Sly Uses

Gob, he’d have a soft hand under a hen.

June 5th • Cyclops

Sucho fuffing a fifeing 'twould cut you in two! She'd bate the hen that crowed on the turrace of Babbel. What harm if she knew how to cockle her mouth!

Akasic Records Office

Foot and Mouth Disease Committee Meeting Minutes

The meeting was called to order at 5:33 pm

Secretary: Lord Chitragupta

Present: Mr Knowall, Black Liz, Good Uncle Leo, Hairy Iopas, Joseph Patrick Nannetti

The minutes of the previous meeting stand approved as corrected.

Joseph Patrick Nannetti moved to consider the motion that the proper remedy for Foot and Mouth disease and similar diseases infecting local cattle such as timber tongue, scab, hoose, kennel cough, condylomata acuminata, TBA, and acute neurocortical emphasitis, be immediate slaughter, though no medical evidence is forthcoming as to their pathological condition.

Good Uncle Leo moved to amend the motion to indicate that foul be included with the bovines in the disease eradication plan.

Black Liz raised a point of information: Ga Ga Gara?!

Mr Knowall moved to amend the motion that the committee consider shipdip for the scab and hoose drench for coughing calves, a known remedy exists for timber tongue and whatever be the case the proper course of action must include the most humane methods, because the poor animals suffer.

Hairy Iopas raised a point of information, what about condylomata acuminata, TBA, and acute neruocortical emphasitis?

Joseph Patrick Nannetti moved to amend the motion that as for CA, TBA, and ANE, they are SOL.

Black Liz moved to amend the motion that Klook Klook klook. Gara. Klook Klook Klook. Ga ga ga ga Gara. Klook Klook Klook.

Hairy Iopas raised a point of information: does anybody know what that damn hen is talking about?

Mr Knowall raised a point of information: would the committee be so kind as to indulge his translation of Black Liz’s amendment concerning a letter she had scratched out of a garbage heap being a defence of fowl as follows: Lead, kindly fowl! They always did: ask the ages. What bird has done yesterday man may do next year, be it fly, be it moult, be it hatch, be it agreement in the nest. For her socioscientific sense is sound as a bell, sir, her volucrine automutativeness right on normalcy; she knows, she just feels she was kind of born to lay and love eggs (trust her to propagate the species and hoosh her fluffballs safe through din and danger!); lastly but mostly, in her genesic field it is all game and no gammon; she is ladylike in everything she does and plays the gentleman’s part every time.

Good Uncle Leo raised a point of information: You is feeling like you was lost in the bush, boy? You says: It is a puling sample jungle of woods. You most shouts out: Bethicket me for a stump of a beech if I have the poultriest notions what the farest he all means.

Joseph Patrick Nannetti moved to amend the motion: don’t hesitate to shoot.

Hairy Iopas moved to close debate and vote immediately on the pending question. Motion carried. Aye: Mr. Knowall, Good Uncle Leo, Hairy Iopas, Joseph Patrick Nannetti. Nay: Black Liz.

Unfinished Business: A member of the committee to be selected to read the letter authored by Mr. Deasy topic: foot and mouth disease, publication pending.

Akasic records of all that ever anywhere wherever was.

March 13th • Aeolus

The methodical task of writing distracts me from the present state of men. The certitude that everything has been written negates us or turns us into phantoms.

Akasic Records Office

Ad hoc Committee Meeting Minutes

The meeting was called to order at 12:50 pm

Secretary: Lord Chitragupta

Present: O’Madden Burke, Myles Crawford, Stephen Dedalus, Matt Lenehan, Professor MacHugh, J.J. O’Molloy

The minutes of the previous meeting stand approved as corrected.

Professor MacHugh moved to consider the motion that the troop of bare feet heard rushing along the hallway and pattering up the staircase be dubbed oratory. The motion carried. Aye: Burke, Crawford, Dedalus, Lenehan, MacHugh, O’Molloy.

Stephen Dedalus moved to adjourn.

O’Madden Burke raised a point of information: Is it not perchance a French compliment?

O’Madden Burke moved to amend the motion to indicate an immediate change of venue and that said change include the adoption of a wine jug in Ye ancient hostelry metaphorically speaking.

Matt Lenehan moved to amend the motion to indicate the meeting venue be changed to Mooney’s.

Matt Lenehan raised a point of information: Will we sternly refuse to partake of strong waters?

Matt Lenehan moved to amend the motion to indicate that the committee will not drink any more.

