Art, Music, Poetry, Pop Culture

What rhymes with “hug me”? Let’s help Robin Thicke (UPDATED)

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The Robin Thicke song-of-the-summer “Blurred Lines” asked, with practiced super-produced fake-spontaneous laugh, “What rhymes with ‘hug me’?”.  Let’s give it a whirl…

#Thicke. Get it? It's a boast, and HIS NAME! Lol. 
#Thicke. Get it? It’s a boast, and HIS NAME! Lol. 

To start, here’s the clothed video to the song. I’ve linked to the “unrated” version in another post, but don’t want to shock people unfamiliar with the concept that we higher primates are attracted to attractive, naked members of our same species. The key lines at 1:33: “I feel so lucky. / You wanna hug me? / What rhymes with ‘hug me’? / Hey-ey-ey-ey.”

Going straight through the alphabet with single-letter replacements we get: 

You wanna bug me.
You wanna dug me.
You wanna fug me. (“fug”, adjective, a stuffy or malodorous emanation)
You wanna jug me.
You wanna lug me.
You wanna mug me.
You wanna pug me.
You wanna rug me.
You wanna sug me. (“sug”, verb, to Sell Under the Guise of conducting market research)
You wanna tug me.
You wanna vug me. (“vug”, noun, a cavity in rock with mineral crystals)
You wanna zug me. (“Zug”, noun, a German-speaking canton in Switzerland)

Some of these clearly won’t work and/or are bad grammar. Some work marvelously. Other possible choices, especially if sung at a quickened pace to stay within the measure: 

You wanna chug-a-lug me.
Bella Abzug and me.
It’s ‘A Bug’s Life’ we’ll see.
This tastes nougat-y. 

I’ve got to go catch up on some recorded television, but your suggestions are heartily welcome here!

More ideas: 

You wanna thug me.
You wanna shrug me.
Let’s do The Frug, G.
You look like Pugsly.
C’mon butt plug me.
Butt butt butt butt me.
 

Art, Poetry, Writing

Fifty Shades of Anne Gray Sexton

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I finished reading Anne Sexton: A Biography by Diane Wood Middlebrook. It was insightful, and the second Sexton-related biography I read this year. The first was written by Anne Sexton’s eldest daughter, Linda: Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother.

I enjoyed the Middlebrook biography more, but both played off each other well. Some thoughts:

1.) A Biography caused a stir
when it was released, for outing a sexual relationship between Anne
Sexton and one of her later psychiatrists. Among the immediate problems
that come to mind: conducting an affair during the scheduled therapy
hour as part of therapy and charging for it. Caused concern among her
friends at the time, and remains an eyebrow-raiser now.

2.)
More controversially, A Biography relies on many hours of recorded
sessions between Anne Sexton and the main psychiatrist of her life, Dr.
Martin Orne. The material was used with the permission of Linda Sexton,
her mother’s literary executor, and the book has a foreword by Dr.
Orne to put things in context. No big deal. Auxiliary family members had
a problem with it, Linda sanctioned it. Good insights resulted.
Middlebrook did a good job using fragments to shed light on Sexton’s
life and work. 

3.) Anne
Sexton’s poetry started in her 20s, at the suggestion of Dr. Orne as a
way to deal with her mental and emotional issues.  It helped.

4.) It is a romantic notion to regard the artist as shaman, one who has a
schizophrenic break and becomes shifted from the rest of our humdrum
reality. That has a bit of bearing on Sexton’s creativity and
productivity. Primarily, though, that romantic notion gets set aside as
true blue mental illness seems an outright pain in the ass with
devastating consequences for the sufferer, family, and friends. It’s not
that the person is ahead of his/her time so much as the wiring is off, leading
to sparks of brilliance than extended short circuiting and shutdowns.
The upcycle of mania may be fun. The downcycle is hellish.

5.) Middlebrook was trustworthy in both the conveyance of Sexton’s life and interpretation of her art. 

6.) I admire Dr. Orne’s willingness to endorse use of the confidential
material, and especially admire Linda Sexton’s willingness to share a
variety of personally embarrassing and harrowing details in her own book
and allowing Middlebrook to probe and bring things to light the rest of
the family would likely object to. It mattered to understand the art.

