Women Disrobe While Leonard Cohen Music Plays - Yet, Something Feels Wrong
No one says naked like Leonard Cohen~Tom Robbins
(From liner notes of the Cohen tribute album, Tower of Song)
It’s Not Just Quentin
The reference in the recently posted Leonard Cohen and Quentin Tarantino: Heavy Video to a brief scene in the Dance Me To The End Of Love video in which Tarantino is naked leads, inevitably,1 to the observation that Leonard Cohen’s songs are brilliantly conducive to the shedding of clothes.
While appreciative of and grateful for this phenomenon, I nonetheless find myself disoriented by two films that spotlight individuals explicitly removing their clothes to the beat of tunes from the Leonard Cohen songbook.
The problem is cognitive dissonance arising from the setting of and motivation for the denuding; both movies feature exotic dancers in strip clubs.
I’ll explain.
I’m Your Fan Dancer
I confess that I am neither an aficionado or opponent of strip clubs and, in fact, am sadly deficient in first-hand knowledge of their offerings.
Based, however, on glimpses of such enterprises afforded by movies and TV shows,2 some reading on the topic,3 and data provided by colleagues, I would think that it would be the atypical establishment in this category that would have a Lots-O-Leonard playlist.
My sources indicate that, at least in the good old days, 
unclad dancers4 would writhe on poles and crawl across stages to the blaring accompaniment of songs such as
- Alice Cooper’s Poison
- AC/DC’s The Jack
- Pour Some Sugar on Me by Def Leppard
- The Motley Crüe anthem, Girls, Girls, Girls (or or any of a dozen other Motley Crüe hits)
- Any of the numerous versions of You Can Leave Your Hat On5
I’m told that currently the various formats of Hip-Hop are especially popular.
Conspicuously absent from the much longer complete listing of stripper tunes were Rock of Ages Cleft for Me, anything sung by Donovan, Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, and Leonard Cohen numbers.
One notes some obvious disparities between Leonard Cohen and the notables on the standard strip show music canon. 
Leonard, for example, rarely leaves home wearing significant amounts of mascara or spandex britches.
He has also published precious little in the heavy metal genre (those rumors that he subbed for the lead singer of Megadeth during that group’s Argentina tour simply cannot be verified although there is an ominous absence of any reports of Megadeth and Leonard Cohen being seen simultaneously during that time period).
And there is the matter of tempo. Which Leonard Cohen track does one use as background for gyrations of this sort?
Certainly, selecting songs by Leonard Cohen that are appropriately sensuous and sexual is a trivial task. But the traditional ecdysiastic6 hymns do not ordinarily strive for plaintiveness, sadness, irony, or thoughtfulness, which are among Cohen’s primary tools.
So, what gives? How is it that two movies about strippers employ Leonard Cohen songs?
The answer, I believe, lies in the specific films.
The Films, The Strippers, The Soundtracks
Exotica7
In Atom Egoyan’s Exotica, Mia Kirshner dances to Leonard Cohen’s Everybody Knows at a Toronto gentleman’s club inhabited by a group of patrons, dancers, and owners who are connected by previous and ongoing relationships. The film, a prize winner at Cannes and the recipient of French and Canadian honors, is a series of mysteries solved by the revelation of more mysteries – and then presented in a chronologically jumbled manner.
It will come as no surprise to anyone acquainted with Mr. Egoyan’s work8 to find that, Exotica, as the redoubtable Wikipedia notes, “deals with issues of loss, grief and isolation.”
Dancing at the Blue Iguana
In Dancing at the Blue Iguana the San Fernando Valley is home to the titular Blue Iguana, a strip club in which the dancers, played by Daryl Hannah, Jennifer Tilly, Sandra Oh, Charlotte Ayanna, perform to, among other songs, Dance Me to the End of Love.
Its theme, if Stephen Holden of the New York Times, is to be believed, is that the Blue Iguana represents “a microcosm of this sad, lonely world and its lost female souls who cater to male lust.”9
The story that forms the basis of Dancing at the Blue Iguana evolved from a five month improvisational workshop led by director Michael Radford in which actors worked with exotic dancers and used that research to develop their own characters.
