ETAOIN SHRDLU

frim-fram sauce

“I want the frim-fram sauce with the ausen fay
With chafafa on the side.”

—Redd Evans & Joe Ricardel, “The Frim-Fram Sauce”, 1945.

multi-colored scorpenae

“The table was strewn with garlands and flowers, and laden with tankards and pitchers. . . . There were terra-cotta platters of plump eels sprinkled with seasoning; there were wax-coloured alphestae, and sacred beauty-fish. Besides these there was a pompilus, a purple fish said to have been born of the same foam as Aphrodite, boopoe, bebradons, a grey mullet served up with calmars, and multi-colored scorpenae. Certain dishes were served in little saucepans in order that they might be eaten foaming hot, and among these were a great slice of myra, fat tunny-fish, and hot devil-fish with tender tentacles. Finally came the belly of a white electric eel, as round as the belly of a beautiful woman.
    Such was the first course.”

—Pierre Louys, Aphrodite, 1896; translated by Lewis Galantiere, 1933.

etaoin shrdlu

meep

Meep Meep

Meep!

The Marree Man, or Stuart’s Giant

The three sad eyes of the ellipses

“The three sad eyes of the ellipses. Something is lost . . . Three islands.
Small songs in a sea that prefers to forget the land . . . The mouth opens
and begins to speak; there is nothing that can be said . . . One world
followed by another and then another. Tiny black specks at the end of
the galaxy . . . A three frame animation where nothing appears to happen,
though perhaps down on the minuscule surface, there are different kinds
of silences, memories, things forgotten or left. The trailing off, the
continuing on . . . Small black stones in the river of speech . . . Three
tunnels waiting for the three trains of past, present, and somewhere in
between . . . Dots lost and drifting from i’s, j’s, or umlauts, floating
between words in the cloudbound grammar above the teleological cities
of the sentence . . . Notes from a song with neither pitch nor rhythm. The
dark matter music between things . . . Three brother molecules in a
subatomic folktale, though it is unclear which is the youngest, most
foolish, most likely to wed the princess . . . An echo of the full stop at
the end of the sentence. Things end, but their ripples mark the page
with their tiny fingerprints. Here I am, though what I was is
forgotten, disappeared, or unclear. I grip the cliff of the page,
holding on until you get here ready to imagine what I might have been.”

David’s enthusiasm for doing free work for Simon