some experts begin referring to the vagrant, drug-addled blind bards simply as “Severed Bard-Heads.” And a strange idea began to take root in the public imagination—that these severed bard-heads are gathered by itinerant children toting surplus NBA ball bags and sold to “processors” for only several rupees a head. Then the severed bard-heads are crushed in a kind of wine press, resulting in a “juicy pulp,” to which is added the spit of the horniest, hairiest, chubbiest, and most uneducated subproletarian women in that particular town or village (aka “ La Felina ’s Angels”). Enzymes in their saliva catalyze various chemical processes that culminate in what we today call “hallucinogenic Gravy.”
Some experts devote entire careers to the study of a single scene. For example, the unusually lachrymose (albeit highly ritualized) scene between Ike and his father at a restaurant, when Ike ’s father says to him something to the effect of “I hate to speak ill of the dead, but your mother was a fat, sweaty, uneducated, subproletarian woman who didn’t have clue one. ” And Ike indicates that he is weeping by slowly touching his sleeve to his forehead. And the father, noting this, says, “You know, I just realized something.…My father said almost the exact same thing to me at a restaurant when I was your age.” And then the father slowly touches his sleeve to his forehead. Or Ike ’s lengthy and disjointed conversation with La Felina at Port Newark about whether Rachel Lee , the Korean-American mastermind of the “Bling Ring” (the gang of well-off Valley kids who burglarized the homes of Paris Hilton , Lindsay Lohan , Orlando Bloom , and Audrina Patridge , a regular on the reality show The Hills who famously complained after the burglary that “They took…jeans made to fit my body to my perfect shape”), constitutes a new kind of anarchist insurrectionary, a “Neo-Bandito” representing perhaps the new “lumpen celebutante,” or whether she’s just someone slavishly in thrall to the celebrities she admired, etc. (This colloquy all by itself is considered by some to be a stand-alone mini-epic.) And there are some experts who devote entire careers to the study of a brief vignette or a single passage: the God Rikidozen absently tapping a Sharpie on the lip of a coffee mug, and the unvarying cadence of that tap-tap-tap becoming the basis for the standard 124 beats-per-minute in house music; or the Dwarf Goddess La Muñeca turning her mortal girlfriend, Chief Warrant Officer Francesca DiPasquale , into a macadamia nut, a jai alai ball, and then 100,000 shares of Schering-Plough stock; or when Bosco Hifikepunye makes Mi-Hyun fifty feet tall and turns Lenin ’s corpse and Ted Williams ’s cryonically preserved head into anal sex toys for her; or when Ike says to the God of Money, Doc Hickory , “Can I ask you a stupid question? You don’t find me dour, do you?” and Doc Hickory ’s like, “Dour?” and Ike goes, “Yeah, y’know, humorless,” and Doc Hickory ’s like, “I know what dour means. I’m just wondering why you’re asking me,” and Ike goes, “Because I heard that Mogul Magoo told Bosco Hifikepunye that he thinks I’m all, like, dour and shit”; or when Shanice gets Lady Rukia to get XOXO to sabotage Ike ’s daughter when she’s taking her tenth-grade math final and answering the question “If each of ‘Octomom’ Nadya Suleman ’s octuplets also have eight children and then each of their children have eight children and each of their children have eight children, etc., how many offspring would there be in eight generations?”; or Candace Hilligoss getting out of the bathtub in Carnival of Souls (to creepy organ music); or Ike inviting a gob of phlegm to a concert. And then there are those experts who devote entire careers to the study and minute exegesis of a single line. And among these particular experts who were entranced with the phrase “severed
Maggie Brendan
Barbara O'Connor
Jan Washburn
Terri Blackstock
Norah Simone
Barry Kemp
G.P. Taylor
Alan Cumyn
Linda Barnes
Lisa Jackson