Matt Lenehan moved to amend the motion to indicate that the committee will not drink any less.

Miles Crawford moved to amend the motion to indicate that Stephen Dedalus is a chip off the old block.

Miles Crawford raised a point of information: Where are his blasted keys?

Professor MacHugh moved to close debate and vote immediately on the pending question. Motion carried. Aye: Burke, Dedalus, Lenehan, MacHugh. Nay: Crawford, O’Molloy.

Unfinished Business: The publication of crushed typesheets, location: Crawford’s pocket, regarding Deasy letter, topic: foot and mouth disease. The pending meeting of a committee formed by O’Molloy to include Crawford concerning a point of information (financial).

In the Star and Garter: reflect, ponder, excogitate, reply.

March 5th • Aeolus

Kyrie eleison 12:26 pm

Virgin Mary: (On the God mic) Welcome everybody, thank you all so much for coming today to the Star and Garter ballroom here in the Empyrean building. We’ll get started in a few moments and as you can see we don’t have an equal number of men and women, so if you find yourself waiting, please form an orderly cue here near the front and we will direct you where to go next. Please write your names clearly on your name tags and make sure they are visible. You will only have eight minutes for each date so please make your time count. No time to be shy folks, really put yourselves out there. So. Right. We’d like to ask the women to choose a table, whichever one you want, it doesn’t matter, and the men will rotate from table to table when you hear the bell. Please do not linger as there will be time during the mixer for follow-up conversations and you will not want to take time away from your next date. Are you ready? (off mic) Joseph, did you prep Helen?

Joseph: As well as I could boss, but she doesn’t seem cooperative.

Virgin Mary: Stuck up bitch. Nothing but problems since we took her on. Well, we need to find her a man she won’t want to run away from, even if she didn’t actually run in the first place. And that blind date with Adam Kadmon went nowhere.

Joseph: Not each other’s type.

Virgin Mary: No. He wants more of a viper. Ok here we go. (On the God mic). All right everybody, relax, have a good time, and remember with only eight minutes there is no reason to have anything but a fun conversation. Stay on neutral subjects, in other words don’t talk about sex, and remember that our policy is no sex before monogamy. Ok, Bell!

Bell: Heigho! Heigho!

Garrett Deasy: Hello pretty lady.

Helen: Hi. So, what should we?

Garret Deasy: I brought a writing sample in case you.

Helen: You want me to read this?

Garret Deasy: Maybe later.

Helen: There’s a bit torn off.

Garret Deasy: Metaphor for my life, I’ve been a bit short taken.

Helen: So have you ever been married?

Garret Deasy: Still am. The bloodiest old tartar God ever made. She once threw soup in a waiter’s face.

Helen: Great. What’s that on your face?

Garret Deasy: Foot and mouth disease.

Bell: Heigho! Heigho!

Helen: Thank God. Hi.

Vampire: Hello. You are a creature beautiful. Want to put your mouth to my mouth?

Helen: Not really. Sheesh, age preceeds creepy. Let’s not talk.

Vampire: Yes, yes. Your foot, allow me to put it in my mouth. You look like the sort who could bring sin into the world, ships to the seas. Um. I don’t want to be rude or anything, but aren’t you going to say anything?

Helen: Nope.

Bell: Heigho! Heigho!

Helen: This is already looking like a lost cause. Hello, I’m Helen.

Napoleon: Napoleon.

Helen: Well, when you sit down you pretty much disappear, don’t you. So what do you do?

Napoleon: I am an Emperor, undefeated. You?

Helen: Kyrios! Lord! That is impressive at least. I think the last guy was a cloacamaker, woof he stank!

Napoleon: Nature has endowed me with a virile and decisive character.

Helen: And your other, endowments? Judging from your stature I think it fair of me to wonder.

Napoleon: Hasn’t it been eight minutes yet?

Bell: Heigho! Heigho!

Helen: Oh lord what now. Hi I’m Helen. What’s wrong with your head?

Pyrrhus: (sniffing, wearing a bandage wrapped around his head with dried blood showing through the gauze) Got brained with a brick. Saw it coming too.

Helen: You ok?

Pyrrhus: Yes. No. I’m sorry, I’m not very good at this. I’m just feeling so, I don’t know, so overwhelmed. I think it is some sort of existential crisis.

Helen: Oh honey, please don’t worry about it. You’ll be ok.

