Get Fuzzy, 8 June 2008, by Darby Conley.Welcome to what will perhaps be a new and efficient series called "Three Nice Poety Things". In it, we look at something and point out three nice poety things about it. Today's is a recent Get Fuzzy strip.
1. Puns are the most obvious form of poetry. And Get Fuzzy revels in them, often packing several in a strip. But while "Wake up and smell the kvas" is nice, "You're behind the iron curve" is terrific. "Curve" and "curtain" are connected by sound rather than meaning, but the pun conjures up the iron curve that you cannot get out from behind.
2. "Runin' nyet biblioteca": The /n/ with /i/-related sounds, switching to /b/ with /i/-related sounds, is well done. It should be "biblioteku" there (I'm told), but of course Bucky wouldn't know that, so it seems he has switched to Spanish for a moment, because all foreign languages are equivalent inasmuch as they are foreign; it is a nice moment of confusion/conflation, which is one of my favorite forms of poetry.
3. That t-shirt. I guess it's an Obama t-shirt? But the O with the stars in the third panel has a little line in it that makes it look like a Q. What is that indeterminate lettershape? Ah, for a world in which indeterminate lettershapes were the most obvious form of poetry! With Geof Huth as poet laureate!
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I was reminded of "learning curve" initially.
Biblioteka (библиотека) is the nominative singular form of library and a genuine Russian word. Biblioteku (библиотеку) is the accusative singular, which is called for by the grammar of the sentence. We can forgive Bucky for not knowing Russian morphology.
I thought it could have been a clock.
Actually, looking that again, the библиотека deal could work out all sorts of ways. If we went with the original construct it appears in: "nyet biblioteka", it would be written "нет библиотек". If we translated him as saying something like "I'm not working in a library", it would look like "Я не работаю в библиотеке", and if we went with the original structure of the sentence, where 'biblioteka' is the direct object, yeah, it would be библиотеку. Yay for finding translation complexities in comic strips!
To me the indeterminate letter shape looks like a volume knob on 11.
Oh that's probably what it is.