“Blowsy abstraction jostling with derelict figuration.” (Schejdahl?)
“Yawing between gesture and smear.” (Ditto?)
“Painting isn’t dead except as a major art. From now on it will be a discourse of adepts, like jazz.” (Dave Hickey)
“Attack with paint the shallow clamor of pixelation.” (Who?)
(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)
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As a twenty-something aspiring writer I felt I was duty bound to tilt at every convention I could locate, and to speak unvarnishedly about it. I had read Burroughs and Berryman and Updike.
Regrettably, one redoubt I chose briefly to storm was pornography. I considered the literature on smut to be a creative void that needed filling.
Also, my studies at the time involved Hispano-Arabic literature. Western scholars used a cloaking device for the naughty allusions not uncommon in medieval texts: They rendered those passages in Latin, exiting temporarily whatever language — French and German mostly — they used to indite their learned treatises. This was especially true with female writers such as Wallada of Cordova.
My Latin was creaky, and sometimes I had to tap a classics colleague for elucidation. I formed a determination to make those saucy writers the subject of future research, and to demolish the decorous circumlocutions of the blushing Orientalists — uniformly male.
There was an “art theater” nearby in Zebulon. Student friends and I would make sorties there to watch the skin flicks with high purpose. Right.
That became a source for journal entries that are acutely embarrassing now. I made a point of being granular and clinical and painfully explicit in my word experiments, calling a spade a damned shovel, so to speak. I thought to confront the prurient head-on and make it … artsy? Light a match.
Predictably, a comment in Portuguese flickered by yesterday. It seemed to credit me with premature ejaculation. If only. I can’t find the comment, I don’t know yet whence those things come nor where they land, but I’m sure it was a flame thrown in response to an unredacted journal entry. Ah well.
The bad news is that there are many pages of journal ahead. (This project is archival and preservative more than edifying.) The good news is that only a few of them (the pages) are about sex. And redaction is the subterfuge of retrospection. I’m hoping it will spare me at least a small deal of further contumely.
(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)
The snout of a maintainer is a blunt piece of overstatement at the insect level. What’s not to love? No wonder so many movie monsters have been buggish. It’s cold comfort, yet assuaging, to reflect that when we mammals croak the arthropods will inherit Mar-A-Leggo. Hollywood may yet prove prophetic in its nutsy way.
John Deere snout
(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)
A ninja of the recondite…
Queasy pudding…
Codwalloping colossus…
Like Puritans and Papists…
In Shakespeare’s “King Henry IV, Part 2,” when the King says the rebels are fifty-thousand strong, Warwick gently chides him saying, “Rumour doth double, like the voice and echo, the numbers of the feared.”
(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)
A Truly Jumbo Shrimp
It’s said a jumbo shrimp’s an oxymoron.
A shrimp’s a little thing you put red sauce on
And gobble by the dozen boiled or fried.
Some of us could eat more if we tried.
Enter the tiger prawn, a new crustacean
Not native to these parts. They say it’s Asian.
The prawn has a voracious appetite
And is inclined to get into a fight
For food with native breeds, the white and brown.
This fact is causing fishermen to frown.
The foot-long Asian packs plenty of muscle.
He’d be the winner in a shrimp-league tussle.
The tiger loves what French calls “fruits de mer.”
We’d say a “seafood platter” over here:
Oysters, crabs, and shrimp. It makes you shudder.
The tiger eats his cousins for his dinner!
From any angle, that sticks in my craw.
For cannibals there ought to be a law.
The tiger’s tasty, though, and a sweet deal
If you consider that one is a meal.
If tiger drives the natives out of town,
He may acquire a dubious renown.
Wouldn’t it be wry, a real reversal,
If we called people shrimps who were colossal?
Reference
http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Giant-shrimp-raises-big-concern-as-it-invades-the-
2424242.php
(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)
had declared himself in pursuit of substantives.
His gastrointestinal tract had lately begun to feel large and accommodating. (commodious, capacious). Thank the stars and the Creator of the stars.
The spasms of sweet cream she had manfully swallowed; all the access he had gained, the lovingly surrendered sphincters; it was no good asking why he had not stuck it; he hadn’t and that was that. It kept on being that in every shade of hindsight.
(snug yet commodious as his dark little room)
The sweet cream he had rammed poured jammed down her throat […]
The Manich Depression is a lowland in SE European RSFSR between the Lower Don and the Caspian Sea. It is drained by the Western and
(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)
Quasi-Scatological Invective Chrestomathy Index Headwords
— Skullduggery
— Tomfoolery
— Shutterbuggery
— Heilraising
— Pettifogging
— Bunkerhunkering
— Duckrupturing
Leonardo da Vinci faces
(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)
Saucy insouciance, sufficient nonchalance…
“I’m kind of sorry that I cause so much grief.” (John Ashbery)
To sup with the Devil you need a long spoon. (Traditional?)
Why not just paint a mustache on everything? (Response to Mount Rushmore)
Hello? (Old postcard). (Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)
(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)
EthicalDative 
Make Intelligent Mistakes
Make intelligent mistakes. (No idea who said this.)
What interests me about rhyming is how it can force you to say something that you didn’t intend to say. It can make your poem go in a new direction. It may not work, but sometimes it does. What I admire about poets who rhyme is their ability to make a rhyme fall naturally, as if it were planned and not a happy fuck-up.
“Whistler’s canvases for the works he called the ‘Nocturnes’ were prepared, Attlee explains, with a red or gray ground, on to which he would wash what he called his ‘sauce,’ a runny mixture of oil paint, linseed oil, turpentine and a mastic called copal. This medium was so liquid that canvases had to be placed on the floor to prevent the image slipping away entirely.” [Lost source.]
(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)