[The following is from The Yale Journal of Pretentious Free-Association, an actual publication that a friend and I actually conceived and produced about 9 years ago—in the real world! All credit for the editor's name—and I believe for the name of the journal, as well—goes to the fecund imagination of my collaborator, Thomas Woodrow (see here!) whom I'll name if and when I get his permisison. I may also include a link to an actual full, online edition of the Journal's one issue if I can figure out a way to do it elegantly, gracefully, beautifully...with love. Here you can view an actual full, online edition of the Journal's one issue—not elegantly, gracefully, or beautifully, but with love.]
When I first arrived at Yale my mind was thinly veiled by the yolkish fluff of youthful ambition and the sublimated anxiety that our poetic populace has compared to butterflies in the stomach, calling to mind Vladimir Nabokov in his transcendent puzzling and Milton's consistent understatement of his own uniformity under God (i.e., Shakespeare). Clearly the students at this glorious institution—people! that staggering recognition of ourselves in others!—cannot be "people" in the same way that Hamlet is a person, mere words on a page that in the reading become something larger; no: people here somehow transcend through intrascension (if you will) undercutting the limbo-stick of the norm in such a way as far to overfly the same, as the space between notes determines the true melody, or the ur-melody, from which all melodies must be birthed, dripping (as I was, as were we all) in the yolkishly placental fluff of the womb. Motherhood, clearly, is the defining feature of Yale: Yale begets us upon itself as surely as did Da upon Mum, coitally echoing, or earlier foreshadowing, the powerfully drumming conclusory portion of "The Wasteland."
What is motherhood, after all, if not a restatement of statements, an explanatory footnote to a Middle English text, long ignored by academic circles in favor of far lesser, sexier texts? My own mother once took me upon her knee and spoke to me in French (the irony of that, the constant tension of English against English, battling itself in its etymology, just as we must in ourselves repeat constantly and endlessly the sexual interchange that created us!): "Tu es beau, mon petit, mon cher, et papa ne t'aura pas." That recognition of my own beauty and the pan-Freudian undercurrents of paternal dominance in the subconscious literary framework undercut all further aesthetic discoveries until I was twelve years old, at which point I first experienced Shelley and was altered forever, as a caterpillar is altered before flying into the spider's web.
Thus, under the auspices of the ever-burgeoning awakening of self and of other-in-literature, bathing in the beneficently teasing gaze of the secular deity Logos, I bring to you, with the subtly self-defecating pride of the newly-arisen from intellectual slumber, the first issue of The Yale Journal of Pretentious Free-Association. Congratulate not the editor, but thyself, for thy reading rejuvenates and retroactively creates. Bless you. Bless you.
Mumblequatch Anuspladdy
Editor-in-Chief
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