Let’s Go To The Champagne Room
The central question, in case one has lost track, is how did two Leonard Cohen songs, Everybody Knows and Dance Me to the End of Love, that may never have been played during an actual stripper’s performance end up on the soundtrack of two movies set in strip clubs?
The disappointingly simple answer is that those songs, however wrong they might be for strip clubs, were exactly right for the soundtracks of movies set in strip clubs.
It is significant that these movies were not actually about strip clubs, which in these cases are metaphorical elements in service of ambitious cinematic themes rather than the subject of documentaries.
Both Exotica and Dancing at the Blue Iguana are especially self-conscious theatrical exercises. In this context, the songs are tools by which to intensify the mood, emphasize (a bit heavy-handedly) the inevitable losses and grief of the situation, and underline the false, disconnected sexuality being promoted.
My difficulty with the notion of Leonard Cohen’s music as an incidental component of a striptease show stems from my characterization of Cohen’s numbers, especially Dance Me to the End of Love, as extraordinarily private psalms of intimacy.
Lyrics like these from Dance Me to the End of Love
Let me feel you moving like they do in Babylon
Show me slowly what I only know the limits of
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love
are not well suited to be played over a substandard sound system in the raucous, pseudo-erotic environment of a gentleman’s club while a dancer earns her wages by artfully stripping, but are precisely perfect to be sung in a whisper with lips almost touching the ear of ones partner’s in the quintessentially authentic sexuality of lovers naked together.
Like the man says,
I Always Wanted To Sing For Naked People
~Leonard Cohen (Song improvised during concert)
Me too
~DrHGuy (Posting, 28 February 2007)
Footnotes
- Well, inevitably in my case ~back~
- Tony Soprano’s Bada Bing Club and the last 20 minutes of a serendipitously discovered HBO production called “G-String Divas” come to mind ~back~
- E.g., Carl Hiaasen’s Strip Tease featuring a club with the (apparently) unforgettable name, “The Eager Beaver,” a bevy of feminist literature I’ve read in self-defense, and various journals found at your better barber shops ~back~
- This discussion is limited to female exotic dancers because (1) the Cohen songs accompany female stripteasers and (2) while I know little about the universe of female exotic dancers, I know far less about male strippers ~back~
- For the record, Kim Basinger was stripping to Joe Cocker’s version of You Can Leave Your Hat On in “9 ½ Weeks” while the rendition by Tom Jones was playing while the men in “The Full Monty” performed. The creator of this ditty was, however, Randy Newman. Keb Mo, Ty Henderson, Three Dog Night, Julliet, and Garou, among others, have also covered the tune. My personal favorite You Can Leave Your Hat On artist is Etta James. ~back~
- In a gallant response to a request by a striptease artist for a more dignified occupational title, H. L. Mencken devised “ecdysiast,” based on the Greek terms for “a getting out.” “Ecdysis,” as you recall from 8th grade biology is the periodic shedding of the exoskeleton by insects, such as grasshoppers, and other arthropods. ~back~
- Update: Reel Toronto: An Exotic Slice of Egoyan is a tour of the Toronto locations that correspond to the settings of Atom Egoyan’s films, including Exotica. ~back~
- Pictures by Atom Egoyan, who qualifies for the title of “critically acclaimed director,” include Krapp’s Last Tape, Ararat, and Next of Kin ~back~
- Hubba Hubba ~back~
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Take Out A Pencil And A Sheet Of Paper
[Note: This diabolically clever, arrogantly rude, and, yes, stupid exam is, I’ve discovered, a reliable generator of frustration bordering on exasperation. Welcome to my world. Good Luck}
The Stupid Test
OK. Pay close attention. Here is a very simple little test comprised of four easy questions to determine the level of your intellect. See if you have what it takes to be considered “smart.”
Your replies must be spontaneous and immediate, with no deliberating or wasting of time. And no cheating!
On your mark, get set, go…
1. You are competing in a race and overtake the runner in second place. In which position are you now?
Answer: If you answered that you’re now in first, you’re wrong! You overtook the second runner and took his place, therefore you are now in second place. For the next question try not to be so dim.
