1. gnome — general maxim, aphorism, terse saying with a moral
Since, like Polonius in Hamlet, his speech seems to consist primarily of gnomes and clichés, I doubt he would be able to follow this play’s sustained allegory.
2. shirtwaist — tailored blouse for women
The old-fashioned establishment did not allow Jane to dine in her dress, but insisted she wear a shirtwaist and skirt.
3. calash — light carriage seating two or four persons. In Canada, a two-wheeled vehicle with a single seat for two, and space for the driver to sit on the splashboard.
“Never mind your carriage, sir, as my man stands ready with the calash just outside.”
4. oliguria — scanty production of urine
While oliguria may be caused merely by insufficient fluid intake, it may also be a symptom of renal failure or other serious urinary tract issues.
5. minster — church of a monastery; also gen. any large church
The crypt containing the abbot’s bones was directly beneath the chancel of the minster, but there was no entrance from within the church itself.
6. burin — engraving tool for use on metal
Of course, many of the actual drawings of Pieter Brueghel are lost to us, but we still can enjoy them through the engravings made by the burins of such artists as the Dutch publisher Philip Galle.
7. osier — willow twigs much used in basket-work
Her grandfather’s old creel turned out to be quite a fine handmade osier specimen, somewhat bleached by the sun but in very good shape overall.
8. misoneism — hatred of novelty or change
“Do you really believe that the desire to preserve some ideas, ideals, and artifacts of the past is mere misoneism?”
9. pomology — study and praxis of fruit-culture
Though one could make the technical case that one is merely a subset of the other, do not confuse viticulture with pomology.
10. paludal — of or pertaining to marshes
The Nazis once planned to drain the Pripet Marshes in order to deny the Russian and Polish partisans a hideout among the vast paludal wetlands.
1. parergon — embellishment, thing subordinate to main subject
Burgess maintains that the final chapter of A Clockwork Orange was essential to the novel and should never have been removed from the American edition, but Kubrick and many other readers have found it an unconvincing parergon.
2. adust — burnt up, scorched
But under the noonday sun our desert camp became unbearable even in the scanty shade as the temperature rose and rose until the very air was adust and seemed painful to breathe into our lungs.
3. shend — revile, scold
By every voice in the mainstream media his actions were shent, yet he remained unashamed.
4. effluvium — vapor or exhalation perceptible only to the sense of smell, esp. one that is noxious or disgusting
The community break room was bright and clean, yet opening the refrigerator released a repulsive effluvium reminiscent of both spoiled milk and dying flowers.
5. larrup — flog, beat, thrash
If he comes ’round here again, I’ll larrup him until he cannot stand upright.
6. iritis — inflammation of the iris
The cortisone he used for treating his chronic iritis had an expired several months past, but he swore that the medicament would still be “just fine”.
7. costermonger — person who sells fruit and vegetables from a street cart; (fig.) hawker of any wares
Virtue is of so little regard in these costermongers‘ times that true valor is turned bear-herd.
Henry IV, Part 2, Act I, Scene 2
8. ochlocracy — mob-rule
Fans of the movie Heavy Metal will recall the paean to ochlocracy by Black Sabbath (from the eponymous album) used in the story of the mute warrior maiden Taarna.
9. equerry — officer in charge of the horses of a royal or an exalted noble; groom
We found the body of the equerry in the stall belonging to the lord’s prize charger; we could not find the massive black Percheron anywhere upon the grounds.
10. fribble — to act aimlessly; to trifle, to behave frivolously; a trifler
He seemed to me to be the worst type of fribble: stupid enough to be convinced of his innate ability and insight, yet powerfully connected enough to cause real damage.
I follow Ralph Waldo Emerson’s dictum to not read books less than a year old for two reasons, and the second is not laziness. Caligula For President proved (in both senses) the second reason, because reading this book now convulses and repulses in a way it could not have done if read when originally published, during the twilight years of the last Bush presidency. This unclassifiable book might then have been only an enchanting exercise in genius, a staggering indictment of the American Dream turned Nightmare under the brute fist of Cheney and company. The cloud of hope might have made my reaction a mere chuckle, no more. To read this book now, however … what can I say? We already have grown nostalgic for Bush fils, an eventuality that I would have believed impossible a few dozen moons ago. But I found myself going further, furtively wishing that the protagonist of Cintra Wilson’s magnum opus, the Roman emperor Caligula himself, could somehow become president, as she outlines in this funny, depressing, brilliant, rollicking, educational satire.
