anagram = "ailing vomit"
fyi
Posted on 10/02/2008 2:17:59 PM PDT by Zionist Conspirator
FReepers have helped me out in the past when I asked about the Frugivores (which I had begun to think only I had ever heard of). Now I'm hoping someone can satisfy my curiosity on a topic both fascinating and gross.
Perhaps you remember the old half hour PBS Dick Cavett Show. This is the show where he would spend the time chatting with some intellectual cult figure (eg, Norman Mailer, Richard Gilman, Tennessee Williams, Lillian Hellman, etc.).
Back in the old days of Carson and Letterman (when he was really funny) I used to stay up later than I do now, and this show was a fun way to spend a half hour leading up to the other shows. Anyway, it was on one of these shows that I heard something I have never been able to forget. It intrigued, fascinated, and horrified me all at the same time. It made a lasting impression and emerged from my dark subconscious once again in a dream last night (don't ask!).
I believe the guest on this particular show was the German author Gunter Grass (though I could be wrong). Anyway, during the interview Cavett casually said something on the order of "people have been known to actually vomit while reading the 'eels' passage."
How in the same heck do you forget hearing something like that???
Anyway, this "eels passage" has haunted the dark shadows of my subconscious ever since hearing that remark. On the one hand, I would never want to read it since I wouldn't want to throw up. On the other, I am curious as to just what kind of passage this is. Of course, I doubt that I would ever have the courage to risk reading such a thing.
Anyway, I have looked up Gunter Grass in Wikipedia and did a Yahoo! search on him as well and simply cannot find a reference to an "eels passage." Maybe I have the wrong writer?
Anyway, do any FReepers out there know about this infamous gag-inducing piece of literature? What book is it in? Can it be generally described in such a way that I can read the description without messing up my keyboard?
For years this notion of someone writing a passage so gauche that people who read it actually vomit has sort of stuck in my mind as the defining characteristic of left-wing artsy-fartsy intellectuals.
You’re a polymath. Maybe you can help me?
“I couldn’t help feeling that her head would bob up again any minute and that she would have to vomit some more, that there was something more inside her that wanted to come out: not only that fetus aged three months who like me didn’t know which father he had to thank for his existence; no, I thought, it’s not just he who wants to come out and, like Oskar, demand a drum, no, there’s more fish, not sardines, and not flounder, no, it’s a little chunk of eel, a few whitish-green threads of eel flesh, eel from the battle of the Skagerrak, eel from the Naufahrwasser breakwater, Good Friday eel, eel from that horse’s head, possibly eel from her father Joseph Koljaiczek who ended under the raft, a prey to the eels, eel of thine eel, for eel thou art, to eel returnest...”
- Chapter 13, The Tin Drum, Gunter Grass
I’d say reading the transcript of any Keith Olberman show would qualify as Ipecac in print.
“This is particularly true in the case of the infamously “disgusting” passages such as the depiction of the grinningly putrid horse’s head full of pullulating eels, followed by the very smell and sliminess of Agnes Matzerath’s vomit: a literally nauseating episode, yet also the introit to a haunting fable in which Agnes sees a fathomless abyss open up before her, and duly plunges into it.” From a book about Gunter Grass.
It's gotta involve Helen Thomas somehow.
...but Oskar says it was the memory of the eels in the severed horse's head, and the fear of seeing it again, that did her in."
Martin Cruz Smith has a somewhat similar scene involving hagfish and a drowned woman in "Polar Star."
Um . . . I don't get it.
What are eels doing in a putrid horse's head? And what is pollulating?
Are these common European eels, hatched in the Sargasso Sea, or some other kind of eel? Moray eels, perhaps? Conger eels?
Thank you.
What are eels doing in a severed horse's head? The head was in the water, I assume? Of course, the female eels, leaving their male companions behind at the seashores, are the ones who swim up river into the countryside and also crawl for short distances on dry ground and get into landlocked ponds and lakes. So it's possible the horse's head was somewhere in the path of a mass swimming of female eels. But then, would they be "pollulating?"
My hovercraft is full of eels.
Slime eels, if I am not mistaken.
They eat their way into corpses via natural openings. And then eat their way out, if I remember Polar Star passage correctly. While they do that, they ooze slime. They can fill buckets with slime.
“Anguilla australis.” The short finned eel, common in the Elbe River, in Germany. Are we doing your homework for you???
Grass, hypocritical lefty that he is, seems to be invoking the eel as something evil, sinister, and dirty. In fact, I know of nothing whatsoever sinister about the good old Sargasso-bred American and European eel (the moray is another matter, and the "electric eel" isn't even an eel at all). In fact, Wikipedia insists that fishermen at the coasts catch eels and keep them as pets. I have read nothing about them being attracted to horse's heads (what, they're eaters of carrion?), much less "pollulating" in them.
This whole thing is way beyond me. Grass seems to be stereotyping eels because they are fish that look like snakes. Otherwise they seem perfectly harmless (though not kosher).
This is the sort of stereotyping you'd expect from a liberal hypocrite.
“Pullulate” ... in this context, means to swarm in large numbers.
Hey! I was just curious!
I'll have to look into this thing more deeply.
They eat their way into corpses via natural openings. And then eat their way out, if I remember Polar Star passage correctly. While they do that, they ooze slime. They can fill buckets with slime.
So they're not regular, everyday, ordinary eels? Are they some sort of supereel? Or maybe they aren't really eels at all (like electric eels, or lampreys, which aren't even fish).
Thanks to all of you. I'll have to do some research on this.
Just kidding.
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