Lady of the Flowers: A Critical Study
Nollson, John
"Lady of the Flowers: A Critical Study" criers, planners, and problem-solvers of all sorts, for they are also the crisis-mongers, just like those doctors forever urging you to get a check-up. These people should be watched, kept in...
...To this day, he insists that his conversation about the birds and the bees with great aunt Anais changed his life...
...These people should be watched, kept in sight, suspected of the worst motives...
...TII publish the verse next month, and if anyone ever asks who Thais is, I'll just say it's my Burmese cat...
...During this symbolist phase of his career, we would surely have expected him to write: How nais, Is vais, Under a dais, With Thais...
...He will, in a word~ have to adhere to the politics of people, eschewing the politics of non-people...
...Look, read anything I've said in the last few years--not very smart, obviously...
...Predictably, he became a homosexual...
...nor do such intentions serve to distinguish liberals from'others, such as the advocates of "special-interests" and corporate interests, or distemperridden conservatives...
...I guess I had better cancel the order for the flowers," Pound said sheepishly...
...Nor does the poem fit the poet's development as we know it...
...Lapleur's translation, written in his own hand, is on the back of the original Pall text...
...In those days, one had to assume that any mention of the penuk contravened the unwritten laws of polite society...
...You're a louse, if you'll carouse, with another man's spouse...
...But wait...
...It is bad economics and worse economics...
...If the President really wants to balance the budget he needs to take a tough-minded approach to the vested interests...
...As such, he was one of the lesser-known, but most important, figures of the Lost Generation...
...That Washington editor so enthusiastic about the expansion of government programs--is he speculating in D.C...
...She entered the family by marrying Linnaeus Nollson, my grandfather's brother, that is, my great uncle...
...For now, I will whet your appetite and share with you one profound insight into the creative process--an important episode which would have remained forever unknown bad I not made my fortuitous fred...
...He became a classicist and read all the Platonic dialgoues in the original Greek...
...It was all perfectly reasonable, and I decided that I would no longer pay attention to those backbiters who kept insisting that Ezra was a bit odd...
...The poem is written on a small card clearly meant to accompany two dozen red roses that the poet bad ordered to be sent to none other than my great aunt Anais...
...Accordingly, he persuaded Timaeus to abandon the study of Plato...
...This explains why he and Anais named their first son Timaeus, after the fellow in the Platonic dialogue...
...From his small shop at number 24 on the Rue Saint Jacques, not far from the University of Paris, in the Quarrier Latin, on the Rive Gauche, Linnaeus Nollson delivered his carefully-cultivated flowers to everyone who was anyone in the Parisian cu)tural community of the 1920s...
...I sneered...
...How many times did he tell me --though always omitting the details: "John, your great aunt Anais was one helluva gal...
...Great uncle Linnaeus remained a Platonist to the end of his days...
...Sincerely yours, Thomas P. O'Neill Speaker of the House Dear Mr...
...Imagine my surprise, therefore, when just this past summer I stumbled upon the Linnaeus Nollson Papers behind an old cabinet in the herbarium of the National Botanical Garden...
...Of course, we all want to balance the budget, but one does not balance a budget as complicated as that of the United States government just by refusing to spend public monies...
...Accordingly, I confronted him when he came to the shop to pay for the roses he had ordered...
...I am very open...
...It is the one that reads: O yais, 'Tis nais, On a dais, With Thais...
...Thinking gives me migraines and I get lower back pains when I have to read...
...The thing I most remember about my great aunt, Anais, was that I could never remember whether there was a wbat's-it with two dots over the i in her name...
...GWP Dear Dr...
...Indeed, Farrel Mangrate of Toronto, North America's leading authority on quatrains, argues for this alternative reading of the rather cramped handwriting of the original m s . Still, we have a right to remain puzzled...
...In cases where it is not, it will nevertheless serve the salutary function of warning liberals that they tend automatically to be viewed as a menace to the community, and that the untoward outcome of any of their pet projects will no longer be indulgently waved aside as a miscalculated good intention...
...And I guess I had better rewrite the poem too...
...Even though great uncle Linnaeus bad delivered flowers to Alice B. Toklas, and knew a thing or two about what went on in her house, he still believed in drawing the line somewhere...
...George Washington Plunkitt, our prize-winning political analyst, has accepted a staff position with the House Ethics Committee, but be has graciously consented to continue advising American statesmen in these times of troubles...
...You bet your sweet ais," I shot back...
...Pound scribbled hurriedly: Too bad...
...26 The Alternative: An American Spectator August/September 1977 It'll sure be nais...
...Dear Dr...
...I'm not...
...John No//son Lady of the Flowers: A Critical Study Winning the Pulitzer Prize for literary studies is no easy task...
...I discuss the significance of this in my article in the next issue of PMLA...
...My own father, a respected and prosperous orthodontist, seldom spoke about them...
...I said heatedly...
...If we transpose but two words in the original Pali text and recast the third line, we shall have produced a perfectly presentable poem...
...I had once heard my parents discuss the fact that great aunt Anais was far in advance of her time on sexual subjects...
...Pound agreed...
...Uncle Timaeus No//son, carrying on a family tradition, was also much influenced by his name...
...real estate, by any chance...
...Since I could have been no more than seven when she told me this, I could do nothing but giggle...
...The President based his decision on the worst possible grounds, saving money...
...It hearkens to the horse and buggy conceptualization of government so prevalent among the opposition...
...Great uncle Linnaeus considered this something of an improvement, but it fell to great aunt Anais to set Timaeus straight...