Poetry, Reading, Writing

The time I (didn’t really) pass out at a bookstore

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The first paragraph below is real. The other paragraphs are largely made-up.

Upstairs to the Poety & Beat Literature room. Community Bulletin Board asks questions, customers answer with Post-Its. 
Upstairs to the Poety & Beat Literature room. Community Bulletin Board asks questions, customers answer with Post-Its. 

Upstairs in the Poetry & Beat Literature room in the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco it was muggy, musty, but calm and infused with history. Beats! I knew little about them other than what could be gleaned from movies and television. I’ve not read any Kerouac and only a little Ginsberg. Gore Vidal in his memoir Palimpsest boasted of buggering Kerouac. Always the buggerer, never the buggeree. I stipulation I now know was common among homosexuals. Then, it seemed an odd and selfish admission from Vidal given his libertine reputation but typically offered few personal details.

Maybe he placed a silver dollar on Kerouac’s back, who, when he caught his breath exclaimed: “I can use this!” 

Above the bookshelves, posters ran round the room of poets that listed the year of the photo. Walt Whitman. Edna St. Vincent Millay. Anne Sexton. 

A trigger was pulled and I stomped downstairs and yelled at the slight blond young man at the register with an earnest soft meticulous beard. “How can this place have a poster of Anne Sexton and not one of Sylvia Plath?” A pause. My loudness increased. “They’re both American. I revere Anne Sexton. She’s a personal favorite and I talk with her in dreams. But Plath is the better, stronger poet. What are the standards here? Is Plath thought of as too precious? Too much the purview of cloistered Women’s Studies departments and sensitive teenage souls to be brought out for display? Break Plath free!”  I stumbled over my tongue on the last sentence and repeated is more slowly and loudly. “Break Plath free! Bring her to the Pantheon upstairs! Set her among the stars!”

I blacked out. Then I came to. I was still in the City Lights Bookstore, seated at a corner table, my head resting against a bookshelf. A paper cup of water was in front of me and I sipped from it. My courier bag was set at my feet. I dragged the main zipper open to extract my large Moleskine journal. I fetched a pen, and opened my journal to see a series of blue and red marks and edits across the 30 or so pages I had already written up. 

Violated, I looked closely and found myself agreeing with almost all the suggestions. I made faces at the excess of added commas. I am a devotee of the Oxford comma, but loathe when commas are added to indicate a pause as if in a speech. Not necessary. Ruins the flow. 

I took myself, the cup of water, my bag, my pen, and my emended journal and exited the bookstore, placing a dollar in the tip jar for art, shame, and karma. 

Activity, Poetry, Writing

My dead dog doggerel – “Who goes with Argus?”

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I hate the grim calculations and budgeting that comes with an ailing pet – slim and expensive chances to maintain that pet’s health but that may also increase its distress to no benefit. I hate, once euthanasia is done, how it changes the rhythms and routines of the home, even if it means less clean-up. I hate knowing if I killed my own meat for food I’d still be sad at times like these, but more pragmatic.

Due to her bladder cancer, diminishing energy, and messy external symptoms – I euthanized our dog of 14 and a half years this afternoon. I got her a cheeseburger for lunch today (Burgerville), because, fuck it.

Who goes with Argus?

You are now a fuzzy hide over meat.
You used to be a wheezing farting bag
Of love and company and eating and shame
And delight.
Now inert. No, gone.
You are only in our memories.
We are no longer in yours.

Activity, Poetry, Writing

When you were young

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A meter tracking bike traffic on the Hawthorne Bridge in Portland. Like London Bridge in The Wasteland :
A meter tracking bike traffic on the Hawthorne Bridge in Portland. Like London Bridge in The Wasteland : “so many/I had not thought death had undone so many.” but happier.

Images crawl up
Then are broadcast
For us to see
Into your past
When you were young.

Poses struck while
A camera clicked.
Days passed outside
Past what was snapped
When you were young.

The snaps resurface
Years later with
“Remember?” “Place?”
Sentimental whiffs
When you were young.

Others of us
Bear witness though
Not witnesses
Then, piqued to view
When you were young.

Ripeness, smoothness
And smiles thrown hard.
Warding distress
Like priest or bard
When you were young.

