This page was twinly inspired by the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and by my wish for a good night’s rest for my Girlfriend, Denise.
Words:
Come we to see the fall of Dusk benign
And on a slumbered Dream-repast we dine
Lash-fluttering & rest: a night’s success
Mementos that the sainted Martyrs bless.
Good night, my dearest Denise…
This is a genuine 15 by 15 diagonally symmetrical crossword puzzle, constructed by my genuine self after two days of tribulation. It is now seven minutes to midnight, and I’m determined to publish today. If it is too hard to read, please let me know and I will transcribe post-publication.
Here’s a clean grid for solvers:
Above is a playful riff-o-rama on the Probabilistic Quantum Multiverse, wherein for every way things CAN happen, they DO, and each possibility gets its own private universe. There is no one acrostic poem above, but here is one variation:
Grant this logorithmic soul
Righteous lack of wrongish troll. O
Isthmus straitens bric-a-brac
Deviathan devoids the rack.
I thought I’d coined a new word with Deviathan (quickdef: Deviant Leviathan), but I find to my dismay there are over 13,000 search results. [sad face]
Though this is playful, it is also a try at Art with a capital A. The illustration is a visual pun for Gridlock. It is a forbidding, Cartesian-coordinated box, and visual pun #2 is that all my subversive/versive thinking is done outside the box. Plus, the bottom row of boxes is a wordless, step-by-step lesson in how to draw a 15 by 15 grid freehand with nothing but paper and pencil. This is handy for crossword puzzle constructors who want to go Commando.
How? Why? Let me close both wordlessly and wordfully with this work in progress:
There was a reflection in Metal, which meant
Half-haloes of light-sourced utensil gave flash
Engrossing attention through elegant sense
Maintaining the contra to All flash is CRASS
And lifting the energy drabness let drop
New angles enable new viewpoint: hey presto
If grabbing the O makes a Cap of a Capo
Now what might become of a Halo? Some question
In September of 1966, Sandy Koufax was winding up a season in which he would win 27 games and receive his third Cy Young award–and play his last game as a professional baseball player.
In September of 1966, Sandy Tolmachoff was enrolled in the 7th grade of a school so new it had not a name but a designation: Unit VI. Her homeroom was Mr. Gasser’s Room 55. (Gasser rhymed with Crosser; sometimes he was, and would crack a long stick across a desk to silence a rowdy classroom.)
In September of 1966, I was a sickly child, well shy of five feet and just north of 58 pounds. Sandy Koufax had been my hero for about three years, and I’d admired him wholeheartedly since October 6, 1965, when he took himself off the roster for Game 1 of the World Series, owing to its taking place on Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. (I wasn’t Jewish, but as fate would have it I’d read a book about a Little League team of Jewish boys, and when I mentioned it to my mother, she reaffirmed that I could be any religion I chose; so I was imagining being Jewish, eventually having my Bar Mitzvah, etcetera–then Sandy Koufax’s momentous decision came along.)
It was also September of 1966 that I met Sandy Tolmachoff. She was a fellow Room 55er. I spoke to her for the first time in the Unit VI cafeteria. She was wearing a pale green turtleneck blouse with striped indentations–not pleats but I never learned the technical term. The blouse suited her fair complexion and arresting eyes.
WOW, she was pretty. GOSH, she was sweet and friendly. I was smitten big time…
…but then I was gone for awhile. On September 22nd I was a patient at St. Joseph’s Hospital. A myriad of airway-blocking polyps was excised from my nasal cavity by the Ear/Nose/Throat specialist Dr. Alan Frerichs, and a yard of packing material was shoehorned into my nose. Gauze and surgical tape held it in place and made me look like I’d had not a polypectomy but a nose-ectomy. When the next-door-neighbor kids came to see me as I convalesced, they left quickly, aghast and shaken.
In time Dr. Frerichs removed the packing material. That packing material removal produced the most pain I had ever experienced in my life.
In time I returned to school. Alas, Sandy Koufax had retired, his career ended due to arthritis in his pitching arm. It was about three months before his 31st birthday.
But the other Sandy, fair of face and bright and ethereal, graced the Unit VI campus till her grade-school graduation, and then attended Glendale High School, just like I did. We are friends to this day, and I last saw her just last year at a class reunion, in the company of her easy-grinning, bursting-with-vitality, congenial husband Bill “BK” Kalpakoff, the man who made her just as much a Sandy K. as my hero Sandy Koufax. Sandy and BK have raised a passel of beautiful children in their nearly forty years of marriage, and their shared life is full of travel and fun. Since their children had to be born, just as my own daughter had to be born, to make the Universe correct with their existence, I am ultimately glad I never confessed to Sandy the crush I’d had on her in the 7th grade. But I will never forget her, even if I live to be forever, and even if I forget Sandy Koufax.
Here is a work in progress. It is Stuck, has been for over a month, but it is a good Stuck. There’s a book by the brilliant physicist Freeman Dyson called Weapons and Hope, now dated in a way but still vital and worth reading, that spoke of Stuckness. He also wrote Disturbing the Universe, which rocks autobiographically.
