by Henri Luc
[This is a further short excerpt from an interview with the beloved late-gaean amateur historian & legendary oldtime history-broadcaster, Emmett R Smith, of the hallowed Lincoln Park district in Old Mankato in Minnesota, on the North Coast of Iowa in Old Earth. He lived in the last years of humanity’s confinement to Old Earth before the advent of widely-available space-travel and out-migration. This was fifteen hundred years ago, of course; and, in all that follows, the rhodomontade and piffle, we may think to detect the authentic voice of that former earth-bound age.
[Such recorded material as we have been able to retrieve from the universal light-cone, of Smith’s Old Earth radio-historiography, now is available in the ‘Mankato History This Month’ archive at this link:
http://www.mnsu.edu/kmsufm/archives.html
[Much of it is ludicrous; and, some of it will bring tears for the sweet fugacity of all existence.
[BW]
HENRI Luc, Special Correspondent, Cosmopolis: “You’d said earlier that you wrote two novels in your twenties and had outlined a third — why did you not continue with fiction and literature…as opposed to writing about history, I mean?”
THE Affable Emmett Smith: “Ah, me! Well, what I am saying is that historical perception simply TRUMPS fictional introspection. Lincoln, you know, said that by forty a man has the face he deserves. And when I realized that mostly people’s troubles all stem from the fact that we are mostly just funny-looking — or we all think so, mostly about each other and that’s the same thing! — well, Hell, I knew right there that honestly one simply could not very truthfully mine a whole lot of big fat novels out of THAT!
“Not a few of these postmodern hairpins do, of course, but that’s what I mean — it’s just another symptom of late-historical self-absorption….
“But that people ARE mostly just funny-looking, and madder than Hell about it too, Christ, there’s loads of history to be gotten out that ONE fact alone — take Hitler, for example, or the average white supremacist for that matter.
“‘PEOPLE Are funny-looking,’ my God, that’s a whole axiom and at least two corollaries — about historical motives AND purposes — all in a nutshell….
“But it just ain’t a whole Hell of a lot of good for LITERATURE!”
Emmett R Smith
[all transcription-rights reserved
[7 October 2007]
All the world looks odd, save thee and me. And even thee looks a bit odd.
Touche, mon cher…vraiment ca!
Well anyway I’m not funny looking, anyway if you think Pippi Longstocking grownup just might happen to be well actually beautiful. Mr. Wook knows. But it is true too that we spend a lot of time worrying about it. That’s just silly. The guys who worry about it the most are mostly way awful and yet, they don’t obsess half as bad about the female body beautiful as these freshman dorm she critters I can tell you that. These Augsburg chicks just pour on the paint for fat guys with zits, come on! It isn’t the zits I mind but the evil expressions like I am the man, wow, I am really pulling off something on this bitch, like all of her clothes off! Not all of them are turds of course. It’s just silly, but I’m lucky too and don’t have a care in the world in that department just as long as you like redheads, so maybe I’m too vain and don’t understand. But I do too I think, it is just silly. When I go home [it is one thing to be intimate with old friends, because] my buddies [and I] all go way back and saved each other from snakebites and stuff, but not these idiots. And then when the chemlab blows up and I get my hair singed off and get burned to a crisp well, looks won’t help the partying then. You just never know. That’s all I’m saying, hair today, rabbit stew tomorrow (laugh), Me.
PS: all is NOT perfect in Grownup Pippi Land, I have just quit smoking for the uncountabillionth time. But THIS is it.
CENSORSHIP!
FOR A fact, /editing/.
That rots like ferret shit.
I see you are going to have it your way, that’s OK, it is your blog but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with saying things the way I want, it’s just I don’t have time for one of my own where I can really get it all out. Anyway, all I am saying is that I do have my own standards and they don’t include these Minneapolis guys. Not much anyway. Show me a man who’ll buy Grown Up Pippi her own ranch and work with her on it and I’m his but trust me, these Five College Fratfatrats are so way not that sort of guy that being adults has nothing to do with it, they’re just a lot of cyberscrots. Pimply ones too. But I don’t mind funny looking either. It is just that if they did knock up some college “woman” they’d all get notes from their Mommies, why they can’t pay the child support. Really. These are not grownup people just because all they have to do is punch a button and the computer lights up. Nobody but nobody here knows how to weld a wheelrim, and that’s pretty lame. So they go in the army and shoot foreigners to prove something about how they’re not screwed like everybody else. It’s just that even infinity runs out after awhile, trust me, Pippi is a Math Chick!
HOW Proceeds the not-smoking effort?
She may not be smoking, but she’s certainly fuming!
DEAR Ms Longstocking:
I Exercised a degree of editorial privilege, to be sure.
IN Principle, no one may object to this as I have long since been explicit on at least a couple of points about submissions to /Bodwyn Wook/. Most notably, no one may utilise casually, and with no specific contextual reason or justification, the f-word in these pp; this term is to-day as dead as a dodo, /ganz tot, maustot/ as the Jerries would say.
NOR, Of course, do I aver that you did /that/; but, you referred /supra/ to certain aspects of your personal & emotional life in a facile & glib tone; and, one that I most certainly did take it upon myself to conclude might be regretted at some time afterward by you, yourself.
ACCORDINGLY, I moderated some of your terms. For this, I make no apologiy & know in fact, and most definitely so in light of a certain /absolute/ knowledge, those bleak insights that can only come with the onset of old age & regret, that you shall (and in pretty short order, too, as of course you are an intelligent person) be appreciative of my discretionary /role/ in these conversations.