Pyrrhus: You are so sweet. I guess I was a bit misled in the past and now I feel like everything is a battle and I always fall.

Helen: Oh poor, poor, poor Pyrrhus!

Pyrrhus: My analyst says I shouldn’t just dump this all out when I first meet somebody, I should highlight the radiance of my intellect, the language of my mind. But I don’t know. I think I’m a lost cause.

Helen: Poor, poor, poor Pyrrhus, I am loyal to lost causes! I’ve never been loyal to the successful. Success for me is the death of the intellect and the imagination.

Pyrrhus: You mean it?

Helen: I do.

Pyrrhus: You are a rose! A rose of Castile!

Helen: Of where?

Bell: Liliata rutilantium. Turma circumdet, Iubilantium te virginum.

Virgin Mary: [On the God mic] Ok, nice speed dating people! We’ll take a short break, have a brief mixer, then do another round. That was great everybody! I feel so optimistic for all of you!

Joseph: You do?

Virgin Mary: Oh lord no. This was supposed to help Helen’s image and who does she like? Boohoo Pyrrhus. Well, time is money. Let’s get on with this travesty and have done with it. These are disappointed people, but we mustn’t make a mockery of their disappointment. And Joseph?

Joseph: Yes Holy Mother?

Virgin Mary: I am not your mother; I wish you wouldn’t call me that. Joseph, find Jesus. We’ll be needing lots more wine.

Pluterperfect Imperturbability

February 3rd • Nestor

Emptiness is everywhere and it can be calculated, which gives us a great opportunity. 10:43 am

May I trespass on your valuable space? I’m Cassandra. I was just invoked. You know, think about me a little and poof, here I am! Most of the time you don’t know it, or if you do you don’t want to, but that’s what happens. Doesn’t bother me in the slightest that you don’t believe me. Believe me, nobody listens to me. You know, I’ve grown enough to admit that never being believed used to upset me a little bit. Just a little. Ok, enormously. It was everything. Frankly, it made me crazy. But I’ve had a little therapy with what’s his name. That Swiss Tweedledum (not to be confused with the Viennese Tweedledee) and now I am more than perfectly unaffected by the reactions of others to my truth. A transcendent level of perfectly unaffected. Except I do have some guy issues. Got pretty screwed over by a boyfriend once. His name was Apollo, you might have heard of him. There’s also Ajax but I can’t talk about that yet. Anyway, Apollo was a lot like that chick who was no better than she should be. You know the one. No, not that one. Not Helen who caused that whole mess back in Troy, no. I mean Torralba. Is that how you spell it? Torralva. Same difference. Sounds the same. Anyway, she’s no Helen of Troy. Torralba’s face launched a thousand ships too, but those were getting away! Sorry. Sweet kid really. Stout, kind of a wild child. Has a moustache that she pretends isn’t there. Somebody ought to tell her to take care of it, but how? Awkward. I told her keeping that thing on her lip was not going to work out for her but she didn’t listen. So frustrating! I could just! Ok, breathe. Om Mani Padme Hum. Om Mani Padme Hum. Total awareness. Got it, I’m cool. Have to keep centered or I’ll end up in crazytown again. So what was I saying? Oh yeah, Torralba. She met a decent, good looking guy with a steady job. Ok it was a job herding goats but still. He loved Torralba and since nothing is less attractive to a woman than a guy who adores her, she didn’t want anything to do with him. Creepy. Came on way too strong too fast. On the first date he said his mother would love her, how many kids do you want, and I’ve always seen myself getting married on the beach. Yikes. She changed her digits, all of them. And as one must, the nice goat-herd turned into a complete jackass who hated her for rejecting him. Then of course, as is customary, once the goat-herd started treating Torralba like complete shit she decided that she loved him. Happens every time. A loves B, B doesn’t love A. Then A hates B which makes A suddenly irresistible. If A+B=B-A then A-B=A*∞. And around it goes. Of course we all would rather end up with ((A+B)=(B-A))/((A-B)=(A*∞)) = ∏/4 but not everybody finds their soul mate. Apollo loved me but faster than I rejected him he totally screwed me over. So here’s the bottom line. You are going to fall into this same trap. Don’t be like Torrabla or her goat-herd! Or Apollo. Or me. Beware. Believe me. Come on, I can tell when somebody is blowing me off, mark my words, there is danger ahead. Listen to me! Oh crap. Calm blue ocean. Calm blue ocean. Breathe in through the nose. And out. Good. Ok. So you seem to be eavesdropping on Stephen a bit. He has father issues, you know. And he’s been spending too much time around the English department lately. I told him it would be no good for him but did he listen? Acted like he couldn’t even see me. Deasy wants his help getting an article published. Lots of paranoia there, thinks somebody might get there first, this is my idea not your idea. Same old bullshit. I told him to strike while the iron is relevant but will he listen to me? He won’t, nobody does. You know, you might look into what you’ve been doing to that body of yours. You know what I mean, don’t pretend you don’t. Your doom is coming. Don’t say I didn’t tell you. Believe me if you will. What will it matter if you wont? It comes when it comes, and soon you’ll see it face to face and say that the seer was all too true. You will be moved with pity.

