The Dish

“The Ache of Marriage” by Denise Levertov:

The ache of marriage:

thigh and tongue, beloved,
are heavy with it,
it throbs in the teeth

We look for communion
and are turned away, beloved,
each and each

It is leviathan and we
in its belly
looking for joy, some joy
not to be known outside it

two by two in the ark of
the ache of it.

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(Poems 1960-1967 ©1966 by Denise Levertov. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Image of Denise Levertov via Wikimedia Commons)

The Posuer Alert is “awarded for passages of prose that stand out for pretension, vanity and really bad writing designed to look like profundity.” Colin McGinn is currently in the lead; he was nominated for this doozy:

What kind of hand job leaves you cleaner than before? A manicure, of course. Why does this joke work? Because of the tension between the conventional idiomatic sense of ‘hand job’ (a certain type of sex act) and its semantic or compositional meaning (in which it is synonymous with ‘job done by or to the hand’). When you think about it, virtually all jobs are ‘hand jobs’ in the second semantic sense: for all human work is manual work—not just carpentry and brick laying but also cookery and calligraphy. Indeed, without the hand human culture and human economies would not exist. So really ‘hand jobs’ are very respectable and vital to human flourishing. We are a ‘hand job’ species. (Are you now becoming desensitized to the specifically sexual meaning of ‘hand job’? Remember that heart surgeons are giving you a ‘hand job’ when they operate on you; similarly for masseurs and even tax accountants.)

I have in fact written a whole book about the hand, Prehension, in which its ubiquity is noted and celebrated.

I even have a cult centering on the hand, described in this blog. I have given a semester-long seminar discussing the hand and locutions related to it. I now tend to use ‘hand job’ in the capacious sense just outlined, sometimes with humorous intent.

Suppose now a professor P, well conversant in the above points, slyly remarks to his graduate student, who is also thus conversant: ‘I had a hand job yesterday’. The astute student, suitably linguistically primed, responds after a moment by saying: ‘Ah, you had a manicure’. Professor P replies: ‘You are clearly a clever student—I can’t trick you. That is exactly the response I was looking for!’ They then chuckle together in a self-congratulatory academic manner. Academics like riddles and word games.

Just a few points behind is Ian Bogost, in the running for his reflections on the return of the McRib:

The McRib is like Holbein’s skull: we experience it as (quasi-)foodstuff, as marketing campaign, as cult object, as Internet meme, but those experiences don’t sufficiently explain it. To understand McRib fully, we have to look at the sandwich askew. … The McRib’s stochastic return mcdonalds-mcribmakes visible the relationship between the eater and the McDonald’s menu. It produces a stain, a tear in the order of things that reveals the object-cause of desire for McDonald’s, but only briefly before it evaporates like faux-cartilage. The fragile conditions that make the McRib possible also insure that desire for McDonald’s food more generally speaking is maintained.

Desire is a delicate system. For Lacan, the lover “gives what he does not possess,” namely the objet a that incites desire rather than sustaining it. Likewise, McDonald’s sells what it does not sell: the conditions of predictability, affordability, and chemico-machinic automated cookery that make its very business viable. … Industrialism is also a kind of magic, the magic of the perfect facsimile. Eating at McDonald’s—eating anything whatsoever at McDonald’s—connects us to that magic, allows us to marinate inside it and take on its power.

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Add cream:

1) Black coffee is darker, and dark colors emit heat faster than light colors. As such, “by lightening the color of your coffee, you slow the rate at which it cools,” if only slightly.

2) The Stefan-Boltzmann Law (apparently) says that hotter surfaces radiate heat faster— than cooler ones. So if you add cream to a cup of black coffee, it might lower the temperature of that cup of coffee. However that cup could still cool at a slower rate than a cup of hot black coffee.

3) Finally, and perhaps most importantly, “adding cream thickens the coffee (adds viscosity), so it evaporates slower.” And, in turn, less heat gets carried away by the evaporation.

