Remembrance Of National Pastimes

Or: What Do You Do When You're Brandon?

 

An erstwhile NER writer, who described himself as philosemitic and as a  "mild, tolerant homophobe" once wrote:

 

"When, one evening, someone asked him [Martin Kellerman] for an opinion on Proust, he shook his head and gave a firm "No!" Why? we asked. Replied Martin, in his heavy German accent salted with British slang: "Because I do not like poofs. Und I especially do not like Chewish poofs. It is against nature, und against my religion." I have never since felt the slightest urge to read Proust."

 

A rather intolerant expression for a homosexual in America is "someone who bats for the other team", but it's a seventh inning stretch to get from "batting" to "bunting" and Mary is on record for dissing our "national pastime", so I'm way off base here.

 

Madeleine "Baby" Bunting is no British Betsy Ross and did not write I Like Green Flags & Islam, but googling "Proust Bunting" yields a description of a stage set which includes bunting and also someone's catch phrase, "Do we have any bunting?"

 

While showering (unlike Queen Victoria, I definitely needed to do so and it isn't even Saturday) it occurred to me that "Bally" (see frivolous posts) could reference pinball machines and Bally's of Las Vegas.  Muddling, buggering and googling on with "Proust Bally" spit out Brandon Proust of Bally Total Fitness.  I suppose that his program could change one's life if one's exercise had been chiefly one of stuffing change in one of Bally's coin-operated contraptions.  

 

Sigh - Answers "not even wrong" I suppose, but I will take umbrage or audubon, while wrapping myself not only in the flag of the United States (my D.O.B.: June 14 -Flag Day) and red, white and blue bunting, but also the colours of my state of Minnesota, at the odious comparison of our immortal bird** with Madeleine Bunting, the "demented loon."

 

*....and you know you're a man...oops - I mean person"

 

** Hint: It's not a bunting.

Mamma Mia

Or: "Help, I Cannot Get Out" Said The Bunting To Ol' Blue Eyes

 

Madeleine Bunting wrote The Model Occupation which inspired The Wild One which substituted biker gangs for the buxom British models who occupied and terrorized a fictional small town in the U.S., the residents of which, "lost time" when they were compelled by the fascist so-called "Super Vixens" to set their clocks to "Channel Island Mean Time."  The novel was written while Bunting was confined to a cork-lined cell in the Nuthatch Insane Asylum.  She was known as "the bird person of the booby hatch" because she kept a bunting as a pet.  Proust's walls were similarly furnished, although he kept an escaped parrot and died of psittacosis. 

 

As an aside, Madeleine wrote a poem, Lesbia and her Bunting inspired by the works of Edna St. Vincent Millay and those of Catullus (translated into Cornish by Judge Learned Hand).  Never published, one of the lines has been rumored to be "my candle bums at both ends, it feels so awful tight", and another, which apparently references the woman who improbably wed both Frank Sinatra and Woody Allen, "In every bed was Farrow."

 

sigh - getting colder