RESPECTFULLY,
E Raymond Smith, /mussulmane, moderateur et gentilhomme/
You are trying to have a good blog and be insiteful (!) and everything and I just type like I said before, so I thought I was being polite enough by not using text shorthand which I think is a pretty big concession by me whom (so there!) I imagine you geezers would call a postmodern woman. But I think it is kind of nice that people read my stuff intelligently and try to polish it up for posterity too. If you want to run an article just All About My Comments and clean up the rough spots a little that would be kewl because then I’d actually know myself what I’ve been saying, plus I could be careful(er?) in future not to give away any Major Mathematical Insights to these other huge weasels in the department here, Ferret
If you do I mean, call it something like Me, A Ferret’s Words Of Wisdom, or maybe “krakisdottir: Ferret Woman Says!”
Your pet ferret reminds me of a poem about the actress Sigourney Weaver and a hedgehog, but I won’t repeat it here because when I posted it in my Burrow some time ago I was roundly ticked off by several readers for vulgarity……
It’s not me that would get POed, it’s Mr. Wook and everybody. They’re all just so way afraid that I might say something to degrade myself or that would make these college “men” here get a little too handy or something. I’d like to see one of these city guys even try. My uncle was in the military and my cousins and I are all pretty fireproof because he was a hand-to-hand instructor and my aunt was a gymnast in a Canadian circus, so we all know a lot about how to move quick and what at. I only beat up somebody once of course in middleschool which is ages ago and I was just fourteen, but he had it coming and I got him and now, I still keep busy. No problemo with any of that. Mr. Wook and everybody there just want to have a more snooty kind of weblog where everybody goes la-di-da, don’t you just hate it when these awful people all say (and write) —- all the time. —-, —-, —-, it’s all they have on their so-called minds, tsk, tsk, aren’t they just scum! But if it’s a vote we’re having I’m all for Sigourney Weaver AND ferrets evey time. I had a roommate who had Esmerelda and she was cute and rode around inside my shirt. The ferret smell makes everybody horny though. Ferrets are just such huge weasels too. But I wrote this all before and maybe Mr. Wook or somebody will include it in my new column or whatever there, in Bodwyn Wook?????!?!
(Anyway I want you to know that _I_ did not write —- so I don’t know why Mr. Wook went off on me about it. And also I like hedgehogs, too.)
[THE Full text of this reply by Aunty has been placed in the following weblog, specialising in language-arts issues and the english and american Vulgate:
http://oldunclecrow.wordpress.com/
[where it may be read under rhe heading of 'No Gerbils for Sigourney Weaver'.
[Editor]
OK then – you asked for it! And as Wookie sometimes dumps in my Burrow, I’ll return the compliment.
“[Sigourney Weaver] has claimed that the turning point in her acting career came [when] “I played this little girl with braids who was quite insane and kept a pet hedgehog…. After that I realised there was no looking back”.
- FAN FACTS, Independent, 6 February 1998
An actress named Sigourney Weaver
Did not rest content with split ——.
When she put (as a stunt)
A hedgehog up her —-
All her sorely —–ed boyfriends did leave her.
http://bodwyn.wordpress.com/2007/10/08/its-simple-really/
Put that blue pencil away, Grandad, you old prude, and restore my immortal verses in all their pristine impurity!
ONE Must only hope that the few /cogniscenti/ who actually read /Bodwyn Wook/ are not the sort of blinkered half-wits who positively cannot figure out a few /lacunae/ in texts,
RESPECTFULLY,
THE Editor
So where are my Pippi Pages of Ferret Wisdom?
Anyway it’s Friday night and everybody except two of my roommates who are as self reliant and cussed ornery as I am, the others all are out getting drunk and puking in the streets down on Cedar Avenue & over Southeast. Pippi has been drunk too a few times, but that was mostly in her junior year in highschool and the thing is if I did it again now it would be just bullshit. That’s only for when you REALLY have something big to celebrate or something. Like a Nobel prize? Or springtime anyway. Meanwhile the numbers are crunching nicely into shape, I think partly because I just won’t have it any other way and they know they have to behave themselves, and the last of the undergrad work is cleaning up nicely too. Also I think I might have a serious boyfriend for sure finally. The test is whether he can keep a hard on when I let on how really smart I am, and since I haven’t been trying to hide anything and he’s holding up good so far, well I guess he might be a keeper. Seriously he’s a sweet man, sorta pretty and plays clarinet and oboe and french horn. At first I was afraid he would be like my New London boyfriend who turned out to a big leg man (although not dumb otherwise) and who was “in lust” on account of how Pippi has ridden bareback ever since she was seven and has pretty nice haunches. But I didn’t care to have pictures circulating around the world without MY say so and that was that. Anyway, Dawson is quiet man who likes to go off for a week and then show up with all sorts of new discoveries. He’d be good for the research because I actually can’t do much more than feed the horses and pat the cats when I’m really on a roll, and he can look out for himself which is a good quality for somebody for me.
kd, You can take it from me that a young man’s notions of lust and love are scrambled eggs and hogbrains. Jesus Christ! I had such a lover once long ago, a bareback rider from SD. She was a bare naked one too in the sunrise. It was love and bitter fights over and over from beginning to end. Of course it was all just about the shape of her fanny in the end for me, and so she got fed up and told me to go to Hell. Partly because she got the itch for the feel of some strange hands on that same fanny, too, so now, damn near forty years after, we send each other “Do you remember’s?” People always stand higher in each other’s memory than in person after awhile, so “don’t rush into nothing!” as they say here in Eagle Lake, up at the Crow’s Nest.
So you permit ‘fanny’ but disallow ‘vagina’ – a perfectly respectable dictionary word! The oddities of censorship never cease to amaze me. I am contemplating writing “Memoirs of a Hedgehog”. Do you know “The Autobiography of a Flea: an Intimate Memoir of the Victorians at Play”, by the way? It gets you itching to turn the next page……