Bret Easton Ellis’ stemwinder at ‘Out’

May 15, 2013

As a straight man, I never thought I’d have an occasion to link a piece at Out. Then again, I never expected Bret Easton Ellis to publish the most interesting piece I’ve read in the last few weeks there:

The Gay Man as Magical Elf has been such a tricky part of gay self-patronization in the media that you would by now expect the chill members of the LGBT community to respond with cool indifference. The Sweet and Sexually Unthreatening and Super-Successful Gay is supposed to be destined to transform The Hets into noble gay-loving protectors—as long as the gay in question isn’t messy or sexual or difficult. The straight and gay sanctimoniousness that says everyone gay needs to be canonized when coming out still makes some of us who are already out feel like we’re on the sidelines. I’m all for coming out on one’s own terms, but heralding it as the most important news story of the week feels to me, as a gay man, well, kind of alienating.

Read it.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Cappy urging welfare? Uhhhh

May 6, 2013

Captain Capitalism urges readers to take public assistance in this post:

The issue is no longer one of morality or independence, but practicality and mortality.  The idea of an “independent” person is laughably long gone.  How many women’s studies professors are there that claim to be “independent women” but still suck from the government tit via their state-subsidized professorships?  How many “bankers and finance professionals” are there that only owe their careers to a bail out or FDIC over-regulation that mandates their job?  How many government employees have you heard COMPLAIN that they really don’t do anything on the job?

This stupid, idiotic, idealistic nostalgia of the 1950′s is long gone.  Nobody in America has the desire nor loyalty to adhere to some kind of over-arching purpose, or country, and are therefore completely and totally in it for themselves (consciously or not).  So stop being naive, stop being idealistic and just take the god damned check when you can.

via Captain Capitalism: The Moral Difficulty of Going on Welfare.

I assume he’s joking but who knows – maybe he’s trying to Make a Larger Point. Although I rarely comment anywhere, I commented, and it awaits moderation.

I guess the obvious point is simple – just because many moochers mooch does not justify the act of mooching. I know such statements are fertile ground for satire, but I find little humor in it. But then again, the shit I find funny wouldn’t be funny to most, so to each his own.

I assume his satirical cover is blown by adopting the observational style of Dominque Francon (stating obiously absurd things in a meta-obvious style) but I’ll be curious to see his reaction to my pedestrian observation. Fun times at times and such…


Tolerancism, to wit

April 29, 2013

More common than Mr. Goad – or I – think, I suspect:

Born in 1961, I caught at least two decades of the so-called Red Scare, but what’s going on now with political correctness, AKA the bloody afterbirth of the civil-rights movement, is the most egregious moral panic I’ve seen. This is far more than a battle for the “right” to interracially date or to engage in same-sex soixante-neuf. This goes far deeper than such trivialities. This is a war of attrition to control thought and language and culture, to demean and ostracize anyone who doesn’t fall obediently in line, to declare certain subjects beyond discussion and maybe even one day to make it impossible to think differently than the herd.I often wonder what quotient of the population feels effectively silenced. How many Americans fear speaking their minds in the workplace because they don’t want to get fired or sued? How many people feel like a pithed frog, mute and helpless, their brain severed from their spine? I suspect that it’s quite a few—perhaps even the majority. Although I don’t like the feeling, I have a firm sense that it is not me, but rather the whole world around me, that is rapidly going insane. But unlike the modern, deeply indoctrinated, progressive hive-mind robot, I allow the possibility that I could be wrong.

via The Tolerance That Is Only Skin Deep – Takis Magazine.


Dittos, dittos

April 3, 2013

I have a certain admiration for Conservatives who partake in the mentally odious, thoroughly masochistic activity of soaking in things like NYT and MSNBC. NRO’s Michael Walsh here writes about a recent review of yet another hagiography to Karl Marx:

I almost stopped reading at that point, and not just because the odious fraud whose thoroughly discredited philosophy has been responsible for more death and misery than anyone else in human history is such a repellent figure — the great Paul Johnson already told us that, in his chapter on Marx (“Howling Gigantic Curses”) in his indispensable book on the pathology of some of humanity’s worst nut cases, Intellectuals. Cads (Rousseau), rotters (Ibsen), hypocrites (Brecht) and mountebanks (Sartre), they’re all here, like exhibitions in a particularly frightening freak show. Where’s Tod Browning when we need him?

