Miss Rhoda Bee

It was 7:51 a.m. of a Sunday when he first crossed paths with Miss Rhoda Bee. The parking lot of the grocery was rich with a spring symphony of birds and circling cars, all made mazy and gracious in the mellifluous light of an April morning, and he felt expansive and warm for the first time in days. He would have coffee soon, and maybe even a banana.
Beneath an old crape myrtle not yet in bloom, she stood resolute, aflame in wrath, a five-foot colossus -- excluding her hair, a sentry tower of twists and sharp outcroppings, itself vaguely foreboding. she roundly, colorfully berated a father who had sat his child in a buggy festively made to resemble a police car by way of pieces of cardboard zip-tied to the sides.
"I'm just..." he began, waving one hand halfheartedly, but she cut him off, firing as might a Gatling.
"Just getting young Junior acquainted with the dominance hierarchy whose lineage he's been so lucky to have? Readying his unknowing hands for the cold mercy of the department standard-issue? Or aren't you a police officer yourself?"
The man shook his head, looking hopelessly toward the grocery's cool, inviting entrance. Ah, reposeful heads of lettuce, cheery tomatoes, quiet tubers. She grew truly incensed.
"Ah, a happy turncoat, then! Familiarity breeding a rich complacency. Either gross or a simpleton, you!  Marring the tabula rasa with the hateful code of men! Tainting the easy freedom of innocence with the noxious repression that poisons the flower of life! And on the day you damned Saxons insist the Lord himself favors!" She drew in a breath here and stopped abruptly. He had drawn close to them, and stopped for a moment.
"The zip-ties even remind one of handcuffs," he offered reasonably.
Her glare went supernova. Her quarry had taken a vague resemblance to a turtle.
"Ah… but I'm a Unitarian?" the man ventured uncertainly. Apoplexy ensued.
"And all of this from a damned hippy-dippy bohemian bourgeois animist!" she spat.  "Sacre merd de chevre! Fils de putin! Bonté! You, sir, are a shameless protozoan, and I pray that whenever you go seeking your quinoa, fair-trade certified organic Brazilian cocoa, and kefir, you find only Cream of Wheat, Hershey's, and drinkable yogurt for the lunchboxes of the youth condemned to follow in your sad footsteps."
The child looked uncertain, but amused. The man nodded, then blinked, as if astonished, and quickly wheeled the putative cop cart off, a refugee seeking sanctuary among the produce. She followed him with her withering stare.
He suddenly thought that he must also buy ginger ale. There was a hand-basket on the ground beneath the myrtle's branch pointing toward the entry. He nodded to her as he picked it up.
"Ma'am."



VII aprilis MMXIII scripta hoc plostro ante Rousem viso

epistle to a social worker

Kay-kay,

The days of late have had a surreal quality, almost as if a fog were burning off, but taking a measure of colour and saturation along with it.

Then I wake to find that things are still maraudingly vivid here in the Most Serene Republic of Atlantis-upon-Mississippi.

http://louisianavoice.com/2013/03/24/greenstein-pay-no-attention-to-the-man-behind-the-curtain-richard-cms-says-dhh-unresponsive-medicaid-questions-which-if-unanswered-could-cost-la-another-800-million/

Meanwhile: a communiqué from our Esteemed Directress.

Good morning all

I  made these cupcakes http://www.yourcupofcake.com/2013/03/lemon-mascarpone-cupcakes.html and will be selling them  today for  $1 each [a bargain because the cake lady by my house sells cupcakes for $2!) for our March of Dimes fundraising .   I also have a few  devils food with vanilla buttercream (and Cadbury eggs too). (24 total)

I am going to put the  all names of the Walk for Babies Team volunteers  in a basket  and draw one  name  to apply the $$ to.

If you would like to “reserve”  one of these cupcakes, shoot me an e-mail—first come, first served!

It is almost enough to make my heart weep, the sheer absurd poesy of it all.  Nero only raped burning Rome with his own theatrical compositions.  Eat your heart out!  Here we sit, a Bastille in the making (though not a shred so populist), and the Directress, instead of answering a few nice questions from the feds, bakes cake!

O, let them eat cake, sweet lemon mascarpone cupcake for babies, as little Brucie goes into the crucible!

Sometimes I wonder if the Latin American republics couldn’t take a lesson or two from us.

*identifying markers redacted from the letter.

it's all terribly interesting!

my translation of an abstract by the inestimable Katherine Parys:

Common salvinia, Salvinia minima Baker, is an aquatic invasive fern that obstructs waterways and impacts water quality throughout the southeastern United States. In an effort to establish populations for classical biological control, the weevil, Cyrtobagous salviniae Calder and Sands, was released at multiple sites across Louisiana. Many of the release sites were lost due to a variety of ecological and anthropological disturbances. In 2008, C. salviniae was found to have successfully overwintered on S. minima in Gramercy, Louisiana. Attack by Cyrtobagous salviniae significantly increased the number of damaged terminal buds and decreased the fresh weight biomass of S. minima.