Do not say, “Personally, I am as worthless as a bolt, but if I stop being an isolated bolt and start gathering with my equally undistinguished and bolt like neighbors, we are, collectively, a big sack of bolts that can hit things harder.”
You are not a bolt. You are a wonderful special individual with talents and hopes and dreams of great fortune, fame and luxury. You are going to sing on television and become rich beyond your wildest dreams just by writing upbeat affirmations on Post-its and sticking them on your bathroom mirror.
Caligula explains just how easy it is to manipulate and control us dolts … er, bolts
As emperor, you can be paranoid, corrupt, sadistic, drunk and incompetent, as long as you have a lot of very rich friends, a ridiculously aggressive approach to spin control and a highly fortified and corruptible private army.
Caligula stands strong for freedom … or something
Reading this work a decade after Caligula channeled it through Cintra Wilson allows us to perceive the amazing psychic prophetic power revealed within its pages. Its prophecy is not like that famous novel about the gigantic steam ship Titan (although the subtitle of The Wreck of the Titan, or Futility, might be apropos here). Rather its prescience is like that found in John Irving’s novel A Prayer for Owen Meany, where the future is perfectly revealed, only the earlier recognition and interpretation is distorted by viewing it through the imperfect lens of the past. What was dimly limned in the mirror Ms. Wilson held up to our decrepit body politic is now clearly seen in the present, where the ashes left behind by our incinerated hopes and dreams serve only to clog further our Cloaca Maxima which already cannot get rid of the fatberg of our corrupt septic excellence.
Here, for example, we see the effect of the DOJ’s OLC opinion stating the president cannot be prosecuted (the opinion itself another gift of the Bush presidency) in Caligula’s description of the uses of the Unitary Executive Theory:
If you wanna be a princeps legibus solutus–a princeps not bound by the laws–it helps if everyone else around you with any kind of executive power gets really confused by some overt proclamation of the legality of what you’re doing and therefore does nothing but stand around haplessly with their thumbs up their eunuchs.
Caligula explains John Yoo’s Unitary Executive Theory and its effects
Or this example of our now accepted disregard for the post-born child:
Due to the dictates of your capitalist economy and the corrupt mechanisms now set in the stone tables of your national laws, you are already helping me kill small children on a daily basis.
More hyperbole become prophecy
Or even outdoing Nostradamus with this entirely topical vision of remaking military uniforms to hearken back to the glory days of World War II:
I plan to increase voluntary enlistment numbers in the U.S. military by bringing back the inarguable sadomasochistic flair of Nazi tailoring.
Caligula — like you — loves a man in a uniform
Driving home listening to the East Village Opera Company’s rendition of “Un Bel Di” I was struck by the one missing note in Cintra Wilson’s prophetic book. ‘Twas not the leering dominance of the InterWebs and AppSpaceBook that she failed to limn, nor the continued balkanization of ideology and interest. What her Caligula did not see as clearly as we can a decade after, is just how much self-loathing we Americans turn out to have, just how much we veritably hate, hate, hate the very idea and ideals of democracy itself. Though Caligula riffs on the failure of slave revolts and how the powerful always win again, he had no concept in this 2008 book of how we despise even the simplest premises of the government we learned of in grammar school (no matter how divorced those lessons were from the reality, a point that Caligula For President pounds into our thick though small skulls quite effectively).
Will Caligula detain me in prison indefinitely until I am finally given pellets of angel dust and led blindfolded into RFK Stadium to fight hyenas wearing nothing but a loincloth made of ham?
You don’t need to worry about that right now.
Concentrate on this: My techniques, while criminally insane, cut through a massive amount of bureaucratic red tape.
Caligula promises to bring Reality TV into the 1st Century
Indeed, I had only two complaints — both minor — about this work. First, I wish that Caligula — sorry, I mean Cintra Wilson — had spent just a little time talking about the dictator Sulla, and I wish that Ms. Wilson (or her publishers) had used the Oxford comma.
I told you they were minor complaints.
