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Scanner by Emily Farris Today on Nerve's culture blog: We bring you more Dita Von Teese from the German Playboy.
Screengrab by Various Today in Nerve's film blog: Holiday special - 35 people, places and movies we're thankful for.
The Remote Island by Bryan Christian Michael Phelps indulges Anderson Cooper in some watersports and Dexter makes a 'bitch move.' Plus: the secret of Tina Fey's scar, revealed!
In
this room there are only stereotypes, or something like that. Typical,
obvious types, codified by the names (epithets) they bear, all sort of
timeless and apt and yet musty like the players from commedia dell'arte,
whatever that is. There is the slattern, the drunk, the miser — all sitting around a wobbly table with their wobbly tankards and their cobbled boots. They talk a lot of shit, loudly and louder, across the room, sitting at a wooden table scrimshawed with the bored knife doodlings of men or women bolder and angrier than the coward. There he is, alone in the corner, with his snifter of applejack and his wobbly heart.
promotion
The room stinks of flatulence and shame. The coward nervously eyes the slattern, no, not the slattern, as he has for most of the evening, but, now, the buffoon. He eyes the buffoon who is performing another sordid jig for the benefit of the slattern. When the buffoon finishes, instead of a curtsy, as he ended his last unappreciated jiggy waltz, the buffoon finishes this time by untrousering himself to expose his ripe, boil-pocked behind. Before the slattern quite realizes his intention, it is accomplished, as the buffoon backs impetuously beyond the parameters of the slattern's zone of personal space and then beyond even that, so the slattern falls into her companions, the miser, who likewise seeking egress from the buffoon's intruding cheeks falls into the drunk, who, being drunk, having disinhibited his own persnickety zone of personal space, reaches across and slaps the buffoon's behind. And what did the buffoon do when he shoved his ass in the booth? Why, he farted, what else. Directly into the slattern's plate of mussels (cold, mostly shelled, but still). This is what the buffoon did. This is what the buffoon does.
The
shameful thing was the thing he could only hide with feigned madness
and indecent
propositions.
The buffoon is the prima donna of shame. The buffoon would like to express this to the coward, to the drunk, but mostly to the slattern. Perhaps the coward understands. Even in these last few seconds before tankards are spilled and the buffoon's teeth are knocked from his swollen bowl-cut head (he is wall-eyed, he has unbecoming dimples), before he is unceremoniously thrown out onto the dirt path winding lazily through the village, a village in the glade of an aspen forest, a village strewn with moldy haycocks and hay-bearing conveyances awaiting repair, etc., a mere piss-stop on the way to the castle (so overrated by Fodor's), it occurs to the coward that, if you're still with me, he envies the buffoon. No, I tell you it's true. The coward envies the buffoon because part of him wishes that he too were brave enough to fart on the slattern's plate of mussels. To fart or piss on or at least near or at the very, very least in plain view of the slattern. So that, quite simply, she might smell his piss and his farts. Vicariously, the thought makes him giddy. But then, being a coward, he plummets back down into his familiar, smoldering mood of shame. But the buffoon does it. It's what the buffoon does.
If only the buffoon had the presence of mind (before he lost his teeth) to reflect how the shame of the coward's inaction was actually not so different from the shame of his own perverse acting out, or, if you will, overacting, meaning that, of course, neither the acting out nor the not-acting-out were the real source of shame at all. The act is just a way to prevent the slattern from seeing the truly indelible shameful thing. Which is...
(You all know what, surely.)
Which is, which was the thing he could only hide with his ugly jigs and his evil humor, with feigned madness and doubletalk, with preemptive idiocy, with insensibility and indecent propositions, with crass chaos, with bad taste, with a dirty tunic and unlaced boots, with unbecoming nicknames for his genitals, for her genitals, for her breasts, for her twat, for his pee-pee, and so, now, with the village mongrels snapping at his heels, having said goodbye to his teeth, he performs one last maudlin display of contrition for his gruesome antics, with bipolar sobs, insincere suicide threats, with diversions meant to disguise the true source of his wretchedness. Ah, yes. The coward and the buffoon would agree if only there were words; the true source, the true source, the source, here it is, and how. n°
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jay Kirk's work has appeared in Harper's Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, Chicago Reader, Saturday Night, and The Nation.
Secular Intercourse by Jay Kirk
Memoirs of an undercover Christian missionary in Russia.
, featuring curious yet marvelous infusions of cucumber and rose petal.
