After a long period of illness and near-incapacitation, David astounded me with one of his best poems, written only last night. He gave me permission to share it here. I am so hoping this will ignite more poems, as he has a unique voice, and is my closest friend.
I AM A MIGHTY BATTLE SHIP
YES. A mighty battle ship Grey Taken a lot of hits and near misses Done some damage in return
My rudder cable is jammed I travel by digression
Bunker oil marks my path We are working to seal the leaks
It is a race against time And tide
Two forward compartments Are sealed by my order Were filling with flood and screams of those left behind
I have counter-flooded to keep The decks even at a level No dramatic going down here
Yet there is no homecoming for us No homeport to take refuge and refit
Sooner or later we go under the cold dark waves I’ll stand my watch, I’ll not fear For many before us have gone down to meet the Old Grey Widow Maker
Clap pat clap your hand, pat it on your partner's hand
Right hand.
Clap pat clap pat clap your hand. Cross it with your left arm.
Pat you partner's left palm.
Clap pat, clap your hand, pat your partner's right palm
With your right palm again.
Clap slap, clap your hand, slap your thighs and sing a little song.
My mother told me, if I was goody.
That she would buy me a rubber dolly.
My aunty told her I kissed a soldier,
Now she won't buy me a rubber dolly.
Three six nine, the goose drank wine.
The monkey chew tobacco on the street car line.
The line broke, the monkey got choked
And they all went to heaven in a little rowboat.
Clap clap (clap your hands and prepare to pat)
Pat (take your right arm put your partner's right palm with your right palm)
Clap (take your hand back and clap)
Pat (take your right arm, cross your right arm with your left arm. Pat
Your partner's left palm with your left palm)
Clap (take your hand back and clap)
Pat (take your right arm, cross your left arm pat your partner's right
Palm with your right palm.)
Clap (now back, with a clap)
Slap (take the pats of your palms and slap your thighs and watch the
Fun materialize as you sing this little song
My mother told me, if I was goody.
That she would buy me a rubber dolly.
My aunty told her I kissed a soldier,
Now she won't buy me a rubber dolly.
Three six nine, the goose drank wine.
The monkey chew tobacco on the street car line.
The line broke, the monkey got choked
And they all went to heaven in a little rowboat.
Clap pat, clap pat, clap pat clap slap!
Clap pat, clap pat, clap pat clap slap!
Clap pat, clap pat, clap pat clap slap!
Clap pat, clap pat, clap pat clap slap!
Rubber baby buggy bumpers.
Rubber baby buggy bumpers
Rubber baby buggy bumpers.
Rubber baby buggy bumpers.
POSTBLOGSCRIPT. Just a tiny bit about Sun Rubber dolls, which I had never heard of before. These were a particularly creepy form of soft rubber doll, the earlier models being squeaky toys such as you'd give your dog to play with. Many of them drank and wet.
The shortest history I can find (because who wants a long history of a rubber toy company?) is this:
Sun Rubber Toys of Barberton, Ohio was founded in 1923, in the midst of a rubber boom for the area, as wartime rationing ended for companies. The Sun Rubber Toy Company produced rubber toy and squeak dolls, including many licensed characters like Gerber Baby dolls, Mickey Mouse, and Donald Duck.
I am right now trying to fathom the ramifications of a rubber boom. When I think of the fact that condoms used to be made out of rubber, before they were made out of whatever-they-'re-made-out-of-now, "rubber boom" takes on whole new dimensions. I am also reminded of poor George Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life (basically, a festive Christmas movie about a man on the verge of suicide reflecting on how useless and pointless his entire life has been), who could not serve during WWII because he caught a chill saving his brother from drowning and sacrificed an eardrum. He had to stick around town ringing curfew every night around 6:00 p.m., which was late for old George, and take part in various drives - drives being not urges, but great efforts to beat the bushes and gather up something you need for the war effort, like - I'm guessing here - rags, tin, glass, rubber. Yes, there were rubber drives, and George was in charge of them.
So I don't know how Sun Rubber Co. held on as long as it did. If there were rubber drives going on during the war, then rubber dollies would surely have to be melted down. A couple of the dolls pictured here look like they HAVE been partially melted down, or at least run over.
The clapping song - I never could make any sense of the lyrics, and to learn the clapping sequence you'd have to slow it down so far it would make no sense. Yet we DID use "my mother told me" as a clapping rhyme, with a slightly different tune. We were singing this long before the record came out, and I suspect it's old, if not very old.