I found this book among my novels, pulled it down and put it on the “to read and decide whether to keep” pile, and eventually started to read it. It is not a novel — there’s far too much actual history in it, both of the Roman Empire and of the Bush père presidency. But it isn’t history either, since the Caligula we meet here is based on the most scurrilous attacks by the foremost character assassins among the ancients, if this golden boy emperor might be heard on Howard Stern. We might call it political science, though attacks against Bush 41 for presidential overreach have grown dated and stale like a country medley on the Lawrence Welk Show. Thus when Ms. Wilson — I mean Caligula — points out the nefarious incestuous relationships between Cheney and the moguls who manipulated California’s energy market while creating the energy policy that was a blueprint for invading Iraq, and concludes by reminding us all that Cheney and Karl Rove distracted everyone from the news about this when it broke by blaming Gray Davis, who was recalled and replaced with The Terminator, we only think it quaint. Quaint and sad, particularly Caligula’s last words on the subject:
Nobody thinks about this major crime committed against the people of California anymore, because so many other crimes have been committed since then that nobody really remembers that one anymore.
Caligula said this eleven years ago. SAD! No, seriously, it’s quite sad.
So though it makes me sad, I will be keeping this book. I will keep it in the “Other” section of my library, alongside such luminous works as The Ship of Fools by Brant, Le Pétomane, and The Night Climbers of Cambridge. Also on those shelves is the spiritual ancestor (assuming there is any spirit left in this old world) of this book, the classic Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. An appropriate neighbor, since Caligula For President made me understand for the first time why Hunter S. pulled a Seneca the Younger and bought his own farm.
Realpolitik is not for the twee
True dat
I wish I could say this book lifts the spirit as it destroys illusions through the magic power of its fantastic style, just as the works of that other Thompson, Jim, had their lack of morals somewhat obviated by the damn fine writing. But I cannot. Truth be told, in neither case can the truly wonderful style and powerful writing belie the underlying depression, despair, and eternal pit revealed in the writer’s words. And our current universe has fallen into an even deeper black hole than the center of Jim Thompson’s dark vision. Asking “Is there any hope?” only makes sense in a world where words and ideas have meaning, and to ask “Is there even any meaning?” is to recognize that the game is fixed, is over, and we lost every bet that was made for us before we were even born.
When your government stops bothering to lie to you, it seems like they just don’t care. It’s like letting the White House lawn turn brown and walking out to press conferences with a bottle of Seagram’s gin ‘n’ juice, wearing a polar fleece housecoat streaked with Egg Beaters and a shower cap and screaming unintelligible obscenities into the microphone. It gives You People the impression that your dictator isn’t even trying.
But Caligula cares, he really does. He just doesn’t care about You People.
Our only hope at this dark juncture may be the collapse of everything, though if that’s hope then we’re in deep trouble. What can be done? Nothing can be done. Not the nothing of nihilists secretly hoping they look cool, but true nothing. Caligula is promising Hopelessness, and “the good news is, you’re at least halfway there.” And this is why I highly recommend this book.
Oh, oh, look out … a march. On the streets! With big banners! Saying, STOP, BAD GOVERNMENT! STOP DOING THAT BAD, BAD THING!
Hold me, Mother! We must, as a governing body, stop doing immoral things immediately, or bisexual college girls with nose rings might wave colorful signs at us!
Caligula is simply terrified of your futile demonstrations
I very rarely recommend books — personal taste being so, well, personal and everything, and besides I have to admit that what I have isn’t exactly taste. But I am recommending this one strongly in spite of the fact that a) 97% of you will not like it. (It’s got a parental advisory sticker cowering in the corner of the room, sobbing quietly to itself.) And b) 97% of the remaining 3% will merely find that it confirms and reinforces your already extant despair. But! It is my hope — “Not dead, yet!” — that the remaining 0.09% may discover some path out of our Slough of Despond which does not lead directly to Hell, and I pray you please tell me where and whither that path lies.
I will simply try to ignore the fact that I do not have anywhere near enough friends — neither online nor in real life — to make 0.09% of that number anything other than a very close approximation of Zero.
1. embonpoint — healthy plumpness; fleshy part of the body, esp. of the bosom
Though two decades had passed, she seemed just the same — well, a slight tendency to embonpoint perhaps, which was only heightened by the stately curves of her gown.
