joke ☹.

It had also been a “share” button, reinforcing the idea that social media is for “sharing,” rather than “showing off” or “desperately seeking attention.” The extra step of actually having to move your cursor over to the button and click on it gave the typist / smartass a few precious moments for reflection, in case he or she decided the comment wasn’t as witty as it seemed.

Now, Facebook has no button to share or comment at all. You simply type your shit, and hit return. Or enter. And ta-da: there it is for everyone to read.

↵  ↵  ↵  ↵  ↵  ↵ 

But what does it mean to deliver a comment, or join a hierarchical conversation via a button called “return”? Are you returning to the dialogue? Are you returning a bon mot like a verbal tennis ball? Are you returning someone’s sad face emoticons like an overcooked steak back to the kitchen from which it came? What of a button called “enter”? Are you entering the vertical narrative each time as if merging finto traffic from an on-ramp? Are you a character forever entering from stage left? Or entering it like deja vu, stepping again and again into that same room?

What we name our tools does not go unnoticed. OK, it does most of the time, by most people. But it’s worth stepping back every now and then and considering what we call the things which have become invisible to us. Take the carriage, for instance. It is a conveyance — a means by which to carry something. A carriage was usually pulled by horses until it became a railway car, which became, on a road, just a car. Car — short for carriage. In England, roads are still called "carriageways." The typewriter roll carries the paper. The paper carries the words. Our fingers carry the message. We speak with our hands. A typewriter neither types nor writes. A typist types, and a writer writes. Perhaps a reader will read. The word “text” has become a verb. We rarely use into our phones for actual speech. We enter and return, back and forth, in and out, all day long.

We’re forever typing shit. 

Obit / Orbit

Balls

My copy. December 1969.

To say someone has “balls,” means they have gumption, courage, insane bravery, perhaps. It means they step up to the plate and take that pitch knowing it might knock them flat on their ass.

This week we saw the end of two trajectories of men lauded for their balls, both named Armstrong. Lance, because he famously only had one, and Neil, because he had enough for a whole team.

Neil Armstrong, test pilot, standing next to the sexiest of creatures, the X-15

While it would be apt to note their accomplishments, it is for how they disappointed many with their post-career actions that contributes to their fame. Neil Armstrong, first man on the moon, shied away from the spotlight he could have basked in to return to being a private citizen. Lance Armstrong all but ceded what many have long believed: that he (like many) cheated to achieve his goal of getting out in front of the pack, higher, faster, than anyone else.

A few weeks ago, I came across one of the more bizarre exhibits in a museum full of oddities in Cincinnati’s Museum Center. Among the display cases of Ohio’s various rodents and chunks of meteorites, there looms one of Neil Armstrong’s spacesuits, posed as if the man were still inside. It looks disarmingly primitive and out of place unless you know that he came from Ohio and lived in Cincinnati.

In the museum

When asked who the first man on the moon was, many of my former college students replied “Lance Armstrong.” They weren’t thinking about the cyclist, however; just the legacy of the name.

Goodnight, Mr. Armstrong. Good luck and Godspeed. 

It’s All In The Package

Stop Staring.

I am proud to report that my eight year-old son has the nicest underwear in his class. How do I know this, you ask. I am totally presuming. But really, which other eight year-olds are going to be wearing David Beckham boxer briefs? They are probably in Spiderman or SpongeBob Y-fronts.

The reason my son is such a lucky boy is that when I was making a purchase recently, of an armful of tops for fall at the local H&M, I was informed by the cute and impossibly young salesman that I would get 20% off my purchase if I bought some. I did the math. It just made sense.

My savings put me in a chatty mood, so I asked my charming cashier how old he was. I’d guessed 23. He said “23.” I said “I’ve been shopping at H&M for longer than you’ve been alive.” He seemed taken aback — though it wasn’t clear whether that was because he didn’t think I was that old, or that the company he worked for was that old.

H&M is pretty new in the US, and just about unheard of in Pittsburgh. But my conversation took me back to those early items I bought there, at the flagship store on Oxford Street in the 80s. This was well before the Primark era, and well before H&M’s flagship store moved to Oxford Circus.

No, really: stop staring.

Here’s what I bought (and what was considered fashionable back in the mid1980s): a completely floppy silvery fabric jacket, a royal blue tiered miniskirt, and a white string vest. I probably wore all three at the same time. With a headband. It was hideous.

Football players didn’t hawk underwear back then, though we all wondered what Gary Lineker looked like in his. Now, I am left staring at the box. I can’t quite bring myself to throw it away.

Mr. Lineker.

Wacky Weed

When I first moved in to the rented house in which I live, I attracted the attention of my neighbors by weeding the garden. This, apparently, was enough of an oddity to cause them to ask, with bewilderment, why I did such a thing; after all, it was a rental. They said it in italics, like that. The implication (in addition to a quick glance at the neglected, overgrown gardens all around), was that it was a waste of time; that it was probably someone else’s job; that putting in all this backbreaking work for a few years only to pass it on to some other tenant when I left, was madness. I answered their question the only way I knew how: I said “I live here.”

It’s not simply that I want the place where I live to look groomed, beautiful, welcoming, and to be productive (I grow a lot of herbs and vegetables); I genuinely like gardening. Weeding is my Yoga, my garden my Gym. All the back yards where I live are sort of joined together, and all back onto a deceptively rural looking alley that is bordered by a wooded slope among which prowl deer. The entrance to the alley is framed by a hill covered in old growth ivy, which is periodically interspersed with flowers, according to the season; snowdrops, lily-of-the-valley, roses, peonies, lilies, and more. It’s a very pleasant place to turn one’s car into. The alley itself is not made impassable by overhanging branches or vines; underfoot it is not obscured by trash or debris.

