Maudit Anglais

 Maudit Anglais
     by Dr. Electolux 

sibling rivalry sucks
wycliff chicken’s clucks
pounding rain on ducks
fighter planes called fukes 
simpson shows have yucks
heroes men with plucks
ford 250 trucks
yours electrolux

Is it swearing when said, by myself, in a language I do not understand? This—this sentence—would be a profound start to any serious investigation by a pre modernist, modernist or postmodernist work of fiction or poetry. I do not care about the answer. I do not wish to answer the question. I do not wish to ask it either. But I wish to examine the asking of it, or of any question that is asked in order to be answered or in order to mock the question and the answer or the question or the answer. This exegesis of the question above, this interpretation, is what fledgling philosophers mean when they say (displaying their wisdom), “Today, after Auschwitz, philosophy’s purpose can only be to question the possibility of the question.” In strong contrast to my feelings on the matter, Philosophy’s spokeswomen mean, “If only there was an answer” when they state aloud that there can be no questions. They are saying in fact that there are no discoveries that matter. The world—science, philosophy, agriculture, history – says the opposite. The profound desires in the breasts of philosophers Tate in York University, Braddigan at Stanford, Williams of Connecticut College, Smith at Harvard, Wayland at Oxford, Morrissette in Calcutta, and Smudgedigit in Edinburg are that a world of meaning be restored, found, sought, plied, worked, willed, wanged, split open, forged, jerked into being, discovered, fine-tuned, lamented, praised, scrounged, fought for, converged upon, analyzed, credited, raised, magnified, transcended, looked at and so on. Thus, “there is no question “is greeted by the only emotion allowed, despair, but unspoken of as such. “Let us never say ‘I despair,’ but keep searching,” is the agreement between all of this latter group of philosophers. ‘Let us find meaning’ is their bureaucracy, their jobs depending on it. Meaning, and the search for it, are economic. Prevailing hierarchies depend on the pull and push of meaning. Ms. Jane Scott, PhD, assistant professor of continental philosophy, would never, despite her three decades of studying Derrida, and thus, of course, Heidegger, admit that she was in any way clodded into a spectacularity of meaning’s thrusts and that she would defend the presence of the absence of meaning with her very life, until she nearly lost it (life and job at the Univ. of British Columbia) and then give up on it as easily as she gave up on her kid when it became plain that he was actually going to be a serious alcoholic and she could not fix him at all. The questions’ presence or absence matters not a bit. It is inconsequential in the absolute. What matters to me is the fact that those who lament its absence want it to be the point of discussion. After this short and stupid piece, I will never again bother with “the question.”
      Who am I? I will tell you by telling you a story about myself. I am now 56. When I was 23 I got married to a very pretty 19-year-old. I asked her if she would be my bride. She agreed. We were married six months later on a very hot day when the suits of those attending the wedding were soaked with sweat, and perspiration ran down the inside of the bride’s dress, front and back, in rivulets. A male attendant fell fainting to the floor before the minister. He chipped a tooth. I was almost as shortsighted then as I am now.  My parents drove up from Abbotsford, 1500 miles away.   They were too poor to come to the affair but they did so anyway. My father is/was a proud man. My mother is a proud woman. What she said did not always go. I do not recall any of the music that was played at the event. Muchachoes. The minister droned on and on. After the ceremony, everyone ate and opened presents and shook hands many times and laughed and felt terrible in the heat, and then my bride and I left for Mexico in my Volkswagen bug. The first night we drank wine, loved once, and fell asleep. In the morning I noticed that the room was neat and had been vacuumed and purified by the order of some good management, even though it had cost us very little. The next day we drove all the way to the Grand Canyon and looked down into it through a pay telescope. Then we made the fateful decision to hike down into the canyon along one of its many trails. We did that and after 6 miles in the 110° conditions, we arrived at the bottom and were soon sitting and lyi g beside the Colorado as it flowed past. We went on our honeymoon into Mexico as far south as cChiquaqua and  visited Mennonite villages in the western hills before returning home to Winnipeg. We are still married some 35 years later. My wife will retire from teaching primary school in two years. I will continue to teach at the University of Manitoba for another six or seven years, and then we will see. What do you make of that?       