2. catarrh — secretions from the nose and eyes which accompany allergies or a cold
He always had had a rheumy constitution, and as rare as a sunny week in San Francisco was a week which found him unhampered by allergies, coughs, and catarrh.
3. melismatic — of song or melody, as opposed to recitative music
From a thousand karaoke bars and ten thousand videos sprang more and more devotees of the melismatic arts, though most had stronger faith than talent.
4. gandy dancer — member of a railroad work gang tasked with laying or maintaining track
Though men of every race worked as gandy dancers in the heyday of American rail, all were eventually replaced by machines.
5. oxter — (Scot. and N. Eng.) armpit
A trained pikeman kens well the weak points of an armoured knight, and will aim for the groin, oxter, and throat if he can get at them.
6. parenteral — administered systemically otherwise than through alimentary canal
The patient was given parenteral fluids to supplement the small amount of clear fluids she was able to ingest by mouth.
7. petard — small explosive device formerly used in warfare for breaching gates, doors, or walls
It matters not that they dropped the portcullis before we struck down the defenders at the gate, as our miners will make short work of it with but a single petard.
8. otiose — superfluous, useless; nugatory
One might well believe that our political news is merely an otiose dumb show designed rather to distract than to edify.
9. kettle — (Brit.) to confine to a small area as means of crowd control
As soon as the clock struck five, the police quickly kettled the demonstrators, leaving them only one exit route over an overpass heavily surveilled by the brute squad.
10. disbound — (of a book) having the binding removed or loose
It is extremely rare to find a disbound Dover edition, but this copy of Mumford’s The Brown Decades had only a strip of cardboard along the spine remaining to protect the still tight signatures.
I was confronted at the front desk by a rebarbative adolescent, if I can be excused the tautology, who claimed the right to review my credentials before passing me on to the vice principal.
2. compurgator — witness to an accused person’s innocence or truthfulness
From the Old English system of compurgators arose some elements of our modern jury system.
3. mangonel — old war engine for hurling large stones
Our ponderous catapults could not maintain the quick rate of fire that the mangonels of the enemy used to their great advantage.
4. apotelesm — the casting of a horoscope
Before his appointment as privy secretary he was required to submit his date of birth so that the court astrologer could provide the results of his apotelesm to the duke.
5. gallows tree — metal support to hold pot over kitchen fire
The big bad wolf found himself impaled upon the gallows tree when he entered the third little pig’s house through the brick chimney, which saved him from falling into the boiling water, but which burned his nether regions as it tore his groin.
6. merryandrew — buffoon, clown; assistant to a mountebank
Everybody plays the merryandrew sometimes, as the old song says.
7. quacksalver — imposter to the medical art
Surprisingly, the products of this quacksalver seemed to bring temporary relief to many sufferers, although this might have been due to the high alcohol content.
8. raree show — peep show; spectacle
The clickworthy ‘news’ apps have become the modern raree show, encouraging thousands to stare listlessly into their phones just as passerby in past times were lured into staring into the traveling barker’s box in search of the demonstrations of minuscule (and perhaps imaginary) circus fleas.
9. algesia — sensitivity to pain
Though one might think that we suffer due to our algesia, people who are born without this sensitivity usually die in childhood due to their inability to correctly identify and react to physical hazards.
10. prognathous — having protruding jaws
His profile seemed so prognathous that I doubted my spare motorcycle helmet would fit him.
You have shown yourself recreant before all assembled here, false to your duty and false to your word.
2. pruritus — itching, esp. with no visible cause
Of course, pruritus may manifest itself when merely mentioned, much in the manner of certain allergies.
3. fremescent — murmuring, increasingly noisy
Our lazy reverie upon the sleepy river was interrupted by a fremescent sound like distant thunder, which we finally realized came from a dangerous set of rapids athwart our course.
4. barratry — misconduct by ship’s master or crew against the interest of the shipowner
Joe and Bob got the captain good and drunk, locked him in his cabin, and then sailed the rusty tub to the Sandoval Islands where they sold the ship for scrap, adding barratry to their earlier mutiny.
5. haplopia — normal eyesight
In Kurt Vonnegut’s dystopian short story “Harrison Bergeron”, the eponymous protagonist is forced to wear distorting lenses to ‘handicap’ him for his haplopia.
