Random Act of Boredom

fresherhells:

“French sounds like a woman flirting with a man, Italian like a man flirting with a woman, Spanish like a saint praying to God, & German like a stableboy cursing at his horse.”

-via Pera’s Atlas Linguistico, attributed to an anonymous Englishman (of course)

Alright. OBVIO!

Stick this in your goddess group meeting:

“If women allow themselves to be consoled for their culturally determined lack of access to the modes of intellectual debate by the invocation of hypothetical great goddesses, they are simply flattering themselves into submission (a technique often used on them by men). All the mythic versions of women, from the myth of the redeeming virgin to that of the healing, reconciling mother, are consolatory nonsenses; and consolatory nonsense seems to me a fair definition of myth, anyway. Mother goddesses are just as silly a notion as father gods. If a revival of the myths of these cults gives women emotional satisfaction, it does so at the price of obscuring the real conditions of life. This is why they were invented in the first place.

Myths deal in false universals, to dull the pain of particular circumstances.”

-Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman

TC - I found it.

fresherhells:

File under: Great Literary Putdowns in History (I don’t have the essay Vidal wrote about Norman Mailer, though I do recall him comparing one of Mailer’s books to “three days of menstrual flow”)

BTW, didn’t Norman Mailer headbutt him during the filming of the Cavett show for that crack?

TC - I found it.

fresherhells:

File under: Great Literary Putdowns in History (I don’t have the essay Vidal wrote about Norman Mailer, though I do recall him comparing one of Mailer’s books to “three days of menstrual flow”)

Gore Vidal on Henry Miller:

“At least half of Sexus consists of tributes to the wonder of Henry Miller. At a glance men realize that he knows. Women realize that he is. Mara-Mona: ‘I’m falling in love with the strangest man on earth. You frighten me, you’re so gentle… I feel almost as if I were with a god.’ Even a complete stranger is his for the asking the moment she sees him. But, uniquely, they both prefer to chat. The subject? Let the countess speak for herself: ‘Whoever the woman is you love, I pity her… Nobody can hold you for long… You make friends easily, I’m sure. And yet there is no one whom you can really call your friend. You are alone. You will always be alone.’ She asks him to embrace her. He does, chastely. Her life is now changed. ‘You have helped, in a way… You always help, indirectly. You can’t help radiating energy, and that is something. People lean on you, but you don’t know why.’”

“After two more pages of this keen analysis, she tells him, ‘Your sexual virility is only the sign of a greater power, which you haven’t begun to use.’ She never quite tells him what this power is, but it must be something pretty super because everyone else can also sense it humming away. As a painter friend (male) says, ‘I don’t know any writer in America who has greater gifts than you. I’ve always believed in you — and I will even if you prove to be a failure.’ This is heady praise indeed, considering that the painter has yet to read anything Miller has written.” (…)

“As a lover, Henry Miller is a national resource, on the order of Yosemite National Park. Later, exhausted by his unearthly potency, she realizes that for the first time she has met Man… one for whom post coitum is not triste but rhetorical. When lesser men sleep, Miller talks about the cosmos, the artist, the sterility of modern life. Or in his own words: ‘… our conversations were like passages out of The Magic Mountain, only more virulent, more exalted, more sustained, more provocative, more inflammable, more dangerous, more menacing, and much more, ever so much more, exhausting.’ “

“Yet Henry never seems to do anything for anyone, other than to provide moments of sexual glory which we must take on faith. He does, however, talk a lot and the people he knows are addicted to his conversation. ‘Don’t stop talking now, please…,’ begs a woman whose life is being changed, as Henry in a manic mood tells her all sorts of liberating things like ‘Nothing would ever be bad or ugly or evil — if we really let ourselves go. But it’s hard to make people understand that.’ To which the only answer is that of another straight man in the text who says, ‘You said it, Henry. Jesus, having you around is like getting a shot in the arm.’ For a man who boasts of writing nothing but the truth, I find it more than odd that not once in the course of a long narrative does anyone say, ‘Henry, you’re full of shit.’ It is possible, of course, that no one ever did, but I doubt it.”

-from Vidal’s Sexually Speaking 

Oh, excellent. Thanks!

Advice to aspiring careerists seeking to ride in helicopters and see themselves on television

CHOOSING COMPANIONS

* * *

Seek out the acquaintance of people richer and more important than yourself and never take an interest in people who cannot do you any favors. This rule admits of no exceptions. When Henry Kissinger was secretary of state, he put it plainly
to a woman seated next to him at a Washingtondinner party. “A great nation,” he said, “is like an ambitious hostess. It cannot afford to invite unsuccessful people to its parties.” In the event that you become either rich or famous you may collect friends in the way that Nike acquires prize athletes or Philip II of Spain collected dwarfs.

OPTIMISM

* * *

Your fellow countrymen like upbeat, happy people, and if you come up against bad news—a missing child, the loss of your right hand, your name left off the guest list for Barbra Streisand’s birthday party—imitate the television anchorpersons,
who manage to smile brightly when reading the reports of floods in Ohio or massacre in Rwanda. Never forget that you are always having fun. The attitude is especially important when being arraigned on charges of sodomy or tax evasion.

WORDS

* * *

Except when filling out insurance claims or marking up the pages of a mail-order catalogue, give more thought to the adjectives than to the nouns. Words serve as set decorations. What matters is how they look and sound, not whatever it is that they supposedly mean.

The abstract word is always to be preferred to the concrete word, and the best of all possible words—”postmodern,” “amusing,” “enigmatic,” “global,” “empowering”—are those that can be addressed to both a foreign policy and the soup.

Proper usage depends upon prior recognition of the consensus already seated on the terrace or the lawn. In conservative company—at a yacht club in Orange County, California, say, or at a fund-raising dinner sponsored by the friends of Senator Orrin Hatch—the words, “sexist” and “racist” refer to people like Jesse Jackson or Woody Allen. Among avowed liberals gathered on West Seventy-ninth Street in Manhattan to celebrate a new book of essays by Gloria Steinem, the same two words describe the entire male populations of West Virginia, Arizona, and Tennessee.

CLICHES

* * *

Make unsparing use of clichés. The empty word is the correct word. Contrary to the opinion of snobbish New York intellectuals, the placid murmur of cliché is always preferable to the expression of strong feeling, which is an embarrassment.


- Lewis Lapham, Lapham’s Rules of Influence: A Careerist’s Guide to Success, Status, and Self-Congratulation

I’m glad you had a baby. I’m really glad. You must be so happy. It’s a beautiful thing, babies. That’s great. Listen, I don’t give a shit. Stop sending me photos.

“He thought of straw: was this the kind you clutched at, or the kind that broke your back?”

-Martin Amis, London Fields