by
David Hering
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[...] What's so terrifying about the narrator's nightmares of adult life, over and above the supernatural horrors of The Exorcist, consists in the grim fact that there can be no maternal reassurance that there exists "nothing like what you just dreamed in the real world" (106).
on Smithy
journalism can lead to a moment of real human connection between the reader and a world that they would not otherwise know
quoted from Robert Boynton's The New New Journalism
X works for General Motors. All day long he performs a single repetitive task. The things he helps to make are not under his control. And yet he feels good. He is proud of the bustling capitalist economy; he may even be convinced that the capability to perform simple repetitive tasks is the only capability he possesses, that he could not handle a larger demand. Does his inner sense of worth count as genuine self-respect, and is GM therefore a successful distributor, in his case, of that primary good?
comparing a passage from Octet to this passage from a philosophical piece by Nussbaum ("Shame, Separateness, and Political Unity")
[...] This is what Lynch is about in this movie: both innocence and damnation; both sinned-against and sinning. Laura Palmer in Fire Walk with Me is both "good" and "bad," and yet also neither: she's complex, contradictory, real. And we hate this possibility in movies; we hate this "both" shit. "Both" comes off as sloppy characterization, muddy filmmaking, lack of focus. [...] But I submit that that the real reason we criticized and disliked Lynch's Laura's muddy both_ness is that it required of us an empathetic confrontation with the exact same muddy _both_ness in ourselves and our intimates that makes the real world of moral selves so tense and uncomfortable, a _both_ness we go to the movies to get a couple hours' fucking relief from. A movie that requires that these features of ourselves and the world not be dreamed away or judged away or massaged away but _acknowledged, and not just acknowledged but drawn upon in our emotional relationship to the heroine herself--this movie is going to make us feel uncomfortable, pissed off; we're going to feel, in Premiere magazine's own head editor's word, "Betrayed."
I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose. And I’m starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life’s sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time. It is dreadful. But since it’s my own choices that’l lock me in, it seems unavoidable—if I want to be any kind of grownup, I have to make choices and regret foreclosures and try to live with them.
[...] Here are some various things I tried: EST, riding a ten-speed to Nova Scotia and back, hypnosis, cocaine, sacro-cervical chiropractic, joining a charismatic church, jogging, pro bono work for the Ad Council, meditation classes, the Masons, analysis, the Landmark Forum, the Course in Miracles, a right-brain drawing workshop, celibacy, collecting and restoring vintage Corvettes, and trying to sleep with a different girl every night for two straight months (I racked up a total of thirty-six for sixty-one and also got chlamydia, which I told friends about, acting like I was embarrassed but secretly expecting most of them to be impressed--which, under the cover of making a lot of jokes at my expense, I think they were--but for the most part the two months just made me feel shallow and predatory, plus I missed a great deal of sleep and was a wreck at work--that was also the period I tried cocaine). I know this part is boring and probably boring you, by the way, but it gets a lot more interesting when I get to the part where I kill myself and discover what happens immediately after a person dies. In terms of the list, psychoanalysis was pretty much the last thing I tried.
The truth behind these seasonally professed inadequacies of intelligence is the old obscurantist myth which holds that an ideais noxious if it is nor controlled by "common sense and "feeling": Knowledge is Evil, both grow on the same tree: culture is permitted, provided one periodically proclaims the vanity of its purposes and the limits of its power [...]; ideal culture should be nothing but a sweet rhetorical effusion, the art of words to bear witness to a transient moitening of the soul. Yet that old romantic couple, heart and head, has no reality except in an imagery of vaguely Gnostic origin, in those opiated philosophies which have always, ultimately, formed the backbone of strong regimes, the kind that get rid of intellectuals by telling them to run along and busy themselves with emotion and the ineffable. In fact, any reservations about culture is a terrorist position. To be a critic by profession, and to proclaim one doesn't understand a thing about existentialism or Marxism (as a matter of fact it is precisely these two philosophies which are declared incomprehensible), is to erect one's blindness or one's dumbness into a universal rule of perception--it is to reject Marxism and existentialism from the world: "I don't understand, therefore you are idiots."
[...] What does it matter, after all, that margarine is nothing but grease if its efficiency is superior to that of butter? What does it matter, after all, that an Order is somewhat brutal, somewhat blind, if it allows us to live inexpensively? There we are, rid of a prejudice that used to cost us dear, too dear, that used to cost us too many scruples, too many rebellions, too many battles, and too much solitude.
I don't remember the larger point of this essay but I really like the closing sentence
[...] Happiness, in this universe, is to act out a sort of domestic confinement: "psychological" questionnaires, shortcuts, household devices, and timesavers, that whole implemental paradise of magazines, like Elle or L'Express, which glorifies the closure of the hearth, its aproned and slippered introversion, everything which busies home life, infantilizes it, accentuates its innocence, and severs it from a widened social responsibility. "Two hearts, one hearth." The world still exists, of course, but love spiritualizes the hearth and the hearth masks the slum: indigence is exorcised by its ideal image, poverty.
for SJ: the idea of turning inwards in a relationship
[...] I merely wonder at the enormous consumption of such signs that the public makes. I see people reassured by the spectacular identity of a morphology and of a vocation; in no doubt about the latter because it recognizes the former; having no more access to the real experience of the apostolate than by its bric-a-brac, and growing quite used to acquiring a clear conscience by merely looking in the shopwindows of sanctity; and I'm troubled that a society which so greedily consumes the posters of charity forgets to ask itself questions about its consequences, its uses, and its limits. And I begin to wonder if the lovely and touching iconography of the Abbé Pierre is not the alibi by which a sizable part of the nation authorizes itself, once again, to substitute the signs of charity for the reality of justice.