Time shocked

February 2nd • Nestor

And there, together in their flame, they grieve over the horse's fraud that caused a breach -- the gate that let Rome's noble seed escape. 10:40 am

Deasy has framed pictures of racehorses in his office. Don’t think about it. Stop. Under the elfin riders the horses. Stop. Monsterous large burst their frames, riding gigantic and oh no I am shouting with the crowds and with Cranley. Place your bets, parimutuelly. No. That horse is racing, looking with his dot eye, wagering against me. He wears oranges. That orange scent of the meatfaced woman in front of us. I smell it! Oh god that horse. Looking at me! Its spearspike baited with men’s blood and guts and jousting aiming for me. Shock. Time split open, I feel it rebounding against me shock by shock. The joust of life. I am the frozen deathspew of the slain. A shout of spearspikes! What! What? When? Now, then. Oh God it stopped. It stopped. Oh thank God. My breath. I feel sick.

Glorious Pious and Immortal Memory

February 1st • Nestor

It may be that universal history is the history of the different intonations given a handful of metaphors. 10:36 am

Look. I’m not going to bullshit around. Everything depends on our understanding of Time. That’s the bottom line. Deasy’s memory of history is not my memory of history, and it is not yours either. Deasy exists in a world of final causation. He divides past present and future with mirrored boundaries all reflecting one great goal. An example. You want an example? Here’s an example. Today in his idolatry of Ronald Reagan he remembered the glory of a miraculous and masterfully designed arms reduction accord with the Soviet Union. But under Reagan’s presidency the cold war’s arms race escalated to extremes and the reduction made only a small dent in the pile of history destroying weaponry. History destroying. If only we could. How do we destroy the nonexistent? Deasy remembers a great immortal statesman. His version of temporality cannot remember the Alzheimers, the shaking, the fumbling of words, the confusion, the memory gaps, the days filled with photo-ops starting at noon and ending at five, the disappearances to his rooms, the handlers, minders, babysitters, doctors, the wife feeding him his lines. There are people who hold this history. Who? Whose memory is this? Whose history? Is it created through symbolic causation? Deterministic causation? Probabilistic causation? Does it matter? It does. I know it does. Look. If you divide past present and future and picture it on a line with the past receding back there somewhere and the future in front of us, then history moves away from relevancy. That’s one way to understand time. But is time a line? Oh our memory returns things to us we thought had long drifted away. Nothing drifts anywhere. Think of a memory now. Go ahead, root around in there and find a big one. See that scar over there? That one with the nasty scab? Ew that looks bad. Pus. Infection, it has spread into memories around it. What was that horrible thing that happened to you? Jeez. Ok, pick the scab. Go ahead, you can do it. I’m right here. It’s ok. Pick it right off and let it bleed a little. That’s it. There you go. That memory sure feels like it is happening again now, doesn’t it? Still hurts. Or rather, it hurts again. It’s not back; it’s always been there. It’s real. Is time a line? You tell me.

Whorled without end

January 30th • Nestor

10:30 am

Picked up paycheck. $634.88. Tried to make brief my bi-monthly appearance in the undergrad office for it. As it was in the beginning is now. And ever shall be? Got cornered by Deasy. Asked me to wait in his office. Shit. Tiny offices in Padelford. I think mine is in one of the sub-basements. I wouldn’t know, I don’t like descending there. Climbing back up my firm foot is always the one below, dragging. Deasy’s breakfast still on his desk. And a mirror to see his angry white moustache (rare) and illdyed hair. Makes the room smaller. Has shells in a mortar. Left over from grinding purple for the emperor. Hollow. Cowries for buying islands and leopard shells blocking their way. Symbols of beauty and power. The numbers on my paycheck, symbols of greed, pride, avarace, and lust.