I am now reminded of something else, damn it, because I don't feel like transcribing this and the only reference I can find is in a book! While researching his masterpiece opera Porgy and Bess, George Gershwin visited Southern black churches, "one-room shacks called praise houses". With typical Gershwin brashness, he didn't just sit in the back row but jumped right into the middle of their rituals. "He did not hesitate to join in as the congregation sang and clapped their hands and engaged in a local ritual called shouting. It was an activity that involved not just the voice but also the slapping of one's chest, knees, and thighs in complex rhythmic patterns." To make a long story short, George kicked ass at shouting and astounded everyone. This complex folk-rhythm seeped into his music in all sorts of ways. And I see hints of the shouting tradition in the pat-clap-pat-slap of The Clapping Song. History hides inside the enigma of music.
Much as I love cats, there is something primitive, almost reptilian about their eyes. When Bentley is at a certain stage of sleep, his eyes are slits with the pupils rolled down (not up), with a glazed look. Sometimes his eyes are wide open like that. It's disturbing. I think predators have to be ready every second for the next kill, and thus don't even have to open their eyes to wake up.
We all love Rocky and Bullwinkle, right? No? Okay. That was just a rhetorical question. I have no idea if you like them or not, or even know who they are. But I found something interesting on a YouTube video featuring the running gag which appeared on the show every week: "Hey, Rocky! Watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat!" In every case, Bullwinkle the magician pulls the head of a wild animal out of the hat and responds with some quip like, "No doubt about it. I'd better get another hat." (A different wild animal each time.) Then Rocky says, "And now for something we hope you'll really like!" This gif is the full non-audio version of the segment, about ten seconds long.
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But if you keep watching it, it becomes apparent that at about the six-second mark, something very strange happens. Hint: keep your eye on the lower left-hand corner.
One of the main characters. . . disappears. Rocky vanishes. He just isn't there any more.
Slowing this down, it looks even more bizarre. What were the animators thinking?
Then witness Bullwinkle making his usual smart remark to an empty stage! There's a great big wall of nothing where Rocky should be. He's looking down and talking to nobody.
This is followed by Rocky's cheery announcement, "And now here's something we hope you'll really like!" It's likely this little bit of animation was reused in all these segments to save money. But notice that it bears little or no resemblance to the original set. The colours are more saturated, the curtains look strange - sort of gathered into folds - and there's a big black "something" above Rocky's head. There was some sort of emblem or crest on the curtains behind Bullwinkle's head that appeared to have a B on it. This, whatever it is, looks nothing like that. It looks like they got some three-year-old to draw their backgrounds for them with a black crayon. This was some sort of cut-rate animation sweat shop. We didn't see just how amateurish and ugly all this was, because we all loved Rocky and Bullwinkle so much. Well, I did.
Oopsy. I was wrong! This is the Rocky announcement at the end of one of the other magician bits, and it's totally different. The curtains are green, blocky, no gathers, and have some sort of thing on them like an upside-down hot water bottle (if you know what THAT is). But pay attention to Rocky, and you'll see they have repeated the animation from the first one verbatim, except for little details like the tail. In the first one, it looks like an animated slug with no features on it at all. But the second one - pay attention to his feet, how they lurch back and forth in a way that is horribly cheap and unnatural. In fact, I can almost see the bottom line of the curtains showing through his little feet.
Disney it ain't. Not even Rankin-Bass. And yet, these guys were wildly popular in their day, in the style of early '60s animation. We were much less critical as kids.
I've been wanting to write about this for a long time now, but I have no idea how to start or if it even qualifies as a post or a fragment of one. It's this thing about lunch. If we have lunch with other people, it's not called "lunch" any more. It's a "luncheon". Think of it. The last three letters mean absolutely nothing, unless this hallows the meal somehow, gives it a greater significance than just cramming calories into your cake hole. Adding "eon" to a normal meal, not even a very exciting meal, a meal that often consists of a bologna sandwich and an apple, somehow renders it significant, or at least more formal. You have to be somebody to attend a luncheon, which is not the same thing as sitting there on a steel beam 50 stories up taking white bread sandwiches out of your lunch pail. No. This is a white gloves occasion.
Do we have "breakfasteon"? The very word is preposterous. We have "brunch", the elision of two words/food universes into one entity/experience, which is (strangely enough) also attached to social functions. You "go to" a brunch; you don't just sit there eating it alone in the kitchen. Standing up. If you go to a dinner, it's the same. We don't eat "a" dinner at night, do we? We eat DINNER. Though at our house, it's still supper and always will be. (And you don't "go to a" supper either.)