2. If you overtake the last runner, what position are you now in?
Answer: If you answered second to last, you are wrong once again. Think about it… How can you overtake the person who is last? If you’re behind them, they can’t be last. You would have been last. It would appear that thinking is not one of your strong points.
Anyway, here’s another question to try. Don’t take any notes or use a calculator, and remember, your replies must be instantaneous.
3. Take 1000. Add 40. Add another 1000. Add 30. 1000 again. Plus 20. Plus 1000. and plus 10. What is the total?
Answer: 5000? Wrong again! The correct answer is 4100. Try again with good calculator. Today is clearly not your day, although you should manage to get the last question right…
4. Marie’s father has five daughters
1. Chacha
2. Cheche
3. Chichi
4. Chocho
5. ????
Question: What is the fifth daughter’s name? Think quickly…you’ll find the answer below….
Answer: Chuchu? WRONG! It’s obviously Marie! Read the question properly.
You are clearly the weakest link.
Credit Due Department: The Stupid Test has appeared on several web sites without attribution.
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More Allan Truax Data In The Offing
A.L. Truax: A Heck Of A Guy Guy
Earlier this month, I published two posts featuring Allan Truax:
I’m excited that significant further information about Mr. Truax may soon be available.
New Sources
From John Andrist, the previous publisher of the Crosby Journal, I learned that
- A. L. Truax was a good friend of Mr. Andrist’s father, Calvin Andrist
- Mr. Truax was a “devoted Mason” who “had much disdain for what he called the ‘animal lodges’ (i.e., Moose, Elks, and others with a primary focus on creature comforts and alcohol)”
- At least one of Mr. Truax’s grandchildren is still living
The Passage Of Housman’s “Last Poems”
With a bit of internet sleuthing, I found an e-mail address that led me to that grandchild. His wife wrote, explaining the provenance of Housman’s Last Poems that passed from A. L. Truax’s hands to mine, confirming that the “A. L. Truax” in the book’s inscription was “Allan Lincoln Truax” and eliminating the remote possibility that it was his sister, “Alice Louise Truax”:
Identification: Allan Truax, Allen Truax, and A.L. Truax
“Allan Truax” and “Allen Truax” appear with approximately equal frequency in the written material I’ve reviewed, with “A.L. Truax” occurring somewhat less often. The name Mr. Truax inscribed in his books was “Allan” so I use it preferentially
Coming Attractions
The e-mail also noted that the grandchild “in fact, lived with them [A. L. Truax and Evelyn Truax] during the school week and … has many photos and stories about them” and offered to share more information about Allan Truax in April 2007.
Updated:
The Life and Times Of Allan Lincoln Truax
Allan Truax Timeline In Context
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Sam Homeward Bound
We must dare to be happy, and dare to confess it, regarding ourselves always as the depositories, not as the authors of our own joy
–Henri Frederic Amiel
Three weeks ago, Sam, my son, was unconscious and on a respirator in a hospital ICU, as he had been for 24 hours following an auto accident that took place about 9:30 PM February 4.1
Two days from now (Tuesday, February 27, 2007), Sam is scheduled to be discharged home.
He has made remarkable gains since his accident and seems to gain strength literally every day. That is not to say he won’t require a prolonged post-discharge period of convalescence and outpatient therapy.
Nonetheless, there is reason for joyfulness, and I invite you all to share this celebration. (A true cynic – like me, for example – knows that there are so few genuine reasons for rejoicing that we cannot afford the luxury of wasting one.)
Sam, Max, & I appreciate the thoughts, prayers, cards, emails, stuffed animals, and other symbols of caring and offer our thanks to each of you.
Footnotes
- See post regarding the accident and hospital admission: ~Things Change~ ~back~
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The Leonard Cohen CBC Interviews
Leonard Cohen: The CBC-designated Melancholy Bard
The CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) has conveniently packaged a series of performances by and interviews with Leonard Cohen from their TV and radio archives under the title, Leonard Cohen: Canada’s Melancholy Bard. While the quality varies from clip to clip, there is substantial entertainment, information, and insight to be gleaned from this treasury.
