Red Poppy wrote:jimbo never suggested the woman was a prostitute
I didn't mean to suggest that I thought that he did.
I didn't say that he did. And I didn't think that he did.
But I also know that I didn't write too good either.
I know, because Lizzy said so.
(And she was right.)
~~
Jack The Ripper was never caught,
and very little is known about him for sure,
But every movie I've ever seen about him
makes him go particularly berserk
precisely when the prostitutes act playfully,
loose and teasing, and inviting.
And jimbo says:
"She wanted me!"
..."She flirted with everyone,
...
She shuffled.she rubbed
,she touched
...
You can have me
Anytime,
..."
jimbo then follows that kind of thing
with this kind of ending:
"my lance buried ,
in her cold cement,
like Excalibur'
One thrust."
And what I wrote, very badly, was
"Well, jimbo makes his girl talk like that."
---meaning like the Ripper's prostitutes talk in the movies.
And then I wrote a rhetorical question:
"And what do they deserve for it?"
By which I meant
On the one hand
1) what did Jack The Ripper seem to think
that his prostitues deserved for their wanton loose
and playfully immoral behavior?
And on the other hand
2) what did jimbo seem to think
that his girl deserved for her somewhat similar behavior?
~~
I did not confuse the two.
I didn't suggest that jimbo thought of his girl as a prostitue.
Or that I did.
I was simply drawing an abstract parallel
Jack the Ripper / his prostitues = jimbo / his girl
(old notation: A:B :: C:D,
or "in what sense is A to B what C is to D?")
--what each semed to think the girls
deserved for their immoral behavior.
Now, the assumption is usually made about Jack The Ripper
that he thought that his prostitues deserved to be sliced up
and killed, because of their immorally loose behavior.
And I didn't even bother to mention that.
What I did do was to immediately follow asking
"And what do they deserve for it?"
with the answer that jimbo seemed to be giving,
by abruptly following all his talk about his girls'
playfullness, with this
"tight little cluster of violent images...
"one thrust"
"lance buried" -
"cold cement" -
as if that was his idea of justice for her wantonness.
That anyway was the parallel I meant.
But even jimbo's woefully improbable line:
"ill have some of that!
And some of you for my dessert!!"
didn't make me think that jimbo thought of his girl as a prostitute.
(what it did reminded me of
(--and this is telling you more about me than you ought to know)
was one of my favorite movies - "Just LIke Heaven"
- with Reese Witherspoon, and Mark Ruffalo -
when the neighbor, Katrina, says "I've got desert".)
Now, for the last time,
the thing that really put the fear of "serial killer" into my head
was this:
jimbo wrote:i dont know her name and never will.it was a man thing
that had to be quenched.been 4 years since.need to do it again
And it's all jimbo's fault, because he doesn't use capital letters,
or spaces between one sentence and the next.
It might seem to him to be a very clever thing not to do,
but it has got a lot of negative consequences.
Anyone who knows certain programming languages
is liable to read his sentences as class.subclass
specifications (like C# system.winforms.form)
So they'd read
"4 years since.need to do it again"
as a class.subclass specification.
That is to say, as the material-implication:
4 years => need
Which is probably not what jimbo meant.
Perhaps, then, the following two were completely
separate and distinct thoughts in jimbo's mind:
1) "it's been 4 years since"
2) "need to do it again".
But, as the run-on sentences he actually wrote,
someone like me had to read them as run-on thoughts.
Which then made it look exactly as if jimbo was confessing
to suffering from some kind of 4-year itch
- an itch having something to do with burying a knife (a lance) in girls -
- an itch which he needed to quench, just about every 4 years.
to be considered a bonafied serial killer
you must murder at least three to four people
with a cooling off period between each murder.
I am not at all well versed in serial-killer profiles.
But it wouldn't surprise me if a 4-year hiatus
wasn't a common one between their killing sprees.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
But of course I do not think that jimbo, our jimbo,
is a serial-killer in our midst!!!
(For statistical reasons, if no other.)
And I don't even think anymore that he was
trying to sound like one, for poetic shock-value.
What I do think is that if jimbo wants to communicate
(- which is questionable) - then he really ought to just
give up trying to be clever.and.or.original with the punctuation.
Punctuation is not a trivial subject. It is difficult.
But to not even bother trying to use it to enhances
communication, rather than hinder it, shows
an awful disrespect for people.
~~~~~~~~
I may also have been laboring under another illusion.
I have been imagining jimbo as an old man.
If he isn't, it would be different.
~~
I'll go even further.
The poem isn't at all bad!
I do think that the ending, which seems to return the girl's favor
of playfullness with jimbo's violently abrupt sex-act
(completely explaining why the girl hasn't wanted
to see him again in 4 years) is a sad, but not at all
uncommon denouement to these things, in college.
("But you know you only used to get juiced in it"-BD)
(If that wasn't the way it was, or if jimbo doesn't
want to leave that impression, then he ought to
change the ending.)
~~
I'll go even further yet.
"cold cement", which nobody else seems to like,
--is actually the best thing in the poem!
At least I think I know what it means.
(By way of a a titanic effort of recall.)
I do not recall the whole history of perceptual psychology,
- (only Kant and Helmholtz come to mind)
- but there've been many who've noticed the enormous role
that expectation plays in perception.
If you're expecting hot water, and you wade into
cold water, it will seem at first to be very much colder
than it actually is, and then you just have to get used to it.
(You ought to either jump right in, or else give up and go away.
I despise people who dilly dally around the shore line.)
~~
In this case, if you aren't experienced,
and if what you expect of a vagina
is an infernally hot, soaking wet spongy quicksand like bog,
then your very first impression of a real one
is very likely to be (due to contrast to expectation)
that it is really more like a cold, or tepid,
damp freshly poured patch of cement.
At least if you're stoned.
(And don't even think about it
when you're drunk and on a water bed.)
That anyway was sort of like my first impression of
Peaches La Tour's - in Millington TN - down by the dipsy-dumpster.
(I am sure that wasn't her real name.)
A gorgeous woman, Peaches, I think. (The
impression could have had a lot to do with
another very famous principle of perceptual
psycology 101.)
(Later, when I was leading a platoon around
the BAM barracks, I got distracted trying to
talk to Peaches through the window. And
the platoon dutifully marched on, through
the bushes and into a wall, before I
remembered them. Nor was I ever again
asked to lead a platoon. But I will always
remember that, in connection with Gurdjieffian
"self-remembering", as an excellent example.)
??
. I feel that those implications are at least, if not more [nah, let's just leave it at definitely more], disturbing than anything in the poem. This one really got to you, didn't it? If it's that you're feeling these references are demeaning toward women, I can understand and appreciate that; but it still doesn't put him in the serial-killer league. If it's just plain bad writing, perhaps, he could join the fraternity of badly-written poetry writers, though.
... I've entertained the notion that maybe it's a "man thing" of objection to one of 'em revealing some of that locker-room talk, when what it oughta be is "What's said in the locker room, stays in the locker room." But, I've only entertained that notion. No formal induction ceremonies have been set, yet. In any case, they have been infrequent enough to not have elicited a feeling of concern with me. I survived this one. I seriously don't expect that Jimbo is going to make us privy to all that follows this. Damellon made her point on that and I agree.