3.) The Palace Aphorisms, 16-18

Fat People & Tourists Series

no. 16

During tourist season, local hunters show a remarkable restraint.

no. 17

The fat man dreams that he is a soap bubble.

The fat woman dreams that she is a tiny seed feathered in milkweed silks, floating up toward heaven.

no. 18

A very fat tourist with a tiny toy camera around his neck comes to see sights and is one.

The milkweed photo is courtesy of www.sxc.hu/ and Loretta Humble, who lives in Malakoff, Texas and describes herself as "owner/publisher of a small weekly newspaper and Living Well, a free health/senior tabloid."

The Palace Aphorisms, 13-15

Fat People & Tourists series

no. 13

Tourists are people in shorts who can smile in unison.

Fat tourists are people in shorts who smile in unison with their knees turned together.

no. 14

Delicacy is a fat man holding a porcelain tea cup.

no. 15

A person never plumbs his genius and capacity for annoying the natives until he is made a tourist.

The picture above was taken by my husband in Istanbul this summer, when Mike and B were tourists there (yes, we are sometimes tourists, and if we eat too much, are liable to get fat--except N, who considered it a feat to break 50 lbs.); it is the underground Constantinople cistern, lost for a millenia and a half. The pillaged columns were mostly Greek, but the builders would have called themselves Roman. The cistern was 'found' when someone investigated a rumor that people living in a certain area of the city could pull up water and fish from holes in their cellars. When discovered in the late Middle Ages, it became a dumping ground for trash and bodies, but has once again been cleaned up.

The Palace Aphorisms, 11-12

Being a subset of the
Fat People & Tourists series,
having to do with the polar opposition
between Baseball Tourists
& Opera Tourists:
a peculiarly Cooperstonian subject.

no. 11

The baseball tourist is invariably fatter, louder, crueler to children, more indignant with the locals, more bursting with uncontrollable passion, more apt to bellow his family troubles to the street—altogether more operatic than the opera tourist.

no. 12

The baseball tourist has a tenuous relationship to reality; he often mistakes houses for museums, lawns for garbage cans, and gardens for his own picking-ground.

The opera tourist shudders delicately at the baseball tourist, purchases a catered picnic basket, and tidies up the opera grounds afterward.

Or, to put it on a more personal level--

The baseball tourist has a tenuous relationship to reality; he mistakes my house for a museum, my lawn for a garbage can, and my cottage garden for his own picking-ground. Etc.

Photo of Glimmerglass Opera courtesy of www.sxc.hu and Adriana Martins of Guaratinguetá, Brazil--no, my mistake. That's actually the Vienna Opera House. But Glimmerglass is quite nice in its own lake-and-rural-barn way...

The Palace Aphorisms, no. 6

series 1: Fat people & tourists

The Palace Aphorisms
no. 6:

The tourist comes to see what he has been told to see and traps a tiny portion of its soul in his little digital camera.

Rules & such for The Palace Aphorisms are here.

* * *

Photograph of a tourist by Cecilia Alvarez of Barcelona, courtesy of www.sxc.hu.