nothing like the sun

All that is left of a person is their name.

Olivia Mostacilla of Columbia, quoted in the 5 October issue of the London Review of Books.

In the LRB Diary piece Michael Taussig goes on to say: “She wasn’t referring to the paramilitary massacres, which have stopped in the past few months because of the ongoing ‘demobilizations’ of the paras organized by President Uribe’s government, but to the craze for plastic surgery, especially the variety known as lipo-escultura or ‘fat sculpture.’”

I’ll spare you the accounts of the back room cut-rate surgeries: the enlarged eyes that won’t close, the infected breast enlargements that result in double mastectomies, the nose job that resulted in breathing like a cat. “You know how a cat breathes? You can hear her breathing several feet away.”

And just for good measure:

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red:
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound.
I grant I never saw a goddess go:
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground.
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.

~ That would be our boy Willy S.

p.s. I have more to say on the subject of female beauty, but right now I've gotta get prettied up for work, so it will have to be later.

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