The whole point of this post is to try to create an entryway into those strange words that end in EON. It's an odd-looking suffix, kind of archaic, and as I look at more and more words that end in it (and at first I could only think of two), I see no consistency in them at all. I had hoped "eon" meant something, something impressive or at least coherent, but now I am not so sure. What leapt into my head was "pantheon", an impressive word for sure, meaning - what the hell IS a pantheon, anyway?
1 : a temple dedicated to all the gods
The emperor Marcus Agrippa had a pantheon built in Rome.
2 : a building serving as the burial place of or containing memorials to the famous dead of a nation
Many eminent French citizens have been interred in a pantheon in Paris.
3 : the gods of a people; especially : the officially recognized gods
4 : a group of illustrious or notable persons or things
He occupies a place in the pantheon of great American writers.
And that is the last time I will talk about it.
After squeezing my brain a few times, "odeon" came to me, followed by "nickelodeon". I know what they are, theatres or antique arcades, public spaces, so there might be some faint connection to "luncheon" and "pantheon" and the rest. But at this point I thought: if I'm going to write about this, I'm going to have to totally cheat and google "words that end in "-eon". There were 246. I decided to be selective and just include the more obscure ones that I knew a little something about:
puncheon
A puncheon is, I think, a sort of barrel. I only remember it because of Robert Browning's famous poem about the Pied Piper, in which the rats invaded the Hamelin cellars. I think the term was "sugar-puncheon." And it seemed as if a voice
(Sweeter far than by harp or by psaltery
Is breathed) called out, ‘Oh rats, rejoice!
The world is grown to one vast dry-saltery!
So munch on, crunch on, take your nuncheon,
Breakfast, supper, dinner, luncheon!'
And just as a bulky sugar-puncheon,
All ready staved, like a great sun shone
Glorious scarce an inch before me,
Just as methought it said ‘Come bore me!'
-- I found the Weser rolling o’er me.”
And all that. I don't want to probe further into "nuncheon", because I don't think it's even a word.
I didn't think of including pigeon, because there cannot be any connection between puncheon and pantheon and pigeon. But then follows wigeon, also the name of a bird - one I've seen, in fact, swimming in the lake.
Words like surgeon and chameleon and sturgeon and galleon are just too common, but what about escutcheon? "He is a blot on the family escutcheon," goes the saying, when the favored son has knocked up the housemaid or whatever. I assume - again, I'll have to look it up - an escutcheon is a sort of family crest or coat of arms, upon which the wayward son is a blot. I've never heard it used any other way, but maybe Poe included it in a story or two, as it's a Poe-ish sort of word.
Truncheon is only mildly interesting. You beat someone over the head with it. Burgeon, dungeon, dudgeon - now there is one. "In high dudgeon," goes the phrase, but what the hell does it mean? It's like "bridled" - she "bridled at the thought" - or "left in a huff". "High dudgeon" is sort of like "deign", in that we don't know exactly what it means, but that never stops us from using it whenever it seems effective.
The list I consulted started with 13-letter words ending in "eon", then 12-letter words ending in "eon", then. . . on and on, the countdown taking us to neon, peon. . .and finally ending with the simple word eon. It's an Einsteinian sort of word, suggesting incomprehensible measures of space and time. If we could trace these things back to whenever language began, we might have some dim understanding of how such a universe of meaning could be crammed into a simple three-letter word.
SUFFIX. On a blog called Grammarphobia, I found the following explanation for nuncheon:
The Oxford English Dictionary defines “nuncheon” as “a drink taken in the afternoon; a light refreshment between meals; a snack.”
While it seems to have meant a drink early on, in later citations it clearly meant a snack, taken in mid-morning or mid-afternoon.
The dictionary’s earliest example is from a medieval account book of the Abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. A Latin entry, dated circa 1260-75, includes the Middle English “noonschench.”
For centuries, as OED citations show, it was spelled many different ways: “nonesenches,” “nunseynches,” “nunchions,” “noonshun,” “noonchin,” “nunchun,” and others. The spelling with the “-eon” ending was likely influenced by the old words “puncheon” and “truncheon,” Oxford says.
So there's a connection. Postscript. In looking on Google for images to decorate this rather dull post, I (as usual) found a bunch of my own. I already wrote about this topic, seven years ago! Seven. I've had, oh, maybe seventeen views since then. But I keep on going, just to avoid saying I never write any more. If *I* can't remember I wrote about this topic seven years ago, will anyone else? I doubt it. It has been eons.