No Purchase of Beer

 No purchase of beer
     by Screwcap the Second

Busy as usual with his horse, general Sajagen sent little Akra with his calculation to the chief. Besides the animals bearing military supplies and armament he would require 27 mules duly assigned to him to carry his beer. The beer came in kegs of 20 kg each. Roughly 200 of these would be accompanying him on his mission into Northern China. The journey would take up to a year. The reply came back from the Mogul that 25 were too many and he would allow only 10. Irate, Sajagen overloaded 11 mules with 15 kegs each and departed, dispirited. He decided early on to begin to purchase his beer en route, to save the supply he was carrying for a time when traveling in enemy territory would make supply-buying difficult. Each keg hung in a bag of goat skin, amply designed to except mule dung.. The dung, named Dhdn in Mongolese,, imparted a fresh and wholesome flavour to the beer after being in it’s vicinity for a few weeks. The rest of the soldiers had to supply themselves by stealing, or buying if they had the coin to do so. It was Akra’s job to pick up each fresh mule turd as they journeyed and to pack it carefully with the others around the leather bags. If the young lad missed a dropping, Sajagen quickly reprimanded him.
     “Here, you useless little horse turd! you are purposely leaving behind pieces of mule excrement to irritate me! Now, get on with you. Go pick that up or I’ll have your gizzard served alongsider my beer at tomorrow’s breakfast!” The boy always obeyed quickly when his general noticed relapse in him.
     When they returned to their home city on the steps a year and a month later, Sajagen had forsworn beer altogether. Not a month into his journey, the entire mule train fell into a ravine and not a keg survived. He sent men down in a great hurry to scoop up all the beer they could in containers of whatever sort they happened to have to hand, but sadly it had all mixed with the mule feces and become almost unpalatable. Sajagen did try valiantly for a few weeks to imbibe the mixture but, despite almost heroic efforts, he eventually found the foulness of taste and the general muddiness f colour (now no longer amber and not bright) discouraging and he decided to give up drink entirely for the rest of his life.                                    

Me and my Faults
      by Douglasin Reimer

And the following incidents acquaint you with me. With what was devious and dangerous about me and what was not. I may have sounded critical and self-righteous in my description of Harvey and Jake but I include myself in their group, in their attitudes. My faults may not be identical with theirs but they are and they are real. We’re all human, in other words, even adolescent males. A great statement about human nature that startled me with its accuracy the moment I read it goes as follows: “Treat every man as he deserves and who shall escape whipping.” I deserve whipping. Okay, I didn’t pull the wings off of flies, far as I can recall (though I remember burning a fly/flies with a magnifying glass). Nor did I blow frogs into balloons (I saw it happen, but never blew into the straw). I failed to plot apple-stealing scenarios for anyone, including Harv and Jake. I simply couldn’t hit a bird with a slingshot no matter how hard I tried. Bicycle spokes survived my plans and presence, and my female peers were in no danger ever of my hands invading their personal space (whether encouraged to or not) because as I remember it they seldom allowed themselves to be found near enough to me to find out (though I would never have harmed what I loved most, more by far than I loved myself). I was timid and self-reproachful in all of my dealings with people except close friends. I always felt sick with guilt whenever I thought the word “should.” So, when it  came to people-hurting, I posed no great danger except accidentally. So, to all intents and purposes, I wore a sort of halo. Not. My greatest “sins” were all fathered by deception. In case you are beginning to think that this smacks of confession—“O geez, here he goes, whimpering about himself, scared of everything and hoping for easy absolution and God’s forgiveness!”—you are bound for a minor disappointment. We boys were all biologically human with all the appetites and mischief that is in boys and has been since time began. It is always said with such certainty by most backward-looking non adolescents that adolescent males’ brains reside way too low down in their persons to be of any use whatsoever. I say, however, that we young fellows did have brains, only they were unafraid things, not easily convinced of the divide between what we did and what we were taught we should do. We saw, we looked, we wanted, we did. At least wanted to do. Now, however, older, in our early seventies, having fully succeeded in leaving the feelings of human biology behind, we are each one of us instead fully the products merely of culture and teaching, of Western fear. We no longer understand the impetuous, spontaneous joys of Eden.
      No, I list my early weaknesses happily and willingly stand shoulder to shoulder with Harv and Jake as an equal. Some of my weaknesses: I secretly loathed my parents’ version of Christianity; though I wouldn’t have admitted it at the time, I took no pride in my sister’s accomplishments as a star athlete, and was in fact hardly aware of it or her existence (all my time and thinking devoted almost exclusively to Dougie, “Big Doug,” Big special Dougie; I pinned my brother Rudy down whenever I felt like it and let my spit stretch down toward his face, though he hated it and tried desperately to turn his face away because half the time I couldn’t pull the spit back up (he begged me and I’d care less, it being so much fun); I would play ping pong with Rudy and win every game, five or ten games in a row, and laugh at him until he’d be so frustrated he’d fling the heavy plywood paddle whizzing across the table as hard as he could, me ducking just in time, and then he’d chase me to try to catch me and hurt me; I’d be laughing the entire time; I stole quarters from my older brother who had won a roll of them in Vegas, and he found out eventually, even though I tried to disguise the theft by taking only one quarter a week; at fifteen I stole jars of cherry, crabapple and raspberry preserves to brew wine, being careful to arrange the jars in the pantry to make it look like they were all still there; i stole a carton or three of cigarettes from a local store, I stole LPs and suede jackets in Winnipeg, I made jokes to my friend about two unfortunate girls in my grade who it was popular to ridicule for their plainness and poor clothes (poverty); and so much more. Treat me as I deserve and, yes, I wouldn’t escape whipping, not by a long shot.