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the book probably would have been burned by the hangman, and its author’s right hand sliced off and fed to the flames.
the book probably would have been burned by the hangman, and its author’s right hand sliced off and fed to the flames.
I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth, or hoped for anywhere else.”
Sane people do not rape those that they love.
“What does the capitalist infidel make, you may ask, of the priceless black blood of Kush?” Ellelloû asks, and then answers his own question: He extracts from it, of course, a fuel that propels him and his overweight, quarrelsome family—so full of sugar and starch their faces fester—back and forth on purposeless errands and ungratefully received visits. Rather than live as we do in the same village with our kin and our labor, the Americans have flung themselves wide across the land, which they have buried under tar and stone. They consume our blood also in their factories and skyscrapers,
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John Kenneth Galbraith’s Affluent Society—with
“Talk of the Town” essay in the New Yorker, in which he wrote, inter alia: Determined men who have transposed their own lives to a martyr’s afterlife can still inflict an amount of destruction that defies belief. War is conducted with a fury that requires abstraction—that turns a planeful of peaceful passengers, children included, into a missile the faceless enemy deserves. The other side has the abstractions; we have only the mundane duties of survivors.
Devils. The guts of the men sag hugely and the monstrous buttocks of the women seesaw painfully as they tread the boardwalk in swollen sneakers. A few steps from death, these American elders defy decorum and dress as toddlers.
They think they’re doing pretty good, with some flashy-trashy new outfit they’ve bought at half-price, or the latest hyper-violent new computer game, or some hot new CD everyone has to have, or some ridiculous new religion when you’ve drugged your brain back into the Stone Age. It makes you wonder if people deserve to live seriously—if the massacre masterminds in Rwanda and Sudan and Iraq didn’t have the right idea.
a whale of a woman giving off too much heat through her blubber”).
a ditsy and whorish Irish mother
the very last available cinematic second.
After I had sent Terrorist windmilling across the room in a spasm of boredom and annoyance, I retrieved it to check my notes in its margins.
thoughtlessly reaping by their very herdlike existence the whirlwind of jihad-ist revenge.
He looks at the quotidian crowd in Manhattan, “scuttling, hurrying, intent in the milky morning sun upon some plan or scheme or hope they are hugging to themselves, their reason for living another day, each impaled live upon the pin of consciousness, fixed upon self-advancement and self-preservation. That and only that.”
Michel Houellebecq, whose novel The Possibility of an Island
biting through his umbrella handle with rage
“to keep his pot boiling, Fraser keeps tossing fresh female bodies into it”?
the ten greatest moments of the American libido.
when Updike describes Kierkegaard (in an otherwise very penetrating essay) as “the great Dane,”
That is hilarious!
he writes that someone turns up “strangled in a Nice (not nice) hotel.”
Also hilarious
Is there an Oscar Wilde for our own day?
(The Importance of Being Earnest
Idries Shah: “These books are a great deal harder to read than they were to write.”
the three most dispiriting words in the English language were “Joyce Carol Oates”?
fans like David Letterman’s, who laugh in all the wrong places lest they suspect themselves of not having a good time.)
I have no wish to commit literary patricide, or to assassinate Vidal’s character—a character which appears, in any case, to have committed suicide.
It’s enough to make a cat laugh.
The staring eyes (close enough together for their owner to use a monocle)
In banana republics, admittedly, very often the only efficient behavior is displayed by the army (and the secret police).
hostile to euphemisms for tyranny.
We owe the term “Anglosphere” in large part to the historian and poet Robert Conquest, who this summer celebrated his ninetieth year of invincible common sense and courage in the fight against totalitarian thinking.
The Dragons of Expectation: Reality and Delusion in the Course of History,
for many generations the human species did not at all have “dominion” over other life forms. The germs had dominion over us.
We notice that creationism often entails “dispensationalism”—the demented belief that there is no point in preserving nature, because the Deity will soon replace it with a perfected form. This popular teleology does not just dispense with creatures and plants: It condemns human beings to an eternity of either torment or—what may well be worse—praise and jubilation.
(The connection between stupidity and cruelty is a close one.)
The Four Stages of Cruelty.)
“Pink,” “spongy,” and “exudative” are among the tasty terms used in internal company documents to describe the “pork” that is being prepared for our delectation. When was the last time you peeled open a deli ham sandwich, or a BLT, to take a look at the color, let alone the consistency, of what you were being sold and were about to ingest? The ham doesn’t taste of anything, but upon reflection this comes as a distinct relief.
The National Socialists in Germany enacted thoroughgoing legislation for the protection of animals and affected to regard Jewish ritual slaughter with abhorrence, meanwhile being enthusiastic about the ritual slaughter of Jews. Hindu nationalists are infinitely more tender toward cows than toward Muslims.
Since 1990, indeed, only six countries have executed juvenile offenders: Iran, Yemen, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, and the United States of America.
the tough-love embrace of the gas chamber
And then the tawdry ritual with the needles or the gas or the electric current, and then on to the next.
the distinction between use value and exchange value.
Economist, which had written that “the assumption that the quarrel between the North and South is a quarrel between Negro Freedom on the one side and Negro Slavery on the other, is as impudent as it is untrue.”
“There is something in human history like retribution; and it is a rule of historical retribution that its instrument be forged not by the offended but by the offender himself.”
Dispatches for the New York Tribune: Selected Journalism of Karl Marx,
and was having to issue repeated disclaimers of the use made of his work by the American right-wing.
Indeed the book is anti-right wing.
The American Way of Death.
“Checks and Balances at the Sign of the Dove,”
Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford, edited by Peter Y. Sussman.
One cannot really be Catholic and grown-up.