...In a word, it is time for conservatives to take the offensive...
...spect, it is clear that great uncle Linnaeus was proof of the hypothesis developed at Duke University--that one's name has great influence on the course of one's life...
...Now if the government moves into this area I just do not see how the tittle fellow is ever going to compete...
...Lewis...
...There you have it, an authentic slice of life, as life was really lived in one of those truly seminal epochs in cultural history...
...I guess it's not nais to plot vais, not once, but twais," he moaned...
...Well," I continued, pressing my psychological advantage, "what do you plan to do about this...
...Plunkitt: Since I became American Ambassador to the UN an ugly rumor has been circulating which I wish to get out in the open, to wit, the rumor that I am not very intelligent...
...The writing on one side of the card is unintelligible, but the other side of the card reads plainly: My dearest Anais, I know you're not pious, But are a woman of spais, So let's get under the dais, For some vais...
...all Paris knew that Alice desired Anais with a passion that only unrequited love could nurture...
...No," I said, "she'll just think it's another mash note from Gertrude Stein...
...He was also a florist...
...It is the prerogative of the individual, the church, the small family farm...
...I will make you wait for my new book to find out everything I discovered there...
...He begged me for silence since, as he put it: "If Alice ever finds out, she'll beat the hell out of me...
...The best way to drive this point home might be, as I have suggested, to presume the existence of a self-interested motive behind all such crisis-mongering and postulating of injustice...
...I've always been intrigued by this branch of my family...
...I now know, for example, who sent those two dozen petunias to Alice B. Toklas on April 14, 1924...
...In fact, what is surely the original manuscript is preserved between two pages of great uncle Linnaeus' order book for March of 1925...
...The American people should not be enslaved by the iron will of some far-off accountant of whose life we know nothing...
...In most cases, of course, such cynicism will prove to be well justified...
...He complimented me on my ability to under...
...Why, she'll probably kick your butt half way to the Bois du Boulogne...
...The Linnaeus Nollson Archive sheds a good deal of light on this mystery...
...The Thais known m history is not necessarily the kind of person with whom one would want to share a dais...
...Saving money is the citizens' God-given right...
...Timaeus agreed, and took up the canon law...
...The Linnaeus Nollson Archive, now kept in the rare leaf room of the National Arboretum (where humidity and temperature can be mechanically controlled), contains material enough for at least eight monographs...
...I am almost knee-jerk open: To me The Alternative: An American Spectator August/September 1977 27...
...Clearly, this is a curious verse...
...With a tweak of the nose, I now must dispose, Of each sensuous rose, Cause your husband now knows, That's how it goes...
...The words can be of any length, just so the memo has only three words--and not much punctuation, either...
...Balancing the budget is a people issue...
...The well-known poem by e e cummings - - o r is it w h auden, or is it Ogden Nash?-has long puzzled literary historians...
...Let there be commerce between us," he said...
...Consider the following complex history of my recent emergence as prominent literary critic...
...Plunkitt: The President's decision to call off production of the B-1 bomber has caused considerable consternation with a large number of my colleagues on Capitol Hill who take it as an ominous sign...
...Beat the hell out of you...
...Great aunt Anais was not a Nollson by birth, yet she never used her maiden name...
...To me, when the federal government begins to save money it is just another example of big government sticking its nose into another area of the citizens' lives where government just ought not to go...
...stand Pall...
...If modern experience has shown us nothing else it is that governments can best be used for spending, not for saving...
...Well, of course, it's true...
...Pound paled visibly...
...I've asked my staff to boil all State Department documents down to three words...
...I told Pound that I had half a mind to tell Alice B. Toklas about his interest in Anais...
...Candor...
...It begins with the fact that my great aunt was the well-known poet, Anais Nollson...
...O'Neill: I could not agree with you more...
...In retro...
...Ezra The objective correlative of the order book, the Linnaeus Nollson diaries, having been completely deciphered, I can now reproduce in full the entry for March 13, 1925: As for the pornographic doggerel that I finally had translated, at first I could make neither head nor tail of it till, realizing that it was written in Pall, the ancient language of the Hinayana Buddhist scriptures, I hastened to Professor Lapleur of the Sorbonne, who rendered it quite easily into English...
...You get to write your erotic verse and I get to save my wife's reputation...
...predictably, he became celibate...
...Having been named after the great botanist who discovered the curious fact that all plants, without exception, have two Latin names, great uncle Linnaeus was himself a botanist...
...Saving money is simply not a proper function of the federal government...
...Pound was now ashen...
...But what else do you notice...
...Uncle Timaeus became quite a mover--even a bit notorious...
...Of course, I have not yet decided whether to publish everything I know, since it's best to keep you guessing...
...Pound was taken aback, but remained good humored...
...I may be able to publish as many as eleven...
...You use the diaeresis only if you think I'm like the iin naive," she would chuckle, "otherwise, just remember to put the emphasis on the penult...
...Eat your heart out, R.W.B...
...Address all correspondence to The Bootblack Stand, c/o The Alternative...
...Still, I was very put out...
...Of a sudden, I realized that young Pound, alone among the poets of the city, had sufficient command of Pali to proposition my wife in that obscure and cryptic, albeit holy, language...
...Yet, so far as I know, I am the fast serious literary historian to make use of the Linnaeus Nollson Papers...
...Liberals must be made to see, if they do not already, that to have good intentions in this world is not enough...
...THE BOOTBLACK STAND Dr...
Vol. 10 • August 1977 • No. 10