One hand Gives, the other Takes. What is Given is a blank check. It may represent indefinite wealth or unlimited potential. (To further digress, the awesome meteor-logical Stephanie Abrams, viewable in the wee hours, is often partnered with Al Roker. I wonder if she’s ever deconstructed the word POTENTIAL to POTENT-I-AL. She well could.)
A woman torques and cracks a bone in her foot. That Hurts. She then goes to an Urgent Care center and gets support-booted and caned in the nicest possible way. That Heals. (That’s based on the real event in the real life of my real girlfriend, who rocks every bit as much as does Freeman Dyson, inventor of the Dyson Sphere.)
This is catch-circling and confusing, so it perfectly fits what Cyndi Lauper sang, once upon a time after time:
Caught up in circles
Confusion is nothing new…
My thoughts have wanderlust. And wonderlove. I am unshaven, but even after I shave I’ll be a work in progress at least as long as I live.
Here is yet another hand study, in tandem with a novelty acrostic for entertainment purposes only. Many of us “draw-ers” started out by drawing Hands; the only more fascinating anatomical subject matter for the beginning artist is Eyes. I’d estimate I’ve done at least a thousand Hand exercises in the last fifty years; and this time I did it to warm up for a far more important project, one that has taken several days and may yet take several more. Meanwhile, there’s this, and these words:
Hellacious flying out to…Montenegro
And balking Balkans ain’t enslaving…Slav
Nor is the color range from Taupe to…mauve
Didactic Dr Frankenstein with…Igor
Choose your weapons with subtlety: live the life you were meant to live, seek the love you were meant to have, befriend with generosity and heartiness. Your weapons will then choose you.
Here are the words:
Of weaponry medicinal as legal marijuana
Remember barrels gun & pen stick out like Yucatán
Deliver us from pistol-packers radical & chic
Newer warfare-wagers use a Kindness-based technique
This challenge came from the realization that the letters in the name Benito Mussolini divided evenly into three-character strings, and if a dot were added to the last one they would all be labelable, and it might be a worthwhile challenge to make the whole mess make sense and work.
(The dot isn’t really needed; an earlier “concept rough” included an illustration of the Isaac Newton Institute, in Cambridge. But .INI enabled the use of a dot as a period, and therefore preservation of the rhyme scheme. In similar problem-solving fashion I’d previously exploited the diaeresis over the i in Anaïs Nin’s name to become two-thirds of an ellipsis in the acrostic.)
Long story a little longer: together again for the first time, we have Ben the rat from the movie bearing his name (and a young and relatively unwarped Michael Jackson singing the last line of the song, with Ben’s tail doing double-duty as the pointer of a word balloon; I’m absurdly proud of this visual pun); Lance Ito, the judge in the O.J. Simpson case; Mus musculus, the common mouse (the word Muscle is from this Latin word for Mouse); Sol Weinstein, comedy writer extraordinaire; and a closeup of an .INI (pronounced “innie” or “eeny”) file. .INI files, also and less confusingly known as initialization files, are bits of software that execute upon startup of the computer. Comment lines, which are ignored by the executable, begin with a semicolon.
Does it all make sense? To me it does, but then again, FINNEGANS WAKE made perfect sense to James Joyce, the rest of us not so much. I will say that this page is a tribute to the survival-triumph of the Jews past the Holocaust, among other things. The mouse and rat refer to Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning graphic novel MAUS, and derogatory drawings of Jews in Nazi Germany, respectively. Sol Weinstein, may he rest in peace, created Israel Bond, “Agent Oy Oy Seven,” among MANY, MANY other light-hearted, brilliant bits of schtick. I was saddened to learn of his passing when I looked for a photo source to do his portrait. And Lance Ito presided over a miscarriage of justice that still staggers me. (Don’t take my word for it. Read Vincent Bugliosi’s book on the subject, or ask Marilyn vos Savant, who’s listed in Guinness as “world’s highest IQ” and who’s called O.J. Simpson an “acquitted killer.”)
Here are the words to the quintuple acrostic:
Believe it or not, mice & rats can be fun. I
Enjoy how their startups are comically run
No rushes to judgment, no riots, no lie, just bagels & lox & a boxed Warr Shu Gai
The page begins with the Quadratic Formula, which, in my younger and more phony-baloney days, I tried to impress my then-girlfriend, next-wife, the former Joni Froehling, by deriving, via the “completing the square” trick and other manipulation. She is no longer married to me, and who can blame her?
A masterful Valley of the Sun poet, Jed Allen, gave me a copy of his awe-inspiring chapbook THE FEAR OF ALGEBRA in appreciation of my reading of his poem “Zero Yard” at the Caffeine Corridor poetry event more than a year ago. Ever since, I have wanted to return the favor, and with this page I hope I have.
The words to the acrostic:
Attitude adjustments sometimes end up on a slab
Lose a Johnny Weismuller–or was it Buster Crabbe
Gain a Tarzan wannabe–a grey-stoked stufféd shirt
Err if you must on Caution’s side: man’s slaughter, shy of Murder
But in the diagram above as x is offed by a
Really not the culprit, who will always get away
Alias: The Solver, of manipulative manna
& a wealth of victims whose mystique is drowned in channel
The theme and meaning of the poem and its related ancillary material are left as an exercise for the student. Ironic hint: spelling out a solution murders Mystery. [enigmatic smile; fade to black]
One with Clay, Image and Text 