But because tiresome late-stage leftist publications like the Times – in whose drearily predictable pages nearly all opinions are now threadbare hand-me-downs, the intellectual love children of George Bernard Shaw and Lillian Hellman — continue to so bitterly cling to figures like Marx, and try to justify their long-running love affair with demonstrable evil. Indeed, their entire world view is predicated on the notion of being in “brave” opposition to something, anything — preferably some sort of rightist conspiracy to muzzle their crackpot ideas (a conspiracy we might call “Western civilization”). In order to do that, however, they need to reach for the comparative moral authority they and their totems so conspicuously lack.

via The Elephant in the Room in My Pajamas – By Michael Walsh – The Corner – National Review Online.


Wanna generate traffic? Tweak Objectivists, I guess

March 29, 2013

For someone who represented herself as the acme of philosophy and individual strength, Ayn Rand could be remarkably touchy.  Whittaker Chambers’s famous review of Atlas Shrugged in National Review infuriated her, to the point that she would not be in the same room with William F. Buckley ever after.

via Rand Versus Lewis: It’s No Contest | Power Line.

I don’t get Powerline’s occasional forray  into dogging Ayn Rand. Steven Hayward does it this time with an almost nonsensical piece about Rand’s marginalia regarding a work of C.S. Lewis. Hayward says that someone’s marginal comments shouldn’t have too much read into them, then he proceeds to do just that.

Hayward calls Chambers’ review of Atlas Shrugged “famous,” but “infamous” would be more likely. After reading through the comments – mainly from Rand fans – only one gets Rand’s fury at Bill Buckley half-right. She was indeed furious about Chambers’ implying a Nazi-like desire to send people to gas chamber dripped off every page, but there was that other little matter of it being questionable whether or not Chambers, a Communist, actually read the book. He gets numerous names and plot points wrong, and anyone who has read the book (whether they liked it or not) would conclude no, he didn’t read it, or much of it.

 


This is making the rounds – interesting for so many other reasons

December 31, 2012

This is a producer’s note that precedes/intros a letter from a Marine to Sen. Feinstein RE her proposed gun legislation. I’m not a grammar fuhrer regarding the Internet, but seriously? Seriously? The Marine’s letter is good, but the text that intros it is … lacking. I italicized the mistakes I found – I’m sure you can do more:

CNN PRODUCER NOTE     joshdb50 was a Marine and was deployed to Afghanistan between the years of 2004 through 2005. Although he is no longer in the military he acknowledges that he owns gun. He says he does not believe the government needs to what guns he owns because he believes registration would lead to confiscation. He says the laws that are in place for gun control are plenty, and adding more laws will remove a means of defense for people. ‘I own the guns I own because I acknowledge mankind’s shortcomings instead of pretending like they don’t exist. There are evil men in this world and there just may be a time when I need to do the unthinkable to protect me or my family,’ he said.

via No ma’am. – CNN iReport.

Please tell me this was written by a producer who speaks and uses English as, I dunno, a fourth language, or a hobby perhaps. /brex


Amoral times call for amoral tactics

December 27, 2012

Mr. Quick writes:

Anyway, if you want to know how to stage your own March Through the Marxist Institutions, buy yourself a copy of Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, read it, learn how to do to them what they’ve done to you so effectively, and then start doing it.

via Yes, You Can Fight Back | Daily Pundit.

Mr. Quick was reacting to a post by Mr. Jacobson over at Legal Insurrection. If you’ve not read Rules for Radicals, read it. Mark it up. Dog-ear it, sticky-note it, and learn it. Forget how repellent you may (or may not, as the case may be) find Saul Alinsky’s tactics – the man was a master of amoral tactics, and his advice to the Left has been followed for two generations. Instructive, for example, was his waving off the nihilistic manner of dress and speech of the 1960s counterculture – he smartly noted that you’ll not reach the mainstream of America dressed like a bum and talking like a hood. Do note that our government, especially the Executive branch, is run by well-dressed men using thug tactics to get their way.

If that interests you, drop the hundred bucks or so and get copies of all five titles in Robert Green’s series on amoral tactics: The 48 Rules of Power, The 33 Laws of Warfare, The Art of Seduction, The 50th Law (co-written with rapper 50-Cent), and his latest, Mastery, which I just got for Christmas. The books are studies in successful movers and shakers throughout history, whether they be clever lovers, military geniuses, political savants – if I were to start a private secondary school, all of these books would be taught extensively. 

