When I type my name in Google, one of the first of the million entries for Kathleen Welch is an excerpt from the Corpse, which explains “the herding of fat Americans to liposuction centers where the fat is used for penile enlargement!”
William Burroughs and I understood each other perfectly. Never actually friends, we shared a kinship based on class, although the tacit bond crossed significant genealogical barriers. My paternal blood extended farther back than his, to the China Trade, and my mother’s stock was older yet, gentry from turn-of-the-eighteenth century Albany and environs.
The new topic of conversation with the old folks I do windows for is health. They tell me about their cancer and their triple bypasses, and I tell them about my triple-A aneurysm surgery. They take in my neck brace and ask what happened, and I say, "Just some messed up vertebrae." This is a long way from how it was when I first started cleaning windows and now and then a young housewife made a pass at me.
Celebrating Ambrose Bierce’s centennary, the Corpse is inviting readers to submit entries for our new Devil’s Dictionary. The one below is an example, by the Editor.
DERIVATIVE: an example of something that should have never happened: turning the verb “to derive” into a noun: it took 100 years for the verb “to derive” to turn into the adjective “derivative,” and another 50 years for the adjective to aquire a negative connotation, as in “his work is derivative,” and only a few months to redefine that noun as a “financial instrument,” and then less than ten seconds for that instrument to become the proctological tool that every American now calls painful. This is the price of letting bankers use words instead of numbers. People, take back your language, and use those butt-plugs we’ve been selling here at the Corpse offices.
Celebrating Ambrose Bierce’s centennary, the Corpse is inviting readers to submit entries for our new Devil’s Dictionary. The one below is an example, by the Editor.
DERIVATIVE: an example of something that should have never happened: turning the verb “to derive” into a noun: it took 100 years for the verb “to derive” to turn into the adjective “derivative,” and another 50 years for the adjective to aquire a negative connotation, as in “his work is derivative,” and only a few months to redefine that noun as a “financial instrument,” and then less than ten seconds for that instrument to become the proctological tool that every American now calls painful. This is the price of letting bankers use words instead of numbers. People, take back your language, and use those butt-plugs we’ve been selling here at the Corpse offices.
A NEW DEVIL’S DICTIONARY