The series is plotted in chronological order from Poet, 22, splashes on to world stage in 1958 to Leonard Cohen looks back (two parts), an interview that took place in February 2006. The symbols on the timeline above indicate the dates of the available clips.
The Leonard Cohen-This Hour Has Seven Days Interview
My vote for Best Of Show among the clips comprising Leonard Cohen: Canada’s Melancholy Bard is On the road to singing sensation , which was originally broadcast in conjunction with the publication of Cohen’s novel, “Beautiful Losers,” in 1966 on This Hour Has Seven Days.1
Cohen’s interviewer, Beryl Fox, is not a brainless talking head.
She is, in fact, recognized as a pioneer in investigative reporting and as an accomplished documentary filmmaker.
While working for the CBC, she was known for her insightful and critical examinations of U.S. politics, the feminist movement, and racial conflicts. She was also a groundbreaking critic of the role of the U.S. in the Vietnam War.2
She continued making documentaries and, later, feature films after leaving the CBC in 1966.
Accordingly, the interview is not a puff piece nor are her queries to Cohen softballs lobbed over the plate to make the star look good. The conversation is challenging, engaging, personal, and even edgy in a place or two.
In addition, there seems to be, especially on Ms Fox’s part, elements of sexual tension and flirtatiousness.
[Note: It does appear that on the date of the interview, either Ms Fox had the misfortune to experience a catastrophically bad hair day or a small mammal somehow landed on her head and took up residence there. The composite photo below provides a more balanced perspective on her appearance.]
Leonard Cohen exercises the poet’s prerogative of re-interpreting and manipulating her words and his own to distract and deflect. A trivial but nonetheless amusing example follows:
Beryl Fox: Where?
Leonard Cohen: There’s this place on St. Lawrence Blvd.
The interviewer’s facial expression at that point is a bonus.
Cohen is provocative, claiming, for example, that Canada has no government and that any couple not in love should be divorced. Fox presses (at one point she asks how Cohen’s mother reacted to reviews calling his book pornographic) but does so politely and does not redirect her interviewee when he flares off on his tangent of choice.
It is rewarding viewing.
The Media
The clips of Leonard Cohen: Canada’s Melancholy Bard begin with
~Poet, 22, splashes on to world stage~
The Leonard Cohen-This Hour Has Seven Days Interview discussed at length in this post is available at
~On the road to singing sensation~
Footnotes
- This Hour Has Seven Days was a CBC Television newsmagazine inspired by the British satire series That Was The Week That Was. It was also controversial enough that after a two year run, it was taken off the air following the 1966 season. ~back~
- The AV Trust Of Canada lauds her 1965 documentary, “The Mills of the Gods: Viet Nam,” in this excerpt:
Beryl Fox’s The Mills of the Gods remains the quintessential example of Canadian documentary filmmaking. Fox takes us into the Vietnam War and allows us to see first hand the futility, sorrow and inhumanity at its core. Her theme of the conflict between people and ideologies is a universal and timeless one, told through haunting sound and visual images. Today, 34 years after it was first telecast, scenes of brutal civilian casualties, torture of POW’s, and gleeful napalm bombing still shock and outrage us. Contrasted with this horror are scenes from the everyday life of the Vietnamese peasantry, working in the fields, shopping in the market, going to school. Fox creates for the viewer a sense of tension and foreboding, ultimately borne out in images of death, destruction and bodybags on the nightly news. The Mills of the Gods transcends the banality of mass media images of war and still retains its extraordinary power and poignancy.
A clip of the film is available at ~The Mills of the Gods: Viet Nam~ ~back~
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Crosses and Windows - A Heck of a House View
View From Office Stairway, Heck of a House
When Good Things Happen To A Heck Of A Guy
in accordance with the Law of Large Numbers, there have indeed been those shining moments in DrHGuy’s life when things have unaccountably - and certainly unexpectedly - gone right.
