Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire,
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
―Robert Frost
"There is nothing funny about Halloween. This sarcastic festival reflects, rather, an infernal demand for revenge by children on the adult world."
—Jean Baudrillard
"Horror is the removal of masks."
—Robert Bloch
"Tis now the very witching time of night,
When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out
Contagion to this world."
—William Shakespeare
"Fear has many eyes and can see things underground."
—Miguel de Cervantes
"We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones."
—Stephen King
See the connections? Write your guesses in the comments, and check in next Wednesday to find the headlines that inspired these pairings.
Images: The Frisky, ExtraTV, The Awl, New Haven Independent, Meteorology News
Answers to last week's installment:
A recent Buke and Gase show reminded me of the power of good two-piece bands. And given the way we're wired, seeing two perspiring humans onstage, singing songs that often feature the word "love," tends to activate the imagination, too. Here's a wildly speculative look at the dynamics, both musical and personal, of some sweet rock duos.
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A weekly series that explores a featured theme by pairing classic quotations with urgent images. What recent news items inspired these textual/visual sets? Leave your guesses in the comments, and check back next Wednesday for the answers.
“I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along."
—Annie Dillard
"Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society."
—Mark Twain
"Want of money and the distress of a thief can never be alleged as the cause of his thieving, for many honest people endure greater hardships with fortitude. We must therefore seek the cause elsewhere than in want of money, for that is the miser's passion, not the thief's."
—William Blake
“If you could kick the person in the pants responsible for most of your trouble, you wouldn't sit for a month.”
—Theodore Roosevelt
“We speak of the masculine and the feminine, but they are the wrong labels.”
—Anais Nin
See the connections? Write your guesses in the comments — and feel free to leave your own "pants" quotes — and check in next Wednesday to find the headlines that inspired these pairings.
Images: Newser, Emotistyle, Perez Hilton, Slate, Hollywood Reporter
Answers to last week's installment:
A weekly series that explores a featured theme by pairing classic quotations with urgent images. What recent news items inspired these textual/visual sets? Leave your guesses in the comments, and check back next Wednesday for the answers.
"You’d be surprised how expensive it costs to look this cheap."
—Steven Tyler
"Me, I want to crack up at that completely ... But the look on Bop-Shop Carl? Pissing his pants slowly with his face."
—Bill Peters (from Maverick Jetpants in the City of Quality)
"Two different faces, but in tight places
We think and we act as one"
—Irving Berlin
“Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.”
—Virginia Woolf
"Even the president of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked."
—Bob Dylan
See the connections? Write your guesses in the comments — and feel free to leave your own "pants" quotes — and check in next Wednesday to find the headlines that inspired these pairings.
Images: New York Daily News, Vulture, New York, CNN, Politico
Answers to last week's installment:
Colonel Hellstache — Maverick Jetpants in the City of Quality is here! To celebrate, we'll be running sneak-peeks at the book and its author, Bill Peters, over the next couple of weeks. Here's part 1 of the Black Balloon interview, in which Peters sets the record straight on regional piss-beer and generally proves to be the funniest guy we've met in ages.
Your protagonist, Nate, is a wayward teenager whose slang-loaded vocabulary is almost like another language. How did you keep track of all those terms and expressions (check out all 146 of them in the Maverick Jetpants glossary)?
Keeping track of the terminology was somehow never a problem. I never kept a list with definitions. Although I did make a list of maybe 50 different terms for sex.
In the book, Nate talks about words that he finds inherently funny, like "pants" and "cheese." Is there a flipside? Are there words that you and/or your characters find repugnant?
Most corporate concept-reduction and noun-verbing is a bit like accidentally brushing your teeth with Bengay. The most recent word that has aggravated me is "onpass." As in, "to pass on." As in: “Would you onpass this item to Terrence?” The word is amazing in its total pointless efficiency. As if anyone has so little time that you could begin to tell them “I’m passing this on” and they would cut you off, throw their hands up and say “WHOA! GET TO THE POINT ‘WAR AND PEACE!’” I hope "onpass" represents some endpoint to brevity-worship, but it probably doesn’t.
You grew up in Rochester, which is also the setting of your book. But now you live in Gainesville, FL, where I imagine Genesee is hard to come by. What do you drink down there?
I have no problem whatsoever with cheap beer — I often prefer it. But sadly, and with utmost Whole-Foodsy whiteness, when I moved to Gainesville, I worried: would I get my Saison Dupont? My Reissdorf Kolsch? The answer: Yes, Bill, you will get your Saison Dupont and your Reissdorf Kolsch. Gainesville has lots to drink. There’s been no change. And looking at the country with red state / blue state anxiety? That’s no way to live.
Have you picked up any Gainesville slang?
In terms of local-speak — and I’ve only heard this within my friends — the blocks of bars and restaurants along University that are east of 13th Street have been referred to, half-seriously, as "Downtown." Downtown has more shows, more elven indie-rock beards, more tattoos, more sustainable-type things — Dwight Garner in a New York Times book review last year called these folks “Bleu collar.” Just getting that out there.
The other Gainesville slang I know relates to school spirit. Gainesville’s population is roughly 125,000, and Ben Hill Griffin Stadium, where the Florida Gators play, seats almost 90,000. "Tebowing" is the most obvious slang, although the phrase wasn’t coined, I don’t think, until after Tim Tebow left UF. Another term might be "jorts." That is, jean shorts. The term, according to at least one Gator sports website, is rooted in the Florida / Georgia rivalry, and supposedly became popular after a Georgia fan, desperate for a good insult, yelled to a Gator fan: “Gator fans wear jeans shorts!”
Five of us are on our way back from a cabin upstate, in a Dodge van with cushy captains' chairs and a back bench that electronically folds into a squeaky leatherette bed. We're all musicians, and even before I insert Grizzly Bear 's new album, Shields, into the CD player, opinions start clashing.
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