freecounterpoint: So Hard

Sunday, January 28, 2007

So Hard

...to sneak up on little boys with all those goddamn declensions in your head.

15 comments:

Arelcao Akleos said...: That's alright. In the New Crescent World Order we'll be too busy trying to fit imaginary vowels between camel spitting consonants to give a damn about the decline of declensional languages. Besides, the fewer books one can read the toastier is that nice burning hill of tomes.; 1/28/2007 6:20 PM
Anonymous said...: aa - you are confusing arabic with serbo-croat with your comment about vowels.
Croatia in Croat: Hrvtska
Allaho akhbar; 1/28/2007 7:22 PM
Arelcao Akleos said...: uh, no, arabic, like Hebrew, lets the absence of a vowel indicate a vowel. Or are you setting the stage for serbo-croat as the Ur-Arabic?; 1/28/2007 7:33 PM
Arelcao Akleos said...: strictly speaking, it makes use of phonemes which defy classification into vowels, although a subset function strictly as consonants; 1/28/2007 7:35 PM
Arelcao Akleos said...: I'm curious, anonymous, is there no use of vowels at all in croatioan-serbian? Or is the example you gave more an example of what "may" happen?; 1/28/2007 7:42 PM
Anonymous said...: Tom & Ray of car talk had a "send vowels to croatia" drive a few years back. These wackos don't even sound vowels.; 1/28/2007 7:52 PM
Mr roT said...: I love that image of being burnt at the stake with your own mission civilisatrice as the fuel. Why not try to find that passage and post it, AA? If your googling skills are weak, point me in the right direction and I will handle it for you.; 1/28/2007 8:49 PM
My Frontier Thesis said...: JJ is great with google. He pulled up some Royal Astronomical Article (circa August, 1869) for me last autumn. Fullers are JJ's googling go-juice.; 1/28/2007 9:12 PM
Arelcao Akleos said...: So how do they pronounce qtb?; 1/28/2007 9:30 PM
Arelcao Akleos said...: Well, so far have not found the quotes on the part where the peace corper gets it. But these quotes give a flavor of the world of the "Marxist-Islamic" dictator Updike sketched [over a quarter century ago!]

From John Updike's The Coup (published in 1978). The narrator, a Marxist Islamic dictator, is describing the ruler of a neighboring country:

“Wamphumel Komomo, President-for-Life.... with his picureseque regalia of catskins, ornamental welts, and medals from the lesser European armies, tirelessly flirted with the international community, inviting the Americans in to build him a desalination plant and then expelling them, inviting the Russians in to train his air force and then expelling them, milking even the Australians and the post-Sukarno Indonesians for their dollop of aid, their stretch of highway,their phosphate refinery, or mile-high broadcasting antenna. Now his pets were the Chinese, who were building him a railway from his nasty little port to the preposterous new capital he had ordained in the interior, Komomo-glorifying Zanjomo, ..... its government buildings based on photos of forgotten World Fairs, its central adornment a mock-herioc bronze stalagmite bearing Komomo's shifty features in imitation of Rodin's Balzac and likely to survive the model's death for one week, by which time the old nepotist's competing sons-in-law will have melted it down for bullets.”

From John Updike's The Coup; Sidi Mukhtar, the leader of a camel caravan, explains why his cargo includes typewriter ribbons and erasers:
“His grin displaying the rift between his front teeth, and lifting a pearl-sized wart nestled in the flange of one nostril, our leader explained the eventual destination of the office supplies: Iran. “The Shahanshah”, he said, “has much wish to modernize. In his hurry he buy typewriters from West Germans and paper from Swedes and then discover only one type spool fit typewriter, only one type eraser not smudge paper. American know-how meanwhile achieve obsolescence such that only fitting spool stockpiled in Accra as aid-in-goods when cocoa market collapse. Formula of typewriter eraser held secret and cunning capitalists double, redouble price when Shah push up oil price to finance purchase of jet fighters, computer software, and moon rocks. French however operating through puppet corporations in Dahomey have secured formula as part of multi-billion franc deferred-interest somatic-collateral package and erect eraser factory near gum arabic plantations. Much borax also in deal, smuggled by way of Ouagadougou. Now Sadat has agreed to let goods across Nile if Shahanshah agrees to make anti-Isreali statement and buy ten thousand tickets to son-et-lumière show at Sphinx.; 1/28/2007 9:39 PM
Arelcao Akleos said...: OK, getting closer I think. This beginning of an older piece from Hitch contains more of the Pepean genius that was Ellelou

n 1978, just as I was beginning to become intrigued by the nascent menace of Islamist fanaticism, I read John Updike’s novel The Coup. Set in the fictional African state of Kush, a Chad-like vastness dominated by a demagogue named Hakim Ellelloû, it took its author far from the Pennsylvania suburbs and car lots, and indeed offered, through the hoarse voice of Ellelloû, a highly dystopian view of them. “What does the capitalist infidel make, you may ask, of the priceless black blood of Kush?” Ellelloû asks, and then answers his own question:

He extracts from it, of course, a fuel that propels him and his overweight, quarrelsome family—so full of sugar and starch their faces fester—back and forth on purposeless errands and ungratefully received visits. Rather than live as we do in the same village with our kin and our labor, the Americans have flung themselves wide across the land, which they have buried under tar and stone. They consume our blood also in their factories and skyscrapers, which are ablaze with light throughout the night … I have visited this country of devils and can report that they make from your sacred blood slippery green bags in which they place their garbage and even the leaves that fall from their trees! They make of petroleum toys that break in their children’s hands, and hair curlers in which their obese brides fatuously think to beautify themselves while they parade in supermarkets buying food wrapped in transparent petroleum and grown from fertilizers based upon your blood! Of your blood they make deodorants to mask their God-given body scents and wax for the matches to ignite their death-dealing cigarettes and more wax to shine their shoes while the people of Kush tread upon the burning sands barefoot!; 1/28/2007 9:48 PM
Arelcao Akleos said...: I give up, and so since am too lazy to go to find a copy of the book I leave it to JJ to see if he can hunt it down over the next few days; 1/28/2007 10:01 PM
Mr roT said...: I'll get on it in a couple days. Briefcase explosion here.; 1/28/2007 11:24 PM
Tecumseh said...: JJ is great with google.
Dixit who? I don't think so -- he manages now and then, but still, can't beat the master who taught him how to click on things, back when the world was young.; 1/28/2007 11:41 PM
My Frontier Thesis said...: Hmmm, ai. I'm going off results JJ produced last autumn, regarding a total solar eclipse that stretched from as far north as Fort Union (upper Missouri River, right-near the Yellowstone River confluence) all the way down south (geographic specifics don't matter once you exit the Dakotas).

I've got other primary sources about how the Natives reacted (or if you have time) when the moon covered the sun. Ahhh, the word I'm searching for: it was, as they say today, "dynamic."; 1/29/2007 12:34 AM