Amorality is not about what’s right or wrong, it is about what works, especially in complicated times. Alinsky’s work, though reviled by many, is grossly effective when used properly.


Interesting to me: Most expensive books sold this year

December 19, 2012

I don’t mean publishing deals, I mean out of pocket paid by collectors:

Our top 25 sales from 2012 illustrate the broad nature of rare books. There are modern first editions of iconic books, significant religious and theological works,and pioneering books of science and discovery. Our most expensive sale was a copy of Johann Bayer’s 1603 celestial atlas with 48 lavishly illustrated tables portraying the constellations identified by the Greeks and a 49th table showing 12 newly discovered constellations – it sold for $47,729.  This was the first star atlas to cover the entire celestial sphere, and introduced a new system of star designation known as the ‘Bayer Designation.’

The second spot is occupied by one of the most successful media franchises in history, James Bond.  When Ian Fleming first put pen to paper and wrote Casino Royale in 1953, there was no way he could have imagined the enduring popularity of 007.  This inscribed first edition of Casino Royale sold for more than $46,000 and would grace any rare book collection.

via AbeBooks: AbeBooks’ Most Expensive Sales in 2012.

I’m not a wealthy man and probably never will be. Were I wealthy, the only expensive taste I can fathom indulging beyond global travel is rare books and letters, especially First Edition First Printings. The first five books that would go into that list would naturally be FEFP’s of some of my favorite novels, including:

  1. The Fountainhead
  2. Abasalom, Absalom!
  3. Ulysses – no, not one of my favorites, but a good rare collectible
  4. Moby Dick
  5. The Sun Also Rises
  6. Less Than Zero, preferably autographed
  7. As old and rare a copy of The Canterbury Tales and Piers the Ploughman as I could find (and afford)

Just for starters. A lot of people who fill out their rare book collections get into rare letters, hand-written speeches and so forth, but I’m to understand that this area is rife with fraud.

Whatever – interesting list.


Joe Queenan pens a gem about booklovery, or,er, bibiliophilia

October 24, 2012

I love reading the words written by people who really like books, and yea, I’m gunna expound on this:

A case can be made that people who read a preposterous number of books are not playing with a full deck. I prefer to think of us as dissatisfied customers. If you have read 6,000 books in your lifetime, or even 600, it’s probably because at some level you find “reality” a bit of a disappointment. People in the 19th century fell in love with “Ivanhoe” and “The Count of Monte Cristo” because they loathed the age they were living through. Women in our own era read “Pride and Prejudice” and “Jane Eyre” and even “The Bridges of Madison County”—a dimwit, hayseed reworking of “Madame Bovary”—because they imagine how much happier they would be if their husbands did not spend quite so much time with their drunken, illiterate golf buddies down at Myrtle Beach.

Aside from being a voracious reader, one so prolific most people wouldn’t believe me if I told them how much I read, I’ll circle back to Joe Queenan himself [a writer who- as far as I'm aware of - I've read one of his books and one of his essays, the latter being a piece for Spy magazine, one of the better magazine essays ever published by, er, god or man].

Queenan – the writer of the WSJ piece excerpted above, took it upon himself to spend a day as Mickey Rourke, and the results – Googlable, I’m sure – were quite funny. They made an impact on my teenage-self, and as these things tend to happen, Queenan’s day spent as Mickey Rourke wound up nudging me to casually host a Mickey Rourke Movie Night at my freshman dorm at Colorado College, which led to a series of dominoes falling that are still flabbergasting and/or tragic, depending on which side of the bed I rise.

Although it doesn’t matter, I still have the torn-out pages with Queenan’s work tucked away.

==

All that business aside, what’s an appropriate number of books to have read, or – more importantly – to own? Among the physical books in my house, the number is probably 1,500, and carry-the-three-minus-the-two-factoring-for-inflation, I suspect like the jelly-beans in that weirdly big jar, I’ve read 4,000 books, give/take. I’m 37 and I read a lot, so discounting – again – discounting – for the inflation of all those silly children’s books I read when I was a kid, yeah, 4,000 sounds about right.

As Clay Davis would say: Sheeeet – I’m not even the best-read person in the room, not by a long shot.

Who knows – might be 800. Might be 7,000. Girls keep reading journals – I do not. Had Algore not invented the Internet, I’d have probably read 12,000 book by this point in life’s journey, and written at least a hundred more. True story.

