MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

Anglophone readers!  In response to recent comments regarding asshole vs. arsehole, listen – this whole thing is a mystery to me. Or rather, a series of mysteries.

1. The first OED quotation for “arse-hole” (slang) is by an American: “This place [sc. Los Angeles] is the one true and original arse-hole of creation. It is at least nine times as bad as I expected” (H. L. Mencken, 1926).

2. Dylan Thomas apparently went both ways, because in addition to the shocking “asshole” quote of 1935 (see previous post), the OED also lists the following: “This arsehole of the universe… this… fond sad Wales” (1950).  What happened between 1935 and 1950?  The consolidation of Stalinism?

3. As for this gem from New Zealand, “It’s absolute comfort from arse-hole to breakfast-table,” Landfall (1948)… I like it very much, but what does it mean?

4. Personally, I first learned the word “arse” from a Canadian-American(!) author, Gordon Korman, in a novel called A Semester in the Life of a Garbage Bag, which includes a humorous acronym-related misadventure: a girl creates the acronym ARSE and, not realizing what it means, puts it on posters all over the school. It is an American school. Nonetheless, one of the girl’s friends knows what “arse” means, and changes the acronym to EARS.

5. I loved A Semester in the Life of a Garbage Bag at age 12, to the extent that I recently bought a used copy and reread it. I still thought it was great. For this reason, I tried, twice, at intervals a month apart, to post a 5-star review of Semester on Amazon (part of my campaign of posting 5-star reviews of books by living authors).  Well, here’s the biggest mystery of all: my review has yet to show up on the site! All the other reviews appeared immediately, so I have no idea what’s going on. Is it that hard for Amazon to accept my love of A Semester in the Life of a Garbage Bag? Maybe they’re still busy comparing the review(s) to the rest of my body of work?

6. You’re going to think I’m crazy but I just looked on Amazon right now, and the Garbage Bag review is up – but it’s the review I wrote yesterday, and it’s dated June 28. I feel like I’m reading The Moonstone or something. Seriously, does any of this make sense to any of you people? Because if so, man, you’re on your own.

Concerned readers! I was deeply moved by the recent international outpouring of sentiment, both pro and con, regarding the potential use of “douchebag” in my forthcoming essay on Dante. In the past week I’ve given a lot of consideration to the different views that were expressed. Frankly, I don’t think I’ve struggled more over any single mot juste in my whole career.

At first, I was feeling pretty good about “sleazebags.”  So was my editor.  He said he had intended “assholes” less as an actual substitution for “douchebags,” than as “a prompt to a third way”—and we had found it!

As the days went by, though, I started to feel less confident.  I was increasingly bothered by the connotation, with “sleazebags,” of criminal slickness—an issue raised by several readers. What if “the thousand and one sleazebags of Florence” was understood to play on some image of Italian corruption or, worse yet, greasiness?  That was the last thing I wanted!  And didn’t “sleazebags” designate a particular kind of behavior or vocation, by contrast with the more existential “douchebags” (the inevitable douchebags, regardless of class or income)?

I began casting about for an alternative.  Although I did appreciate the many piquant suggestions I received from readers, none, to my ear, was quite right in context. That is, the historical moment may come when it sounds OK to refer to “Homer, Moses, Judas, Jesus, Brunetto Latini, Beatrice, all the thousand and one asswizards of Florence,” but I’m pretty sure it isn’t here yet.

One night I lay awake “brainstorming” about all the nimrods, ass-hats, jerks, jerk-offs, knuckleheads, fuckups, fuckwits, et alii, ad nauseam, but only succeeded in giving myself terrible dreams about an exboyfriend.

In the morning, I realized it was time to reevaluate the objections to “douchebag.” These seemed to fall into two categories:

1. Shelf-life: We should avoid fad words of recent coinage, because they might go obsolete.
2. Staleness/ annoyingness: We should not join annoying, repetitive people in overusing their favorite words.

Interestingly, Objection 2 has been around since at least 2006 when Gawker called a moratorium on “douchebags,” offering, as an reward for the reader who came up with the best alternative, a bottle of Balneol Perianal Cleansing Lotion (“it may not seem like much, but according to a commenter at drugstore.com, ‘it will last at least 6 to 8 months even in the most busy of households’”). What was the result? Choads, twatwaffles, snatches… nothing suitable. The unclaimed bottle of Balneol ended up in the Gawker lavatory.

