This collection’s most notorious essay, “The Naked and the Conflicted,” which first appeared in The New York Times Book Review, is also its best. In it she revisits the graphic sex scenes by writers like Roth, Updike, Bellow and Mailer, finding in “their dirty passages a sense of novelty, of news, of breaking out.”
She compares the coitus in their books with that in the work of younger writers likeMichael Chabon,Dave Eggers,Benjamin Kunkel and Jonathan Franzen. She finds this generation to be somewhat larval. For them “innocence is more fashionable than virility, the cuddle preferable to sex.”
I’m with Ms. Roiphe. Bring back the ways of dirty old men!
[In the realm of the spirit] does not everything begin with the great moment of resolution, of intention, of promise … . And then comes the next part; then one is supposed to go on to the littlest things, the simple, everyday things which will certainly not make a great impression or help anyone by means of a bold comprehensive plan. Alas, on the contrary, it is like spelling, which separates words and takes them apart; so it is, too, in the long, long hours when one cannot see the meaning of things and waits in vain for connectedness . … The heaviest burden laid on man is, in a certain sense, time . . . . And yet, on the other hand, what a softening, alleviating, seductive power time has! But this softening, seductive element is indeed a new danger.
You have to let things
Occupy their own space.
This room is small,
But the green settee
Likes to be here.
The big marsh reeds,
Crowding out the slough,
Find the world good.
You have to let things
Be as they are.
Who knows which of us
Deserves the world more?
How much do you love me, a million bushels?
Oh, a lot more than that, Oh, a lot more.
And to-morrow maybe only half a bushel?
To-morrow maybe not even a half a bushel.
And is this your heart arithmetic?
This is the way the wind measures the weather.
We all kinda knew this already, but yes… I definitely need to make my way west, eventually!
Neuroticism, along with other personality traits, has been mapped across states in the USA. People in eastern states such as New York, New Jersey, West Virginia, and Mississippi tend to score high on neuroticism, whereas people in many western states, such as Utah, Colorado, South Dakota, Oregon, and Arizona score lower on average. People in states that are higher in neuroticism also tend to have higher rates of heart disease and lower life expectancy.
I am hopelessly flawed, we are all flawed, and of course life is, too. The moment I am able to pour my love into all of these things, each with its flaws, and to express this love through the fullest gestures I’m capable of making, will be the moment I realize the only reason life is worth living.
(Realization from hitting rock bottom yet again. Relatedly, I want to read Camus again so badly, but with completely new eyes, based on William Styron’s adorations of his existential and moral struggles in Darkness Visible.)
It makes me so glad to see finance smarts used for doing good (charity) as well for making a statement (politics). Just donated to the Jubilee Fund and am keenly interested to see how this thing plays out, legally and otherwise.
Lee is an influential writer on aesthetics and contemporary art and is recognized as the key theorist of Mono-ha, an antiformalist, materials-based art movement that developed in Tokyo around a series of seminal writings Lee published between 1968 and 1971. In these and later essays, Lee constructs an aesthetic system that challenges the closed objecthood of modern art. He eschews objective form for a relational structure and spatial dynamic that induces us to encounter the bare existence of what is actually before us, to focus on “the world as it is.” He promotes these mutual relationships between work, viewer, and surroundings by shifting the artist’s role from an act of creation to a practice of mediation. Rooted in his philosophical stance and going beyond the binaries of Eastern and Western aesthetics, Lee’s art and writings partook of the radical global rethinking that transformed contemporary art in the 1960s and 1970s, when terms such as “system,” “structure,” and “process” recast the object as a dynamic event occurring outside the studio confines in everyday time and space.
The most prevalent character clown in the American circus is the hobo, tramp or bum clown. There are subtle differences in the American character clown types. The primary differences among these clown types is attitude. According to American circus expert Hovey Burgess, they are (in order of class):
The Hobo Migratory and finds work where he travels. Down on his luck but maintains a positive attitude.
The Tramp Migratory and does not work where he travels. Down on his luck and depressed about his situation.
