The Last Ride of the Wee Yeasty Rider

We've been writing intentionally bad poetry for many years now, but have only recently begun to impose restrictions on content and form. Today, we challenged ourselves to write a 12-line poem containing:

1. racehorses

2. recent evolutionary developments

3. a German literary reference

Below is the result. If the requirements strike your fancy, please, send us your own interpretation!

Ezmerelda's hooves beat the track like a baker kneading challah

Magnificent flanks, but zero propulsion

it mattered little to her rider, who had ceased

himself to grow (before Ezmerelda was born) at the age of 3.

But Jörg was not small, only highly evolved

the hats were being made smaller and smaller, you see.

And his blond hair grew brighter, like challah

The aristocrats in the stands yawned away their educations

tragic, when neurons give way to wee yeasty riders

rising to such proportions only to be beaten down again

This was what was running last through her synapses, Ezmerelda,

as her hooves under Jörg's direction left the track, the cliff -- to death.

Things we like II

1. Frank Bölter’s fully functional origami boat, which would be perfectly at home in The Science of Sleep, and which I think should be available for conversations that neither wholly take place in dreams nor in waking life.

2. Elephant shrews: the manner in which they wiggle their noses to search for grub makes them look as if they are permanently a fixture of a stop-motion film.

3. Marcel Mauss lamenting the loss of the squatting position in the adults of the Western world. Tomorrow's activities involve attempting to reclaim this both humble and incredibly useful posture.

4. Whale calls that sound like bird's songs when sped up, and bird's songs that sound like whale calls when slowed down.

5. Diaphaneity as mineralogical category, and minerals that exhibit all types of it at once.

Things we like

The predilection Lauren and I have for lists is probably obvious by now. Nearly all our lists are infinite, and foremost among them are the lists of things we like. And since I have tentatively decided to post more here, having purged my life of Facebook, but not of the impulse to share random information, voilà une sélection de la liste des choses aimées:

• the Wooster Collective, especially when they post things that highlight the similarities between people and sheep
• Louis Malle, Charlie Chapman, Ingmar Bergman, and the Criterion Collection’s page of quotes
• Jean-Luc Godard's (and Fritz Lang’s) Le Mépris (Contempt, 1963), which is even better than I’d remembered
• Zadie Smith, at least when she writes things that highlight the differences between people and software
• David Sedaris and Dutch Christmas traditions
• Three-line novels. More of these to come.

What the Beatles have in common with sandwiches

There are only two things that a person can say that will immediately convince me that he or she is lying:

1) “I don’t like the Beatles.”

2) “I don’t like sandwiches.”

It would be understandable for some people not to like sandwiches if there were only one kind of sandwich. Or only one kind of Beatles song. But the infinite potential of sandwiches and the actualized potential of the Beatles are both so varied and multifarious that it is, I am convinced, simply impossible to categorically dislike one or the other.

And if a person claims to do so, then the poor thing should be properly introduced to baguettes, focaccia, and John Lennon as quickly as possible — or they should stop lying.

My lovely friend Ashley and I had discussed this over lunch, and then we went to the bookstore she promptly overheard the man who worked there shrug nonchalantly, “I just don’t really like the Beatles.”

Obviously, we fled to the stacks, and got distracted by poetry and Chekhov and the universal law that every bookstore must have at least one used copy of Irène Némirovsky’s Suite française.

I ended up with A Room of One’s Own, by Virginia Woolf (which I’d already read), and Eichmann in Jerusalem, by Hannah Arendt (which I hadn’t). When I went to pay for them, the clerk (the one we were eavesdropping on earlier) commented, “These are both really good books.”

I was distracted by some plastic alien finger puppets, so I said, “Indeed.”

He held up Eichmann. “Make sure you have something funny on hand when you read this one, though. It’s amazing, but, you know ... super depressing.”

In the movie version of my life, I will say, “I appreciate that, but I can’t take advice from a man who pretends not to like the Beatles. How do you feel about sandwiches?”

But in actual life, of course, I said, “Yeah, will do. Thanks.”