Inside Shakespeare & Co. bookstore in Paris
My Happy Place
September 22, 2009Holocaust Porn
September 22, 2009So I thought I came up with Holocaust Porn, which isn’t a real thing, but two words, in their essences meaningless (as all words are) when, said one after the other, cause an intense reaction in others. An experiment, of sorts. Of course such a thing doesn’t exist; just invoking its empty name implicates the listener, whose mind is in control of what images or ideas or symbols come forth.
Using my intellect to justify being willfully iconoclastic. Happy Monday!
Also I think it would be funny to tell people at parties that you’re currently working on a screenplay. “Essentially, it’s erotica that takes place at Auschwitz.” Just watch their faces.
Again, I thought I came up with it. But no, guess again! You’re right –– our friend David Mamet!
In a chapter entitled Sadomasochistic Phenomena; or, the Two Chelms
“The masochistic and sadistic imagination engages in fantasies wherein the cryptosexual delight of unlimited power is experienced (equally and perhaps interchangeably) as victim and perpetrator.
Holocaust films and slave epics are, essentially, these sexual fantasies. Their viewer is permitted, by the rectitude of the innocent sufferer’s cause, to engage in fantasies of submission, simultaneously enjoying fantasies of dominance.
…
Anti-Semitism is a profoundly sexual fantasy — a sado-masochism founded on religious or pseudoreligious (e.g. Marxist or Nazi) views, which views are variously called ‘social’ or ‘racial.’ It is (consider the bizarre paraphernalia of the Nazis, the impossibly intricate illogic of the Holocaust denier) a fantasy capable of being worked out endlessly in everyday life; quite literally, a dream come true.”
WOAH, David Mamet! You…are nuts.
Exhaustion
September 21, 2009Two poems by Richard Brautigan, which I first read lying in a hammock in Brazil…
The Nature Poem
The moon
is Hamlet
on a motorcycle
coming down
a dark road.
He is wearing
a black leather
jacket and
boots.
I have
nowhere
to go.
I will ride
all night.
Widow’s Lament
It’s not quite cold enough
to go borrow some firewood
from the neighbors.
If I Had a Twitter Right Now…
September 19, 2009it would say, “ID is thinking it’s a shame she doesn’t have enough money to buy really expensive lingerie.”
…Had A Twitter, or just Had Twitter?
A Very Funny Exchange
September 18, 2009(The subject, BTW, is pacifism.)
DHG:
just read in this morning’s new york times that the state of ohio spent 2 hours trying to kill a man yesterday, and they could not find a vein they could get the needle into, and now they are RE-SCHEDULING killing him next week. my jaw dropped. that there is a death penalty here is barbaric in my view –we are among the few “civilized” nations that have it, as you probably know; our neighbors like Mexico are appalled–but to strap a man down and try to kill him for HOURS and then decide you’re going to do it to him again next week is torture of the most rarified kind. far worse than putting someone on the rack and snapping his tendons and connective tissue. in other words, makes medieval methods look like child’s play. you’d think that if the state failed to kill someone right–or at all–that they then forego the right to kill him. but they’re using a 1946 ruling to justify it–apparently it’s not unconstitutional. yeah well, neither was slavery.
and to answer ID’s about muktananda’s philosophy, yeah, non-violence entirely.
LH:
See, all I thought was Jesus, how lame can Ohio be that we can’t even get a vein? Is this because of the budget problem??
DAVID MAMET
September 18, 2009Good news! I got the David Mamet book on Anti-Semitism to review!
Bad news! I have three days to read it and write the review.
That’s okay, though, cause I’m kinda psyched. David Mamet “On Anti-Semitism, Self Hatred and the Jews”? Get ready for some vitriol.
School with David Mamet
When one student asked Mamet who his favorite actresses were, he exploded: “Women who act are not actresses. They’re actors. Why do they need to fucking qualify what their genitalia are? Folks, seriously, I need to disabuse you of the notion that ‘actress’ is anything other than a euphemism for ‘floozy’ . . . Do women fucking writers call themselves ‘writressess?’ No!”
Balbirer – who appeared on “Seinfeld” and wrote and performed the solo show, “I Slept With Jack Kerouac” – says Mamet advised her, “There’s nothing worse than being a woman in show business . . . you’ll be asked to do only two things in every fucking role you ever play: take your shirt off and cry.”
He also told his class he considered critics “the syphilis and gonorrhea of the theater,” and delivered a lecture, “the premise of which was that Bill Cosby was a whore . . . television was evil and for whores, Hollywood was a hotbed of whoredom, and we were to avoid all of these things like the plague, unless, of course, we, too, were whores and not the artists we said we were.”
Originally printed in the New York Post, sans the expletives. I added them back in. You’re welcome.
I Do Not Like My Writing
September 16, 2009…these days.
If only my crying looked this pretty...
Alright Seriously
September 15, 2009Seriously? People are still making shows about women who have twenty babies at one time? Eight Million Kids and Counting? Please make it stop. It’s really totally disgusting. And I hate to play Captain Obvious here, but how is it dogmatically sanctioned to pump your body full of unnatural hormones in order to get pregnant with the sextuplets you will then raise with “very strong Christian values” (including: not letting them watch television but having their entire adolescences documented on that very same broadcaster of societal evils) and it’s somehow NOT okay to exterminate one tiny little fetus that is definitely NOT a person yet? It makes zero sense, and somehow I think God, in his infinite wisdom, gets that. He’s not stupid, and he doesn’t appreciate your hypocritical procreating habits.
MICHELLE DUGGAR I AM TALKING TO YOU.
Back At The End
September 15, 2009Some day, later on in my life, I will come back to Montauk in September, alone, or with someone/people I love. I will eat sushi at West Lake Clam and Chowder House and watch the fishermen gut their catch on the wooden table next to me. I will wear my blue Montauk dress. I will swim in the ocean late at night, when the sharks come close to shore. I will pay the twenty dollars to swim in the salt pools at Guerney’s Inn. I will read and I will let it be quiet. Silence is a gift. I will never again take it for granted.
Reasons I am happy to be here:
cable television
the ocean
Reasons I am not:
The fat, semiretarded cat I found licking itself on my bed last night when I checked in
bugs
my boss living next door
No internet in my room
Where Is the Dwelling Place of God?
September 13, 2009“God dwells wherever man lets him in.”
~A Chasidic Rebbe. Whose name I don’t know.
Goodnight/morning.
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