Eddins, "Depraved New World"

[Terrance]

Mark David Tristan Brenchley wrote:
> 
>  yours (thinking very much on the hop)
> Mark




Hip, Hop, hobby, hip, and you don't stop thinking on a
hobby-tip and la-la-la-la-la-tra voonda bah la laire-nil
nisi divinum stabile est; caetera fumus--the gondola
stopped, and old Alice was wearing her Monday's best, there,
how charming its grey and pink--goats and monkeys, with such
Pintos in the sewer too!--so the countess passed on until
she came through to the little park in Astoria, the one
named after the Greek, where they retired the old man that
killed Americans defending his farm and where Niobe
presented her with a Vietnamese cabinet, and slid down the
tunnel under the brown fog of a rice paddy misty morning to
have her baby and look for fuel in vacant lots as the world
turned and Buddhist Monks in
vacant lots carried  shotguns into the rising sun over John
Wayne walking the wrong way shot backwards on the eye where
the Jesuits sang folk songs in the Hilton parking lot---
Defunctive music under the Irish sea passed, gas Godolphin
never heard, the word of Victoria passing,  Passed seaward
with the passing bell Slowly: Bleistein's way, Chicago
Semite Viennese, and an Irish Catholic Jew, oh yes, A
lusterless protrusive eye and a Baedecker cigar Stares from
the protozoic slime at a perspective down an Irish nose, a
Pug nose,  at the smoky candle end of time, the Jew, yes,
Wood can't defend him there, but of all the peoples, the
Irish had always been looked down upon as the most backward,
demeaning "ape-like" caricatures in newspapers and books,
little black Sambos of the British Isles with their noses
like the pigs they slept with, yes you racist Karl Marx, it
was  Famine, a pug nose like a pig, no different than an
African, and in the two decades between 1847 and 1867,
Irish-born immigrants scattered like the ducks from the
green.  Most worked as unskilled laborers, the rural
agricultural values the Irish brought with them were
different from those characterized by the English
"Protestant work ethic." Individualism, ambition, and desire
for looking down the nose at, were neither part of Irish
culture nor fully understood by the Irish. The pug nose,
which branded so many Irish immigrants with a mark, oh the
irony, how that black welt on the face, not the mark of the
great race of satirists, but of the Irish immigrant, the
hungry dirty catholic pig nosed animal. How the Irish
physiognomy was regarded as "servile," inspiring analogies
to dogs  (hence the name "pug"), but also to pigs.  Measured
against the standard of the English nose in Britain or the
German nose in Germantown on the East Side, the Irish nose
was too  short. The Irish nose and the Jewish nose and the
African nose were all alike, Gilman writes, in that they
represented difference. (The irony, of course,  is that by
the middle of the twentieth century the  pug nose had become
the ideal, as we are reminded  by the face of every woman
who underwent rhinoplasty in the 1960s.

Thinking on and off the hip, 

Tex