In 2008-09, the death of “douchebag” was again announced/ called for by various publications, on revamped charges: the word was not only “completely played out,” but was now being bandied about for purposes other than its “true intention”; “the douches themselves” had sinisterly coopted it for use against less deserving candidates; its very transcendent historic-philosophical conditions had expired, along with the financial bubble that brought us the platonic douchebags; etc.

Oh readers—it’s a thankless, dreary task to separate the issues at hand. But did I go into this line of work for the yucks?  Let’s start with the “shelf life” objection. Here, I think there’s been a conflation of normative and prescriptive: people say that douchebag is on the brink of extinction, because they believe it should be on the brink of extinction. Yet the very insistence that it should be extinct is proof that it’s still here.  People have been trying to exterminate this word for 5+ years, and not even the massive incentive of a bottle of Balneol could elicit a viable alternative… these things mean something.

As for overuse: since when is being used a bad thing, for a word?  “Asshole” is obviously used way more than “douchebag,” and nobody says it’s time to retire “asshole.” The view seems to be rather that “asshole” is time-tested—a classic.

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Long-suffering readers!  As I unpacked my hard-won suitcase earlier this week, I was delighted to re-encounter a “bookmark” I had been using last month – a gift from a very kind Slavic professor at Boston College (where I had the honor of giving a Lowell humanities lecture in October), who had found it in the BC library copy of The Possessed.  ”I thought you might like to have it,” she told me, handing over this small slip of cardboard, adding that perhaps I shouldn’t over-interpret whatever it said about the possibly bilious condition of my readership:

As I turn this box top over in my hands, hoping that the loss of the UPC barcode didn’t prevent any of my esteemed readers from getting any kind of mail-in rebate, I am moved to think of the many and diverse uses that a book may fill for its public, if it is lucky enough to find one in this world.  Appreciated readers!  This Thanksgiving season, I am grateful to all those who have ever found in my work anything to bring them comfort, of any degree or kind.  To paraphrase the immortal Onegin:

…Whatever end
You may have sought in these reflections—
Tumultuous, fond recollections,
Relief from gassy pain and bloating,
Live tableaux, bons mots for quoting,
Or maybe merely faults of grammar—
God grant that in my careless art…
You’ve found at least a crumb or two.
And so let’s part; farewell—adieu!

Having recently learned that two independent Google searchers arrived at my blog via the search phrase “elif enima,” I decided to try this search myself… and discovered that My Life and Thoughts is the very first hit!  w00t!  In the spirit of good sportsmanship, though, I would like to cite some of the runners-up in the competitive “elif enima” informational sector:

Unal, E
Unal E (Elif) …. Management of enema tip-induced rectourethral fistula with gluteus maximus flap: report of a case. [My paper] O Krand, E Unal.

Islam Will Replace Collapsing American Empire – alt.religion.islam …
Jul 23, 2008 …. Up your ass mohammad – Elif air ab tizak! …. As the old Arab proverb goes, “My enema’s enema is my friend”….

Atlas Shrugs: Turkey’s Re-Islamization
When its hands, feet and chest are pressed Elif recites various sura from the Koran in … Accessories to Elif doll, such as a toy laptop, teach toddler to …

Well, I wish Elif Unal the best of luck with what sounds like a fascinating program of research.  And I am grateful to learn the old Arab proverb, “My enema’s enema is my friend.”  It must be a very severe rectourethral fistula indeed, if even your enema needs its own enema.  But I was most interested by the item about the Elif doll (cf. Barbie is out, Elif is in) on Atlas Shrugs, a blog about Islam in Turkey.  (Where, you might be wondering, do enemas enter (so to speak) into this subject?  Check out the 110 posts tagged Kofi Annan a.k.a. Coffee Enema, e.g.: “The UN and more specifically Kofi Enema is a Jihadi tool.”)

Patient readers! In explanation for the long silence, let me tell you that I have been researching and writing a really time-consuming article, the precise subject of which should remain a wonderful surprise to those of you to whom I am not always personally unburdening myself about it, but, it involves the Russian Orthodox church. This is how I found my way to the Interfax Religion site: a resource which I cannot recommend warmly enough to my dear readers.  It is, unlike my blog, updated many times a day, with important stories such as, “Three Bronze Angels to Carry the First Monument to Enema in Zheleznovodsk“:

Stavropol, June 16, Interfax – The monument to one of the most wide-spread medical treatments will open in health resort town of Zheleznovodsk.

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