6. vigneron — wine-grower
The Georgia colony during the days of Oglethorpe was fortunate to have the services of the Jewish vigneron and physician, Samuel Nunes.
7. obus — artillery shell
Making his way past the barbed wire and the obus, skirting the foxholes and the shell craters, he carried the kitten cradled within his gas mask bag towards the one remaining patch of greenery on the horizon.
Completely filled after the torrential rains, the 30-gallon bin carried two-and-a-half hundredweight of water, making it impossible to move until drained.
9. morbific — causing disease
Though your mother’s exhortation to bundle up lest you catch a cold has merit, the freezing weather has no morbific effect, rather its danger lies in the lessened resistance it imparts to your immune system.
10. discectomy — cutting out part or all of a spinal disc
Though he had tried to remain hopeful, he was pleased beyond all measure by how immediately the discectomy relieved all the pain he had been enduring for the past six months.
1. beetle — to overhang, to project; to hang over with menace
Try as I might, I could not completely ignore the beetling mounds of paper precariously perched upon the shelves of the boarder’s salon or bedroom, which mounds threatened to fall upon us every time we inadvertently jostled the furniture.
2. cattywampus — arranged incorrectly or diagonally; askew
After we spent two hours wrestling the donated couch up the stairs and into the loft we realized that it made the whole space cattywampus, ’cause you couldn’t fit any of the small tables at the ends of the couch and there was a big empty corner left behind it in the room; it just wouldn’t fit any other way.
3. keratometer — device used for measuring curvature of cornea, principally to assess astigmatism
However, the keratometer assumes that the eyeball — well, the cornea — is a perfect sphere, though that is not true.
4. pinniped — of or relating to the order of aquatic carnivorous mammals which includes seals and walruses
Bill turned and ran from the charging pinniped, finally realizing that he had intruded into the huge sea lion’s private breeding grounds.
5. dyspnea — difficulty breathing
Her complaints of chest pains coupled with her obvious dyspnea made me suspect a collapsed lung.
6. sapiential — having wisdom
Job is one of the seven sapiential books of the bible (though only five appear in the usual Protestant editions), so called because they deal principally with the wisdom of sages.
7. wheal — small, reddened swelling of the skin, usually circular and often accompanied with burning or itching
Before the varicella vaccine reduced the occurrence of chicken pox to merely one tenth of its previous spread, parents frequently had to place mittens on their small children’s hands to keep those toddlers from scratching furiously at the itchy wheals that broke out on their face and torso.
8. declension — inflection of nouns, pronouns, or adjectives through various cases and numbers
Fortunately we no longer have to worry about the dual number once used in earlier Proto-Indo-European descendants, so the declension for most modern European languages only requires learning the rules for singular and plural numbers.
9. frowzy — musty, bad smelling; slatternly, unkempt
The squat woman’s frowzy hair resembled nothing so more as a recently abandoned rat’s nest.
10. asthenia — debility, lack of strength
Sighing mournfully upon the fainting couch, she exhibited an asthenia which was either an effect of her bird-like appetite or an affect of her predilection for 19th-Century German Romanticism.
Yesterday, at approximately 4:51 PM, I heard my one hundred and ten thousandth track in iTunes. The particular track was a peppy instrumental version of “Fly Me to the Moon” from a Customusic sampler album. Customusic was — and still is, apparently (just don’t click on the main logo; the Customusic Web site does not appear to have an “index.html” page) — … um, where was I? Oh, right! Customusic was a Muzak competitor (actually, it is Muzak which is no more; they will not be missed), and the song I listened to was a little taste of their product. (First one’s free!)
This statement is verified (by me) as accurate under the new iTunes data protocols outlined here. Thus today’s announcement supersedes the erroneous pronouncement made earlier. We apologize for the previous error, and will continue to beat that particular dead horse long after it is not necessary.
Since we have abandoned the old music methodology, comparisons with earlier putative datapoints are moot. We do, however, promise to issue in the not-too-distant future an in-depth analysis of the 110,000 songs heard. At this point we’ll merely mention that the 110K tracks represent 442 days of audio, and take up 705 GB of dataspace. (To give you an idea of some of the issues with the previous methodology, I’ll point out that the ‘non-songs’ heard already occupy over 120 GB of data; more on this and other points may be found here.)
Not heard yet are almost 82,000 tracks. More details to come.
