Love Letter To A Dodo Bird

Dear Dodo,


Has there ever been an uglier bird?

You, with red-tipped beak, yon gaping nostrils, most bald and all-but-plucked head.

You, misshapen as an old boot.


Can I call you my fat baby, my inelegant overgrown dove?

Can I call you my portly piggy pigeon?


I love your flightless girth and beady dino eyes.



I love your mud-puddle plumage.


There are many reasons I love you but most of all this: your ignominious etymology -


“Sluggard,” “Fat-arse,”



“Fool,” and “crazy.”


Can I call you, as Vice Admiral Wybrand van Warwijck did, “loathsome bird”?


Or might I address you, in the manner of the Dutch, simply as “swollen” (as is my heart for you)?


Oh feathered lumpy lumpy!


Oh goitered low-hanging balloon!

I long to hear your call once more, low and awkward through the underbrush:


Doo-doo, doo-doo, doo-doo.

I Am Re-reading Franny and Zooey For The Second Time This Month

On January 27, JD Salinger's corpse will turn two years old. Franny and Zooey--though nitpicked by Updike, who is a cad, and by Joan Didion, who is the greatest nonfiction writer of the past fifty years--is Salinger’s finest moment. If you haven’t read Salinger since high school, start with either that or Nine Stories. Don’t start with Catcher in the Rye unless you are a sexually frustrated teenage boy.

Because I was a sexually frustrated teenage boy, I started with Catcher in the Rye. For a book report, I had to pick one novel from a pre-approved list of fifty. I picked Catcher not because I was a twelve-year-old version of Holden Caulfied, but because my older brother already owned it, which meant I would not have to borrow a book from the library, which meant I would save the $1.50 of late fees I would have inevitably incurred.

I’ve reproduced the tale here not just because I invariably go out of my way to recommend a good prose pacifier to divorced parents of petulant twelve-year-olds, but for quite another reason. What directly follows is a question about quality versus quantity, a question that is only fair when it pertains to artists who are already deceased.

If you’re a Salinger junkie, you have little choice but to read and re-read his slender oeuvre to get your fix. This is not healthy or admirable or even advisable. Since he published a mere four books, roughly eight-hundred pages in all, whenever I get that Salinger itch, there’s no place to scratch but the slim spine of one of my pocket-sized paperbacks. And I hate that. Like a more traditional junkie, I find myself lying to my mom instead of telling her the truth, instead of telling her that I am re-reading Franny and Zooey for the second time this month. It’d be a boon, not a bane, to his fans if Salinger had been more like Bob Dylan or Woody Allen or Philip Roth. Every year it seems there’s a new Roth novel in my stocking or a Woody Allen movie in my NetFlix queue or a Dylan album in my iTunes -- some superlative, some in that middle ground between mediocre and good, and some which are embarrassing, but totally have the right to exist. Regardless of their merit, however, I taste and decide for myself if I should return for seconds. Who knows? In a decade or so I might actually enjoy Bob Dylan’s Christmas album.

So which do you prefer: Artists who produce prodigiously, even if their production might occasionally be embarrassing? Or artists who are pickier with their output, producing less, but producing consistently superb art?

Elliott Krause is a Defunct staff reader and contributor to Ye Olde Blogge.

Take A Ride On A Giant Slingshot

Both devoted garage-salers and lovers of all things thrift, the apartment I share with my boyfriend is an orange-walled hybrid of past and present, old and new. A dusty record player sits in the forty-two inch shadow of our flat screen TV, which faces a tattered yellow chair we rescued from a rummage sale two years ago. A missing leg meant that it was free, and after several failed attempts to fix the thing we used a few blocks of wood to prop up the back end, concealing our work with a bookcase purchased on Craigslist for two dollars.

Saturday afternoons, my boyfriend and a friend of his from art school sit on our couch (bought new last summer after we grew weary of Goodwill’s stained, lumpy offerings) and watch VHS tapes they find at thrift stores and auctions. Interested in obsolete technology, Josh and Derek create videos and other conceptual-based art projects that celebrate the collision of new media with old. Josh drags black garbage bags full of tapes from the office we share, and I watch while he and Derek sort through them and decide which ones to sample for their own videos. In one, Chuckie Cheese and his friends try to hotwire a school bus; in another, a high school choir from Ohio goes on a field trip to New York City.  The group favorite, though, is a video of a teenage couple that takes a ride on what looks like a giant slingshot at a county fair, their screams decade-shattering as they are snapped once, twice, into the night.

Watch below:

Amy Bernhard is a Defunct staff reader and contributor to Ye Olde Blogge.

A Hundred Years Ago...or, the Square Pancake

 "...Many years later, I think about holding a relic.  That issue of National Geographic was nearly a century old when I held it in my hands.  Try as I might to resist the simultaneous temptations of sentimentalizing the past and frowning at the present, I can't help but feel that a century twenty-five years ago might feel like a millennium now.  I'm sure each generation bemoans, or at least takes note of, the speed of its present versus the languor of its past, perhaps without value judgement, but things are radically faster now than at any point in human history, and the past recedes at lightning speed.  Of course, the older one gets, the further into the past the past vanishes; though not news, this still rankles.  I was young when I held that issue in my hands: my childhood ended the month before; adolescence just a week later; I didn't have a whole lot of perspective yet.  But I sensed the gravity of perspective, of distance, before I could adequately essay it."

Defunct contributor Joe Bonomo has a wonderful short essay up at No Such Thing As Was about holding one of the first issues of National Geographic, Record Store Day, and vinyls.  Fans can also check out his Defunct essay, "Wait For It," which appeared in last April's issue.