La salvinia común, Salvinia mínima Baker, es un helecho acuático invasor que obstruye vías fluviales y afecta la calidad de agua por el sureste de los Estados Unidos. Para fundar poblaciones de control biológico clásico el gorgojo Cyrtobagous salviniae Calder y Sands fue introducido en múltiples sitios por toda Louisiana. Fueron perdidos muchos sitios de introducción debido a varias alteraciones ecológicas y antropológicas. En 2008 fue notado que C. salviniae invernó exitosamente en S. mínima en Gramercy, Louisiana. El ataque de Cyrtobagous salviniae aumentó apreciablemente la cantidad de brotes terminales dañados y disminuyó la biomasa fresca de S. minima.

given that common salvinia is one of several invasive species found in Louisiana waterways, I can't help but feel like I'm in an awesome biological fantasy, (albeit a bit more understated). Ms. Parys has also done research on the impact of red imported fire ants on the weevil mentioned above(PDF link), the abstract for which I had the fortune to translate as well.

ain't science grand?

he's gonna babble about trolleys

the six sentence structure makes for nice, quick prose when you've the attention span of a goldfish.

your incipient megalomania is arresting, I confess. but I can't remember your name. is it that you haven't told me?
no matter, do be still. I am trying to draw the back of your head in pen, and I haven't margin for error. not with the streetcar rocking so.

don't eat the flowers

In my chest, there are a thousand blossoms of venom holding springtime court, and outside is the hateful blue that locks out the sun, drugs line and form into dripping wrecks, turns asphalt into the skin on mephitic rivers of pudding. I had cooked, and how I had turned the fire up and attended the slaughter with lemon and salt, seared its skin like I longed to sear the skin of the boy in my kitchen, so tempting and warm that I opened the door to go smoke. even with the oven on, the aroma so thick and toothsome, I only cooked and ate, and I fed but never tasted him, and I struggled and burned, smoked and guttered right out. in the choked ember tint of such an evening the poison garden begs for wind so I slept with the window open; the kitchen went stony, the skin left lonely in the fridge. the lullalby is nasturtium and nightshade cackling at the sad excuse for day that follows, weak as dishwater and the grease of yesterday's attempts atop it. ponder, indeed, if there's any call to ever clean a kitchen again, if particular flowers could grow in a bombed-out stove, make for decent seasoning when properly dried...

>> fabula amoris sex in sententiis
>> scripta 6 dec MMXII
>> pro puero quo apud me cenandum vinit at basia mihi non tulit.

it had me in tears.

something a favourite professor of mine (Jeremy King, otherwise known as El Rey by his Spanish Linguistics students) once posted que me tuvo cagándome de risa:

The highlight of the LASSO conference (from a talk on linguistic strategies in literature):

"Y las salesgirls porteñas una bola de snobs and I know I'll have to take a size 3 (can you imagine a country donde the largest size is a THREE????) por 'y...el tema del busto', as they delicately put it here and F***, ni que fueran tan y tan BIG, sólo que estas washed-out faux blonde social X-ray lollipops no tienen, directamente, tetas."

I can only imagine that talk as playful. sparkly, even.

but it must be said, in due seriousness, that porteña salesgirls are actually incredibly snotty, most especially the ones at the little "cueva musical" shops along the peatonal downtown, suffering all day as they do the ceaseless playing of Gotan Project's "La Revancha del Tango", a delightful little electronica petit mal of several tango standards.

I should think that listening to the words "el capitalismo foráneo" repeated ad nauseam over some gauzy beats found in a shoebox portishead left out by the kerb would probably make anyone surrounded in their work by tourists feel less than pleasant towards ignorant foreigners whose deepest knowledge of inventive tango interpretations is astor piazolla. but given the average age of the porteña shopgirls I saw, they'd have been far more likely in the club after hours popping it to kelis (it was 2006, let's be clear) or playing pool to cumbia villera (that, on the other hand, may approach eternal), and may conceivably have never heard yo-yo ma's celloriffic take on their national cultural heritage. lucky situation, that; a good number of porteños in general were convinced that chinese people were taking over, as evidenced by their ownership of virtually every small supermarket and buffet restaurant, and might've violently resented such a flagrant incursion.

now, never having had to buy feminine attire in Buenos Aires, I cannot speak to the disposition of dress-shop attendants. I can and do favourably speak of the nice ladies in the feria in parque centenario who will gladly sell you a nice woolen overcoat for a very reasonable price, even before the customary price negotiations. they also do not fit the description given above in even the slightest, at least, not that of faux blonde lollipops. yo-yo ma, tampoco.

in prior times this would have been called a salon

an exchange
for 2 interlocutors

> : I confess that it's so bro I can't even finish it
just like most him 'novels'
- : same here
I tried to read it in high school and got so bored
i didn't yet realize it was EWWWW FOR DUDES
> : and I picture most of the characters as crusties
a la them what stand at esplanade and claiborne and spange
- : hahahahahahahahaha yeah
TOTALLY
> : and deep in my head a crabby man in a rocking chair says 'get a damn job ya sorry bum'
but I think some of kerouac's personae crustamatae were following jobs anyhow
- : hahahahahahahahhahaha
that man sounds muddy mudskipper in my mind
i just found it unbearably boring. i didn't get the characters at all.
"and then we got drunk and fucked some bitches in a new town. something america. the end." - my brief summarization of On the Road.
> : I tried reading satori in paris or whatever
and it was like
tu passes tout le jour dans le maudite beauty parlor
which was slightly better than
'git drunk fuk bitchez'
- : hahahahahaha
> : but even so I couldn't tolerate it, and stomped it on the floor at aunt tiki's
to no one's horror.
- : HAHAHAHAHAHAH! TO NO ONE'S HORROR!
i just don't understand american masculinity. i think the less i understand it, the better.
sometimes it seems like the more i understand, the less interested i am in actually having sex with men, so you know, i'm okay with just letting it be this thing i don't want to know the particulars of
> : strangely, it's got a line of 'naked ancient greeks at the gymnasium being sods' to it
which is strange to think about
but this is why no one should read ancient greek plays
it's like 'hmmm damn 3000 years ain't shit changed'
- : i think kerouac was a totally closeted homo with a homophobic streak
> : uh, ya think?
didn't he schtup ginsberg?
or did I eat some bad acid
anyway he hung round with a buncha drugged up buttpirates so whatever
his cred is nil
- : HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
> : on that account, anyway
- : DRUGGED UP BUTT PIRATES
I AM DYING