How, who was she.
Outstretch fingers.
If the same age,
Did they linger
When you were young.

You are hiding
Molting beauty
Sun skin honeying.
You were not you
When you were young.

I now hear you,
“I remember”
Sighed to be kind.
Arid nod back to
When you were young.

Dimmer souls swarm
And cling on you.
I’d want to warm
But not love you
When you were young.

I get stuck on
Your life from then
To now and when
You became you from
When you were young.

Did it turn when
Your edge cut through.
Someone heard when
You spoke your truth
When you were young.

The friends in stasis
Are the same but
Slower. Their paths
Clear, even back to
When you were young.

Fact and will changes
Every molecule
Of you. Estranging
Yourself more from
When you were young.

Activity, Poetry

U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky’s promposal

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Elaborate prom proposals (“promposals”, natch) are a thing. I never asked in a fancy fashion. For my junior prom 27 years ago (mortality! eeek!) the prom obligation with my then-estranged girlfriend lurked for six weeks while we were separate (with great drama) until we were reunited prom night and then rolling again as a couple for almost another year after that. So, rather than a romantic promposal, it was a month or more of stomping around, or wailing, or languidly, anguishedly lamenting/complaining/wishing “Well, I guess we’re not NOT-going-to the prom. So I think we’re still going?” Flopping about, crying, pleading for sympathy from any friends willing to listen.

To the outside world? I was a damned nuisance. Inside? Nature bade me steer my body’s ship to its siren call, pointing the prow to its rocky, turbulent, amoral shore to breed (with protection) and feel at all costs, even to exhaustion and oblivion. And, by golly, my seventeen years of life would not have been in vain to die tossed and broken onto that jagged beach. [final cough] I lived. [expires]

Ridiculous now? Substantially. Are the memories still dear, the perverse, feral, mad, beautiful things that they are? Yes.

U.S. poet Robert Pinsky read a promposal on ‘The Colbert Report’ this week. Not a great poem, but charming:

Promvitation!
by Robert Pinsky

As when, far off, in the middle of the ocean,
A breast-shaped curve of wave begins to whiten
And gathers and gathers until it reaches land
Huge as a mountain, and breaks.
And what was deep comes churning up from the bottom
In mighty swirls of sunken sand and living things
And water.
So in the springtime, every race of people
And all the creatures on earth all rush to charge
Into the fire that burns them. Love moves them all.
And that same wave, and that same fire, move me to dare ask:
“Will you be my date for the prom?”

Poetry

Reading “Who goes with Fergus?”

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Toward the end of April (National Poetry Month) I decided to try reading a poem aloud myself as a post. This gave a chance to see how a new video editor program, external microphone, tripod, and DSLR camera all work together. Normally I just use a smartphone or camcorder. Turns out a tight close-up is very tough to do slowly by hand. Hope this amuses.

I previously posted about William Butler Yeats’ “Who goes with Fergus?”, and nowadays I don’t think it rates in my top 10 of Yeats poems. But I had a visual of tying this poem to a slow zoom-in. Sometimes you got to get the vision out rather than step back and worry about whether it’s representative of a personal state of mind.

I thought of imitating Yeats’ voice with a deeper, quavering, shamanistic chant and Irish inflection. Confidence is solid that I could bring it off, but thought saving that for later would be best.

Poetry

“Safe in their Alabaster Chambers” by Emily Dickinson

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A stacatto counter-sermon. Our daily travails and various regimes fully absorbed by an indifferent clock without markings. If (when?) a mental breakdown happens, it would be fun to repeat the D and S sounds in the closing lines over and over as an insane tic: “Diadems drop and Doges surrender / Soundless as dots on a Disc of Snow”.

“Time to change your bedpan, sir.”

[Perhaps a faint nod at the orderly] “Diadems drop and Doges surrender…” 

Safe in their Alabaster Chambers
by Emily Dickinson

Safe in their Alabaster Chambers —
Untouched by Morning —
And untouched by Noon —
Lie the meek members of the Resurrection—
Rafter of Satin — and Roof of Stone!

Grand go the Years — in the Crescent — above them —
Worlds scoop their Arcs —
And Firmaments — row —
Diadems — drop — and Doges — surrender —
Soundless as dots — on a Disc of Snow —

St. Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City, Rome