No There There

from Slate

That makes the search for a compelling Kagan narrative even more imperative. But there's no there there...Lacking Sonia Sotomayor's up-from-poverty life story and John Roberts' sprinkled-with-fairy-dust charm, Kagan has been halfheartedly sketched by her enemies as a snarling hater of the military, and by her friends as awfully nice.

Gertrude Stein was famous for long torrents of doggerel, but nothing she said or wrote has proven so immortal as how Oakland, California has "no there there" (except for maybe "You are all a lost generation," directed condescendingly at Hemingway and Fitzgerald):

What was the use of my having come from Oakland it was not natural to have come from there yes write about it if I like or anything if I like but not there, there is no there there.

This comes from her memoir "Everyone's Autobiography." She was searching for a house she once lived in and couldn't find it. Moreover, she found Oakland unworthy of reminiscence.

To me I think this quip is not just minor disappointment. There is also subtle dig at California's disposable culture. Stein lived in Paris, and the quote gives off a whiff of haughty Old World dismissal.

But now "no there there" has become common enough currency to apply it to any non-entity. Journalists overturn every stone in search of a scandal that would complicate Elena Kagan's judicial appointment, but there's "no there there."

Could anyone use this phrase affirmatively? As in, "I love that new restaurant. Its ambiance is so unique. There's a wonderful there there." The phrase completely avoids an attempt at accurate description.

A "there there" is an essence, a gestalt, or a special luminosity that disappointing things don't have.

Fuel

from Terminal 4 at JFK Airport

A clever monosyllabic bar name should link the ritual of imbibing with some other site-appropriate concept. Think of Clink, at Boston's newly renovated Liberty Hotel. The place used to be a jail!

And there's a bar at Kennedy Airport called Fuel. The stuff you put in a plane, and into yourself, get it?

Coup de Gras

from the San Francisco Chronicle

The coup de gras was Kevin Kouzmanoff's double to left.

In French, "un coup de grâce" is a merciful death blow. It's euthanasia for one's enemies, but in its borrowed American form, the term feels sophisticated and luxurious.

Except that sometimes grace is misspelled "gras," which springtime revellers know means "fat." "Coup de gras" doesn't mean anything, although it calls to mind some kind of suffocation with meat.

In this example from baseball, where Kouzmanoff puts the game out of reach, he might be swinging a bat made of sausage links, or waddling around the bases all bloated from a big lunch.

Whatever Lifts Your Luggage

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The Doughnut-Pyramid

If we think of the misery of war as being at the center of human affairs, the Japanese people have since Hiroshima been fleeing in all directions away from the center. Thus we have developed a "doughnut" view of life, keeping as much distance as possible from war's misery at the center. With the growth of our affluent consumer society, our standard of living has risen dramatically; so, to add a vertical dimension to this perspective, we leave the tragedy of war at the bottom and seek to rise higher and higher above it. With our double effort to get away from, and also above, the misery of war, the simple doughnut has been replaced by a three-dimensional pyramid as the shape of our common lifestyle -- with the [1964 Tokyo] Olympics at the top.

--Toshiro Kanai as told to Kenzaburo Oe

Wow. Not a lot I can add to this one. A doughnut of repression! A pyramid of affluence, with a hole of war at its vacant heart! Simply an outstanding mixed metaphor. And bonus points for mentioning the moral bankruptcy of the Olympics.

Victor Ward

from Glamorama by Bret Easton Ellis

Ellis novels unfurl the vanity and vacuity of overexposed models and heirs in NY/LA. American Psycho got the most notoriety but for my money Glamorama is the funniest, strangest, most haunting Ellis effort.

The book's protagonist is first glimpsed in The Rules of Attraction, where he has a cameo as the object of Lauren's unrequited love. In Glamorama, Victor Johnson is a wisecracking heartthrob whom someone's trying to kill. Except he has chosen a Pynchon-esque nom-de-mode for himself: Victor Ward.

Drowsy on pills and booze and more fashionable than most of us could ever imagine, it's a given that people envy Victor Ward. But like a good Ellis character, he hates himself and is hurtling fast towards oblivion. It's almost like he's institutionalized in a fashionable milieu from which he can't escape: the victor ward.