I visited my parents last weekend, and my father and I were talking about reading. I started reading at a freakishly young age, and to add some spice to that chili, I started doing it [ie reading] up-side-down. My dad read James Michener novels, those giant doorstops of my youth. Although I don’t have photographic memory, I do know that sitting, sage-like, on my parents’ bookshelf, is a green-jacketed copy of Leon Uris’  Trinity. 

“You sister loved to have me read to her when she was young,” he said, and he was true in this – my sister, now an engineer, loved being read to, and she is to this day an insatiable reader, though – granted – she enjoys popular novels [/thehorror I know].

“So what about me?” I asked, and yes, I’m aware that it’s the height of pretension to structure one’s everyday conversations in novel form.

“I think you taught yourself to read,” my father said. “You hated having anyone read for you. You read the newspaper upside-down, and that was that.” And so on. And although I can’t vouch for myself at 3 or 4, there is little I hate more in life than anyone reading anything to me – I love my mother, but whenever she unearths a newspaper clipping to recite, she may as well be reading from the most bearably dark parts from that book about unbearable darkness, being, et al.

Yeah, worst analogy ever.

==

Queenan’s essay is good. He obviously spent a lot of time on it, he’s obviously spent a lot of his life reading books, and this I respect. Although this has turned into equal-parts confession and review, it was meant to be neither – frankly, I like it when writers write about books they love and about the reading habit that pushed them into the game in the first place.

My quibble, and it’s a little one, is this: about of a million books published about a million things, why did Queenan find the need to dog Atlas Shrugged? Hitchens did the same thing in one of his later essays, and many essayists have done it before – at the end of the day, it’s one book, nothing more. If Ayn Rand’s self-described magnum opus is so terrible, why bring it up?


Private goodies

October 20, 2012

Good stuff – Moxie writes:

There were a few points in this article that I thought were utter nonsense, but this was the main one. Maybe it’s because I’m an Old and most of the men I date are late thirties to early fifties, but I simply don’t believe that grown men do this sort of thing. My girlfriends don’t even discuss much of their sex lives with me and vice versa. I don’t know. I think there comes a point where you just no longer need the validation from peers. Since I keep all of my old phones and laptops, I still have sexts, emails and pics from past relationships/flings/hook ups. Other than an inane email exchange I had with someone from my past several months ago written with the intention of proving his innocence to someone else, I highly doubt such conversations are being distributed to third parties.

I see women on Twitter talking about cock shots and comparing notes/passing hem around. But in those cases those men who sent such photos want them to get out. They’re digital flashers. The send such photos with the intention of offending and shocking women so that they’ll post such pics to Twitter or show them off at their next cocktailing session. (See what I did there?)

via How Do You Know That Your Privates Are Private?.

The number of dirty text messages I send and receive on a weekly basis would by definition* exclude me from the Heaven I don’t believe in. I don’t send pics of my junk to women, but beyond that, I give as good as I get.

Moxie is deadly accurate in her assessment, at least in my experience as a bachelor, and the various told tales with my unmarried friends, men and women. I turn 38 next month, so as she intuits, this could be a generational thing.

I don’t share texts or pics – never have, never will (not counting a couple of received psycho melt-downs, but even then, pix weren’t shared so it was still out of context). Occasionally, a friend here or there will share a naughty pic a woman has sent him, but never with her face and never in context – ie, it’s a set of boobs, always nice to see, but that’s it.

It’s never even occurred to me to share a series of dirty text messages and I’d never share a nudie pic because that’s personal – I don’t think anything is absent meaning, and in the moment, I always assume what is meant for me is meant for me. At the same rate, I don’t ever share anything I wouldn’t want made public – my general paranoia combined with my specific empathy insure I’d never do something to hurt another person, or share anything that could come back on me. /pathos

Several months back, two girlfriends of mine in a 48-hour period told me about men they were involved with who shared vidya of themselves (the men) masturbating.

No, seriously.

Although my field of expertise isn’t located anywhere near the land of relationship advice, this is one I can share without reservation: if you’re a woman and a man shares vidya of himself masturbating, you need to disassociate yourself from that man immediately. Putting aside aesthetics, taste, class, and judgement, understand this: if he has no compunction about recording that act and sharing it with you, he’s going to have no compunction about recording whatever you do in his home and sharing it with anyone else.

Gospel, girls, gospel.

==

*This isn’t an invitation to debate theology – you know what I mean.


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