This is because I weed it, too. I do this — which benefits all of my neighbors — simply because I want to, and unless they caught me doing it, they’d have no idea it was me. That suits me just fine. I don’t even tell my elderly landlord, who lives in the house at the alley entrance, that I keep his clematis in check, his lawn from becoming choked with dandelions, and his hedge trimmed. Because weeds tend to procreate with windborne seed, I weed my neighbor’s unruly gardens too. And when, in the middle of winter, and no weeding can be done, I shovel the paths and sprinkle salt on his steps. Hey — I’m out there already, right? Might as well.

But I’m not writing this to slap myself on my back. It’s to complain bitterly, about the cowboys he hires to take care of the garden. They purport (according to the sign on the side of their truck) to be horticultural experts. They are not. Once a year at this time (mid-July), when the grass isn’t growing fast enough to mow (and charge him for), they have a thorough once-over with the weed-whacker. In fact, they use the weed-whacker to perform every single one of their horticultural functions. The general idea seems to be to reduce everything in its path to three inches in height, as if they were giving the property a military haircut. No matter what lies in its path, down it comes. Flowers in full bloom? Down. Tomatoes bearing big, fat fruit? Down. Actually, they didn’t fall down so much as slump, then turn limp before I noticed that the stalks had all been cleanly sheared off at ground level. Last year, they also buzzed my herbs, all of which were growing in what I assumed to be fairly obvious borders. And how did I know that they had not simply been chewed down to nubs overnight? Because the plants themselves lay scattered all across the lawn where the weed-whacker had sprayed them.

I have asked my landlord why he employs these guys, given that they clearly don’t know their ass from their elbow. I didn’t use those exact words. He said that he’d always used them. And that was that.

A few days ago I noticed that the stalks of the recently flowered lilies in the alley had begun to turn dry, and were ready to be plucked from among the ivy. I did not act fast enough, however. Today I went out to find the entire hillside had been defoliated, the remains making a thick, clinging layer that was suffocating the ivy underneath. The whole thing looked a mess, like a hurricane had come through. A lovely shady laburnum tree near the garages had also been subjected to a “trim,” and looked as if it was weighing up whether losing 60% of its leaves was worth surviving or not. It was buried trunk-deep with its fallen slender branches, like some grotesque victim of an unspeakable war crime. “What have I ever done to anyone?” is asked me. OK, it didn’t. Plants can’t talk. It they couldn’t they’d be screaming.

I went out and pulled the straw-like crud from the ivy bank, and pulled the thistle stubs and lifted up the branches. I made three black contractors bags full. This should have been the cowboy’s job. Instead, they just walked through and left it all there. This is because it can’t be blown away, but requires actual climbing up the hillside, bending over and stuffing bags by hand. It’s hard work. I have not yet mentioned that it was 100 degrees. While I sweated away, a neighbor maneuvered past me and said absolutely nothing.

“You’re welcome,” I said under my breath. “Have a nice day.”

Buttery Will Get You Everywhere

If you wanted to “butter someone up,” you would use words, not actual butter. Using actual butter would be inadvisable. Buttering up means paying someone a compliment in order to make them feel generous towards you. This is also known as flattery. It is not buttery. Buttery is a flavor reminiscent of the sweet, rich creaminess of high quality butter. To butter something up is a direct reference to making a dull slice of bread more edible with the application of dairy grease.

For flattery, a good approach is to remark on someone’s shoes — “I love those shoes, they do wonderful things for you,” you might say. You can’t go wrong with a shoe compliment. Male or female, doesn’t matter. The shoes could be hideous and do absolutely nothing for their wearer, but that’s beside the point. The point is to get what you want. It is an off-white lie with a tinge of gold. A lie the color of Lurpak.

People have been flattering one another for a very long time. “Those are a great pair of feet you’re sporting” was probably a pick-up line long before cobblers cobbled together shoes to hide them. “Why thank you,” the object of one’s affection probably replied, “your cave or mine?”

To flatter comes from the old French word flater, meaning to stroke with the hand or caress, from the Frankish word flat (palm; the flat of the hand). Humankind has no doubt been much advanced by such flattery, the good flatterers able to pass their suave genes on after a jolly night of buttering up and foot tickling.

But there is a downside to a diet of flattery: if you’re not careful, you could end up wanting both sides of your bread buttered, leaving you in a pickle. Or holding a pickle. (Or is it a hot potato?) On the one hand this; on the other, that. It would certainly make it hard to pick up your sandwich. While some social lubrication is good for making connections at a party (“excuse my greasy hands — oh! What lovely shoes you’re wearing!”), you can’t have too much of a good thing, or for the good thing to be spread too thin. We’re talking about butter here. Too cold and it’s reluctant; too warm and it wilts. Room temperature is just right.

While flattery is a handy tool to wield as part of your repartee repertoire, you must be sure not to overdo it and start fluffing it up. That is done to butter to accentuate its creaminess, but when done to people, simply makes things stiff. No-one likes to think you’re fluffing, or that they need you to do it. If you feel things start to get awkward, return your attention to the shoes. Cast your eyes down. “I’ve always wanted a pair of those,” you should confide. Then look back up. “Buttery will get you everywhere,” they’ll say. “Your place or mine?”