Fairy Tale
Ron PadgettThe little elf is dressed in a floppy cap
and he has a big rosy nose and flaring white eyebrows
with short legs and a jaunty step, though sometimes
he glides across an invisible pond with a bonfire glow on his cheeks:
it is northern Europe in the nineteenth century and people
are strolling around Copenhagen in the late afternoon,
mostly townspeople on their way somewhere,
perhaps to an early collation of smoked fish, rye bread, and cheese,
washed down with a dark beer: ha ha, I have eaten this excellent meal
and now I will smoke a little bit and sit back and stare down
at the golden gleam of my watch fob against the coarse dark wool of my vest,
and I will smile with a hideous contentment, because I am an evil man,
and tonight I will do something evil in this city!
This is definitely one of my all-time favorite poems, almost entirely because of the unexpected and altogether delicious ending. The last two lines really make it. I often think of them when I’m out and about, even though I am technically an evil woman with no gleaming watch fob to speak of.
Read more about the poet here or hear him reading ‘Fairy Tale’ here.
Another evil man who likes doing evil.
What better way to kick off this blog than with a post on sickening, lice-infested clumps of hair? (Yeah! Go team blog!)
I am, of course, referring to the phenomenon known as The Polish Plait, also known as Plica Polonica or Plica Neuropathica. A Polish Plait is pretty much
A preserved Polish Plait from the Museum of Krakow.
what happens when you don’t wash or comb your hair, to the point where a large, smelly clump forms. And at this point, it’s not just a clump of hair — we’re talking blood, skin, pus, and lice, all forming a saucy mélange, if you will, of keratinous grossitude. And as hair care even as recently as a couple of centuries ago wasn’t fabulous, they were, in fact, pretty common.
There was a lot of superstition surrounding the Polish Plait; people treated them like magical amulets that drew illness from the body and granted good health — pretty ironic given there were documented cases of people dying from “laboring beneath their plait” (one shudders to think). People actively tried to grow these sickening, festering lumps of shit on their heads to bring good luck. However, it was also thought that casting a magic spell on someone could give them a Polish Plait, and if you dared to cut it off, it could very well become pissed-off enough to attack you. Hence the widespread horror among the peasantry in the 19th century when medical professionals campaigned around the countryside to get people to quit with the shitty hair, even forcibly hacking off a few. It wasn’t until there were rumors that the plaits might be taxed that people cut them off themselves. Which just goes to show that people will do anything not to fork out a little extra cash.
People who rocked the Plait:
"Bitches best not be talkin' shit 'bout my Plait."
King Christian IV of Denmark
HOT OIL TREATMENT PLZ
This allegedly homeless man
Links:
Wikipedia entry on Polish Plait
Elements of Pathological Anatomy by Samuel David Gross, MD, 1857
An interesting history of the Polish Plait which, among other things, links its appearance to images of Medusa in ancient Greek society.
