Not only ought 'it's a no-no' carry twice the force of a simple 'no' (instead of a quarter of the force, as it actually does); it ought to set in train a series of increasingly vehement negations: 'no-no-no'; 'no-no-no-no' and so on. But does it?

No.

Pasta

The penne adhere to the base of the pan,
sway in the scum-hot water like razorshells
clustered on their low-tide rock

What children say

In Longus’ Daphnis and Chloë Eros speaks: ‘I am not a child though I seem to be so, but am older than Kronos.’ Every child says this, without speaking; the iteration of the ancient-ness of new life.

Urban superposition

‘Now let us,’ says Freud in Civilization in its Discontents, ‘by a flight of imagination, suppose that Rome is not a human habitation but a psychical entity with a similarly long and copious past—an entity, that is to say, in which nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest one. This would mean that in Rome the palace of the Caesars and the Septizonium of Septimus Severus would still be rising to their old height on the Palatine … the same piece of ground would be supporting the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva and the ancient temple over which it was built. And the observer would perhaps only have to change the direction of his glance or his position in order to call up the one view or the other.’ It's an odd thing that Freud immediately steps back from his psychical thought experiment (‘There is clearly no point in spinning our phantasy any further, for it leads to things that are unimaginable and even absurd’). Other writers have not been so coy, most recently, of course, Mièville’s City and City. But the central point here is worth stressing; that actually this precisely how cities operate: we walk semiconsciously through the semipermanence of all the city all of time.

Esmiss Esmoor

That moment in Passage to India where the locals begin chanting ‘Mrs Moore’, and her son is revolted: ‘he disliked it more than he showed. It was revolting to hear his mother travestied into Esmiss Esmoor, a Hindu goddess.
Esmiss Esmoor
Esmiss Esmoor
Esmiss Esmoor.’
What’s odd about this is that Isis is not a Hindu deity ('is Mother Isis! More ...is Mother Isis!): although she is very much the right goddess to invoke at this moment in the novel.

Judgment of Ys

I’m less interested in the Judgment of Paris, and more in the Judgment of Ys. The fate of a land is of more moment than the fate of an individual—or more precisely (since the latter soon tangles up the fates of nations) the environmental thoroughness of the judgment passed on Ys is more striking.

What the parrot says, and what it means

When the woman, her name is Violet, went to the funeral to see the girl and to cut her dead face they threw her to the floor and out of the church. She ran, then, through the all that snow, and when she got back to her apartment she took the birds from their cages and set them out the windows to freeze or fly, including the parrot that said, “I love you” [Tony Morrison, Jazz]

The pathos here is all to do with the fact that though the parrot might say “I love you”, it does not mean it, and in fact it cannot even know how to mean it, any more than a dead woman can feel the cut of your revenge. This gap between our tendency to invest the world with our own emotional intensity and the actual indifference of the world is one of the key things that informs Morrison's fiction.