(Video of cream being added to coffee in super-slow motion via Modernist Cuisine)

John McWhorter reviews the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE), now available online:

There is a delightful muchness in it. The standard dictionary necessarily focuses on what we all say, but it should not disqualify a word as English if only some of us say it. DARE is a much different English than we are used to seeing gathered in one place. From 1965 to 1970, the editor and his staff covered 1,002 communities nationwide, asking 2,777 people what they called 1,847 various items. The finished DARE contains 60,000 words and 2,985 maps. Tabulating all of the data was so gargantuan a task that the original editor didn’t even live to see the project completed.

It was worth the wait. Only from DARE can we learn that, across this great nation, dust bunnies have been referred to with a dazzling array of terms such as fooskies, ghost manure, rich relatives, cussywop, and more colorfully, pussy, slut’s wool, and yes, negro wool as well. Things get almost poetic with souls and even men, and my favorite is the apparently rather taciturn upstate New Yorker who gave the local term as type of fuzz.

Sadie Stein adds:

Just to give you a taste of the myriad riches contained therein, the following are all regional variations on informing a woman her slip is showing:

• “It’s snowing down south”
• “Your father likes you better than your mother”
• “Whitey’s out of jail”

Tim Murphy asks, “If President Barack Obama wanted to take down Santa Claus, how would he do it?”:

Targeting Santa while he’s on his rounds sounds good in theory. NORAD already purports to track Santa’s progress on its website, owing to a typo in a 1955 Sears advertisement that accidentally broadcasted a secret government phone line to the general public. And the NSA is well-equipped to spy on Santa’s kingdom. Arctic Fiber, a Canadian company, is laying a new fiber-optic cable underneath the North Pole that will link Tokyo and London, to get a leg up on high-frequency stock market trading, but it could also give the US government’s super-secret (until recently) data-collection programs the lowdown on what’s going on at the workshop.

But the United States has never successfully shot down a ballistic missile, which doesn’t inspire confidence in its chances at taking down Santa, whose packed schedule requires him to travel at pace somewhere between ridiculous and ludicrous speed. Norwegian physicist Knut Jørgen Røed Oedegaar argues that Claus is equipped with an ion shield, which prevents him from being torn apart by gravitational forces and protects him from being incinerated (by fireplaces, atmospheric reentry, or missiles). Also, he travels between dimensions.

From “Clearances” by Seamus Heaney:

In Memoriam M.K.H., 1911-1984

When all the others were away at Mass
I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.
They broke the silence, let fall one by one
Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:
Cold comforts set between us, things to share
Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.
And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes
From each other’s work would bring us to our senses.

So while the parish priest at her bedside
Went hammer and tongs at prayers for the dying
And some were responding and some crying
I remembered her head bent towards my head,
Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives —
Never closer the whole rest of our lives.

Please consider supporting the work of the Poetry Society of America here.

(From Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996 © 1998 by Seamus Heaney. Used by kind permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux.)

Unlike Kyle, Marc Tracy is just fine with being Jewish on Christmas:

December 25 is one of my favorite days of the year. I don’t have to work. I eat a fun ethnic meal (the cliché is true: It’s sometimes Chinese). I see a movie. And I celebrate my own heritage: Being Jewish on Christmas is like having one’s Jewishness traced in bright, red-and-green ink.

Part of my love for Christmas is based on the same aesthetics that everyone else likes about the holiday. The seasonal/pagan elements are undeniably beguiling: I cherish the culmination of fall, the smell of pine, and the snow; and even I cannot help but associate them with Christmas. I love the songs—many of which, anyway, were composed by Jews. I enjoy glad tidings as much as the next person, whatever their theological origin. On Christmas Day, the streets are pretty, and empty, and when I find myself in the suburbs, parking is a breeze. (Closed businesses are only a minor inconvenience, I’ve found, and anyway Starbucks tend to be open until 4 p.m.)

Christmas is, in other words, a fête for the Jews, too.