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The South Atlantic Quarterly 103.1 (2004) 57-60



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Canto

Gordon Lish


So what the fuck is it, ekphrasis, ekphrastic?

I get up, go right to the can to go sit on the can as per every morning of the last of my life, and what is written all over the newspaper my man Jeeves slips to me under the door?

Ekphrasis, ekphrastic!

Isn't it enough to make a chap sick, words like this?

So who's behind it?

Sounds to me as if it's the Turkomen who must be behind it.

I'm sorry, but I am getting the drift it is definitely your Turkomen or your California homosexualistical educationists.

Lest it possibly be, you know, yids.

Hey, please—there weren't any queer words like this back when I was coming up. We had a whole host of different kinds of impediments back then—words like periphrasis and periphrastic and even the humble the aboriginal phrase.

Now, darn it, it's all changed.

Like Jeeves himself.

The man resents it, he actually fucking stands there regarding me and resenting it, forty-three years in my service and all of a sudden the name Jeeves, the miscreant has suddenly summoned [End Page 57] the cheek to say to me, is too unutterably service-ridden for it to suit the fucking likes of him.

"It bespeaks subjugation to me," the man, my man, fucking says.

"Sir," the fucking joker fucking says to me, "the name you retained me to serve you under, it is out of fashion, I feel, and, you know, it's socially—or shouldn't we say socio-dynamically?—hobbling. To me, individually as a person, that is."

Piss on him and his person!

You know what I say?

I say piss on this man—my man—and his uppity fucking person!

These people, these words!—what on earth has happened, is what I am asking you, and where does one apply to petition that matters, posthaste, be remanded to the custody of par? Because, speaking personally, I am acquainted with not one Turkoman in the entire dispensation and have yet, do attend, to consent to the society of the most remote member of what is politely understood as a chap's intent when gesturing as a rhetorician in the direction of the tribe.

Save Jeeves himself, of course, who was Shloink when the poor sod came to my door in search of a place in the sun and fell, as a not indirect result of his shamelessly inflamed entreaty, into my employ.

Is now not the time that I let the fellow go?

Though—nay, nay—not before dispatching the old boy to the city library for him to appeal to the latest expression of lexicology and determine for his master the definitions of these up-to-the-minute vilenesses recited for your review at the top of this exasperating experience.

Ekphrasis, ekphrastic.

Great God, how I hate pages!

Paper.

This one and all the others.

They're worse than Turks, worse than Hebes, even—if you can believe it—more disagreeable than Greeks.

Oh, last night, was it not wretchedness itself for me?—Not one whit of nookie but plenty of Lentricchia on the phone.

You heard me—Lentricchia phoning.

A wop.

Come on, your Dagoman, your Dagoman—please.

This is like our tribling, like your sheeny, like your kike, save demonstrative of an inferior skilled in claiming for his kind the notoriety of a superior grade of cuisine. [End Page 58]

Will someone please tell me why it is that your yid will sit there eschewing milk in any of its various manifestations? Are you aware these stubborn creatures have dedicated themselves to the refusal of the felicity of butter on bread? Even your guinea makes more sense than that.

Anyway, Lentricchia phones. It is Lentricchia phoning.

Allowing as how he has had the honor (hah!) of his having been charged with the superintending of a publication made petty by the regrettable regionalism of its otherwise interchangeable name, which, sorry, I, Gordon, cannot, in the crush of the promise...

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