Weekend Words: Crawl

On Thursday, amNewYork reported that the annual SantaCon charity bar crawl will not be heading for Bushwick this year. According to the article by Dan Rivoli:

Communities have balked at the SantaCon bar crawl over reports of public urination, vomiting and rowdiness in the middle of the day. On its website, the “Santa Code” notes that “Santa does not drink more than Santa can handle” and “Santa doesn’t piss on the streets, start fights, block streets, climb on cars or deface property.”

Owners of Bushwick bars had been preparing for the onslaught of drinkers known to tear through the city’s hot nightlife areas in the cold light of day.

“Nobody wants it and nobody will allow it,” Ben Warren, owner of The Bodega and Heavy Woods, told amNewYork. “I’m just going to keep them out.”

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“Hollywood gives a young girl the aura of one giant, self-contained orgy farm, its inhabitants dedicated to crawling into every pair of pants they can find.”

—Veronica Lake

“I am the camera’s eye. I am the machine that shows you the world as I alone see it. Starting from today I am forever free of human immobility. I am in perpetual movement. I approach and draw away from things — I crawl under them — I climb on them — I am on the head of a galloping horse”

—Dziga Vertov

“I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.”

—Adrienne Rich, “Diving into the Wreck”

“Junk is the ideal product… the ultimate merchandise. No sales talk necessary. The client will crawl through a sewer and beg to buy.”

—William S. Burroughs

“A society which allows an abominable event to burgeon from its dung heap and grow on its surface is like a man who lets a fly crawl unheeded across his face or saliva dribble from his mouth — either epileptic or dead.”

—Jean Baudrillard

“How can a man’s candour be seen in all its lustre unless he has a few failings to talk of? But he had an agreeable confidence that his faults were all of a generous kind—impetuous, arm-blooded, leonine; never crawling, crafty, reptilian.”

—George Eliot, Adam Bede

“She, of whose soul, if we may say, ’twas gold,
Her body was the Electrum, and did hold
Many degrees of that; we understood
Her by her sight; her pure and eloquent blood
Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought,
That one might almost say, her body thought.
She, she thus richly, largely housed, is gone,
And chides us slow-paced snails who crawl upon
Our prison’s prison, Earth, nor think us well
Longer than whilst we bear our little shell.”

—John Donne, “Elegy on Mistress Drury”

“You can tear a poem apart to see what makes it tick… You’re back with the mystery of having been moved by words. The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps… so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash or thunder in.”

—Dylan Thomas

“Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search of the Atlantic Ocean, and missing? That’s the way the mind of man operates.”

—H. L. Mencken