One such example, notable for its spectacularly serendipitous timing, took place on the occasion of DrHGuy’s (or, more accurately, then MedStudenHGuy’s) Internal Medicine final exam. While DrHGuy, it is important to note, was confident that he had passed the test by a comfortable margin, he was to discover that almost every one of the answers of which he was less than certain turned out, in fact, to be correct, resulting in a score so aberrantly high that the medical school faculty revised their previous (and absolutely appropriate) assessment of DrHGuy as a competent but less than outstanding performer in that discipline to an evaluation that was tinged with something akin to the adulation of the Magi for the just born Messiah. Happily for the future of healthcare and DrHGuy’s psychiatry career, sanity and logic returned shortly, albeit not before DrHGuy was awarded Honors for the course.
And what can we learn from this parable?
Well, no one said it has said it more clearly than Tom Peters,1
To which I can only add the DrHGuy Corollary to the Tom Peters Principle follows:
Getting Lucky With Heck Of A House
As it came to pass, the designing and building of Heck Of A House included more and perhaps way, way more than its statistical share of instances when the results of plans and projects were as good as or better than the hoped-for outcomes.3
The Miraculous Vision: A Hallway With A View
(And a semi-miraculous shift to first person)
During one of our weekend visitations to the Heck Of A House building site, Julie and I were walking through the second story interior hallway of what would become my office when we noticed that, because the walls of the pool area abutting the office then consisted only of framing, that we had a gorgeous view of our yard and an adjacent field. After a brief discussion with our talented and empathic builder, an asymmetric window had been added to the plans for wall between the office hallway and the pool.
And, in defiance of the odds, the window placement worked perfectly, framing the view we had seen that day during the construction.
Consequently, every time I walk to the stairway from my office, I encounter the window pictured in the preceding graphic and, especially in the spring and summer, exterior views that are sometimes, without exaggeration, magnificent. That this experience rarely occurs without my recalling the episode when Julie and I first encountered this scene is a non-trivial bonus.
It is really great to be lucky.
The Photos
Snapping photos of Heck Of A House for insurance documentation this past summer, I followed my typical protocol, taking large quantities of pictures in hopes of producing one or two of decent quality.
One group of photos that resulted from that session shows the crossbeams of the pool area set against the view of the trees outside the house, and I’ve convinced myself that some of these pictures rate high enough on the artsy-fartsy scale4 to warrant presenting them in this post.
The sequence of nine photos, all taken within a few minutes of one another, begins with the view seen in the graphic atop this post and ends with a more prosaic, insurer-requested snapshot that shows part of the pool itself, the ceiling fans, etc. as well as the beams and trees. The seven images in the middle more interesting. Each of those is similar with details and angles that vary only minutely, but in ways that are, to me at least, intriguing. Because I took these photos for non-aesthetic reasons, the sizes vary and the lighting and focus are, well, let’s call them charmingly imperfect. My only manipulation of these pictures has been cropping some such that they all portray more or less the same area.
This gallery can be found at ~Media: Crosses And Windows~
Footnotes
- See Hewlett-Packard, Tom, and I Were All Lucky – OK, HP and Tom were REALLY lucky, but still … ~back~
- ”Infuckingcredibly” is, of course, an example of tmesis, a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is interjected between parts of a compound word or between syllables of a word. It is also an expletive infixation, a figure of speech in which an expletive or profanity is inserted into a word. An expletive infixation may, as in this case, also be a tmesis, but if the word attached to the explicative is not a compound, that instance of expletive infixation would not meet the criterion for a tmesis. In this case, I chose the term, “infuckingcredibly” to echo the “fucking” in the quote from Tom Peters. Also, it provides me a rationale to make a reference to the formal names of figures of speech, one of those “scholastic trifles” essential to my signature formula for making each post a challenge for readers (see 12 Ways To Minimize The Popularity Of A Well-written Blog) ~back~
- DrHGuy did put the odds in his favor by cleverly making every mistake possible in designing and building the predecessor of Heck Of A House ~back~
- If the reader will be kind enough to tentatively buy into my artsy-fartsy self-evaluation, I will be kind enough to forgo writing one of those interminably long paragraphs describing these photos with terms like “evocative of a contemporary cathedral, albeit one that is atypically suffused in unfiltered sunlight,” “contrast between man’s well-crafted artifice and nature’s unrestricted beauty,” “play of shadow and light,” and “subtle, nuanced modulations” ~back~
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12 Ways To Minimize The Popularity Of A Well-written Blog
Seek not the favor of the multitude; it is seldom got by honest and lawful means. But seek the testimony of the few; and number not voices, but weigh them.
