“Let me show you my work,” they say, opening a portfolio in a storm.
It’s plenty brilliant, but it’s not like they’ve been punching
the clock down at the smelter for six months.
“My work,” they continue, “attempts to trapeze the stigmata that
violates the hierarchies and higher Archies Comics which serialize the
tenderloin medallions of our jack-boated & peeper-jack rabbits” [sic].
They smell like every blundering variety of onion—yellow, red,
white, sauteed—simultaneously.
One wishes they’d engage in ablutions, even back-alley
ablutions, you know, “work” a bar of soap into a lather in order to exfoliate a
few olfactory outlets.
“I try to work every day”, they add, if “to work” equates with
menacing glances issued upon the skyline from the boxy confines of a
dumpster-dove armchair.
The rejection of the treatise, the tilt of the beret, the
ankle-height of the denim, the adjustment of the mustaches, the futility of
the effort to vanquish an indefatigable booger.
“My opus is to myopia,” they say, “as my oeuvre is to my oeuf,
as my opiate is to my Boeuffy the Vampire Slayer.”
Whew.
The work weak, the work ethnic, the work oat.
The scene shifts to a $3.00 coffee tab.
“I call this my work Visa,” they say, producing a credit card.
It’s a miracle the transaction goes through, it’s a miracle they
pick up the tabby, [sic].
It’s a miracle they merely cull the heard of hearing.
complaint week 2015 editorial schedule:
October 26: The Democrat Machine
October 27: Artists and Writers Who Say “My Work”
October 28: GWU Fires Adjunct Creative Writing Faculty
October 29: Washington, D.C. Manchester City Bros
October 30: People Who Don’tListen to Music
Image: "Goethe in the Roman Campagna" by Tischbein.
ReplyDeleteOccasionally one still hears "oeuvre" or "opus" and a slight hint of emesis roils in the mouth. And yet artists and writers who actually toil - not necessarily in the smelter, or forge, or kiln, but perhaps in the office, hospital or shop - are often mistaken by a jury of peers for elusiveness/reclusiveness/hermeticism: "Are you still working?" Makes one certainly want to pick up the tabby. Which I do, daily.
ReplyDeleteThere's an Hors d'Oeuvre or an Oeuvre or M'Ouevre if it's like hey bro, move yr oeuvre, it's on my big toe! The Opus of the Lupus (critter) would be some kind of like huge buffalo or Bison burger. You'd have to ask the Lupus through his wolf whistle & epistle. But I digress. Never let it be sez that Hthr Fllr duddn't pick up the tabby because like it's a whole lotta tabby not to mention other catz. What I wanna know about is this shop. I don't hang out at no shop. I'm strictly a high ABV lupus which means I have stout dreams of the near horizon.
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