WEBVTT

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Do you know what
a Fiji mermaid is?

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Do your Googles
work on your phone?

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[LAUGHTER]

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It's F-I-J-I mermaid.

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Or you can look up
F-E-E-J-E-E mermaid.

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And this is how we read
poems together in 2024.

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You got to meet me
halfway with these ones.

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But this poem that
appears in the book

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has a Fiji mermaid in it.

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And if you're looking
at it now, it's

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like this patchwork
stitched together

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beast, this horrible
turducken-like thing.

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[LAUGHTER]

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And it's also like a hoax.

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It's a fake.

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It's a sideshow thing,
which seems right.

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And there's one of
those in this poem.

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And there's also an epigraph
that's kind of long.

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So I'll just kind of
describe what it does.

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But there's a book called
Spanish Colonial Tucson:

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a Demographic History that
names an ancestor of mine

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pretty uncharitably.

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And I love it because there's a
complaint from a Spanish priest

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that my ancestor
was kind of inept.

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And what really makes me--

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what I get a kick out of is that
even in the late 18th-century,

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there's this sentiment that
we're just tired of nepo babies

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and their ineptitude.

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And i think of a
quote from it was

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that, this guy does
nothing but dance, gamble,

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and sport fancy clothes.

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So this is called In The Style
Of Early Television Makeup.

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To what extent is
one ancestor you:

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ebb exposed and
uniformless skull,

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skull who evidently once sat
for a portrait on a donkey

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painted wraithlike in the style
of early television makeup

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on the very crushed
water bottle island

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vortices you trawl tonight?

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Hat with the
extravagant galloon,

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bloodblack Sea of Cortez.

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All Souls' didn't Mother
comb for bone slivers

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with your toothbrush,
splice wreckage--

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uncorrupted digit, true
cross, the figurehead doll's

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hard recurring white
syphilitic eye--

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hoist that Fiji mermaid
in your church clothes?

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Thank you.

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[APPLAUSE]

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