~Immanuel Kant
Avoid popularity; it has many snares, and no real benefit.
~William Penn
The most significant blogological observation resulting from my Heck Of A Guy 2006 reviews can be summarized as follows: Despite posting content that, in comparison to that of many other, far more heavily visited sites, is better written, more informative, and funnier,1 I have managed to minimize this blog’s popularity.
Note that I am not whining about this discrepancy; heck, I can’t even bring myself to call it unfair. Short of voting fraud, what kind of complaint can one legitimately mount against the outcome of a popularity contest? “It’s not fair that she won; she’s more popular than me?” “This is supposed to be a popularity contest, but it’s turned into nothing but a popularity contest?” I don’t think so.
So the good content-low readership phenomenon isn’t a rip-off, but it is kinda interesting.2
Successfully minimizing the popularity of a blog that is well-written, informative, and funny doesn’t happen accidentally. It requires a strategy. As a service to bloggers everywhere, I’ve identified and listed a dozen methods I’ve used effectively to protect some outstanding content from readers.3
Establish A Defensive Perimeter To Deflect Potential Viewers
1. Divert readers with a clichéd, irrelevant, and, above all, dull opening before they become invested in your blog’s content
Try, for example, opening the post with an obscure, moralistic quote from someone like Immanuel Kant or William Penn.
2. Be a high roller at the Technology Casino
For example, spice up your trial and error code-writing self-education with a tinge of terror by making changes in your only copy of your blog stylesheet and template.
Use the cheapest host sites; find out if they really are all the same.
Experiment with every blogging tool, toy, and gizmo available, especially if (1) it’s new and untested4 and (2) you’re not certain of its benefits or potential problems.5
The technical problems thus created, however transient, can convince viewers your site is unreliable and can continue to diminish your audience long after those flaws have been repaired.
If viewers can’t view your site, you don’t have to worry about them as readers – or the links to you they might have placed on their own sites if they had liked what they would have seen – or their viewers who might have visited after the original readers (justifiably, of course) praised your talents. Every snafu that takes your site out of service (or just extends the time it takes for your site to load beyond a few seconds) has the potential to cause your very own [ choose one] vicious cycle or domino effect.
And, if Joe Bob’s browser can’t see your site, there’s a good chance Googlebot can’t see it either. Say goodbye to the search engine index.
Make The Blog A Challenge – Who Wants Hundreds Of Thousands Of Readers If They Aren’t Willing To Jump Through Your Hoops?
3. Always keep ‘em guessing
Shun straightforward news, advice, story-telling, or humor. Waver ambiguously between serious content, pathos, complex parody, and pretentious metaphysics, always maintaining sufficiently sardonic tone to cast doubt on the intention, let alone the accuracy, of even the simplest statement.
4. Exorcise all those hobgoblins of consistency, whether foolish or otherwise
Follow your own bliss within each posting. There is no consistency police to prevent you writing a single post that includes a critique of a movie you saw a decade ago, a review of an unrelated book you once read, a description of the best web sites for flash games involving gambling, Visigoths, and shellfish, the third cutest thing your kid said last week, a recap of Sunday’s sermon, and a paragraph on that armadillo dildo featured yesterday on the Discovery Channel. It’s a big world; there has to be somebody who will love that mix.
And remember, segues and transitions are for wusses.
As for your blog in general, stay true to the theme that you are far too special to be limited to a single theme. Resist and refute pleas to focus your efforts.
It is, by the way, inadequate to be merely inconsistent. There is the danger that some readers might enjoy reading a series of randomly chosen topics. To reliably discourage readers, one must be inconsistently inconsistent.
The writer sincerely desirous of thinning out the readership would be wise to affirmatively mislead the viewer into assuming a pattern exists and then crush that hope. Imagine the disappointment and frustration, for example, generated when a viewer reads a couple of posts written on a single topic, notices an indication that another is in the offing (e.g., “There’s more to this story.”) but then never finds another post on that issue. (Note that this effectively aggravates the reader and amuses the author.)
5. Employ your writing style as a weapon of mass obfuscation
Be warned that a sesquipedalian vocabulary is advantageous but insufficient. Eager beaver readers, for example, can simply look up the definitions of even the longest words.
Many of these individuals, however, can be flummoxed by adding a few obsolete words, preferably obsolete words that became obsolete because they were abstruse even when they were in common use.
The clever writer, however, will recognize that the potential for befuddlement is greater still if one intersperses technical jargon, cultural or regional slang, professional argot, and the like indiscriminately throughout the composition. This tactic is most effective if these terms are stripped of any clues as to their origins; in such a pure synsemantic or KWOC format, these literary land mines are nearly impossible for the reader to defuse.
While depositing a foreign phrase (without translation of course), in the midst of an exposition has nearly become its own parody, one should not overlook this strategy, given that it not only contributes to the general mystification of those foolhardy enough to peruse that posting but is also the writer’s classic instrument of intellectual one-upmanship, n’est-ce pas?
Like a foreign phrase, figurative language, implemented carefully, can supersede and impede comprehension. No less an authority on confusion than Bugs Bunny provides an example worthy of emulation in the episode, ” Baseball Bugs,” when he speaks directly to the audience prior to his final pitch of the game: “Watch me paste this pathetic palooka with a powerful paralyzing perfect pachydermous percussion pitch.”
Similarly, allusions can be confounding – if handled correctly. Anyone can invoke and recognize Greek, Roman, and, all too often, even Norse myths. On the other hand, mix in a few Iranian, Oceana, or Mesoamerican deities (without explanation, natch), and you, my friend, have got yourself an allusion to disillusion that will drive the hardiest reader to despair.
Another good bet is a throwaway line linked to some scholastic trifle just familiar enough that most readers have probably seen it before but obscure enough that most won’t recall the specific meaning,6 thus inducing in your erstwhile reader an element of embarrassment and, with luck, some shame, effective deterrents to further reading. I have found, for instance, that references to the formal names of logical fallacies can be forced into almost any context and are thus invaluable in this respect:
“That is little more than a case of dicto secundum quid ad dictum simpliciter.”
“You, sir, have fallen prey to the Fallacy of Undistributed Middle.”
Rather than surrender to the use of a short, simple word if a difficult, arcane term cannot be found to fit the context, draw up your courage and invent an expression; this kind of neologisticity not only delights the writer but also bewilders the reader.
Finally, keep in mind that authoritative and conclusive reader-daunting requires simultaneously stocking ones posts with these impediments to comprehension while subtly sustaining the implicit value judgment that any competently educated eighth-grader would recognize these terms and their meanings in context.
6. Manufacture complexity to inhibit reader motivation
As assuredly as the unexpected appearance of the philanderer’s wife during his assignation with his secretary causes him, however ardent at the onset, to detumesce, a proliferation of subordinate and embedded clauses, compound sentences, prepositional and participial phrases, coordinating, subordinating, and correlative conjunctions, and especially correlative adverbs, along with their entourage of commas, colons, and semicolons leads to an analogous deflation of interest by the once steadfast reader.
7. Even if you can’t make it entertaining, informative, amusing, or touching, you can certainly make it long
Get your money’s worth from each post. It isn’t worth booting up that computer to write a two or three paragraph post someone can conveniently read in less than five minutes.
Besides those ne’er-do-wells who read your blog obviously don’t have anything important to do.
Don’t Make It Easy For Google et al The Others; That’s Why They Call Them “Search” Engines
8. A clever heading that amuses its creator and misdirects the reader is invariably preferable to one that simply and accurately describes the content
So what if search engines, which account for 90% of your readership, depend on the first few words of a heading to provide an indication of the content – they’re so smart, let them figure it out. With just this one tactic, you can both discourage those who have already landed on your blog and prevent many, many more from finding it at all.
9. Do whatever necessary to discourage links to your site
Just because Google and the rest use links going to your blog as the most important determinant in ranking your site in their listings doesn’t mean you should ever ask for a link, especially from a high-ranking site. And, certainly do not write a post about anything that might get another blogger or webmaster to write about you a