Happy new year, everybody... and good night!
The tundra swans are back on Lake Mendota.
"In Scottish custom, Unspoken Water was water believed to have healing properties when collected 'from under a bridge, over which the living pass and the dead are carried...'"
Orgasms and sandwiches.
something I found googling his name.... "Part of the early research leading to that book found that women who enjoyed food were likely to enjoy sex as well, and that put a twist into the Fishers' social life, Rhoda Fisher said. 'When we got to somebody's house for dinner,' she said, 'no women wanted to sit near him. They thought he'd analyze their food.'"
If I had to choose between an orgasm and like a really good sandwich, I'd pick the sandwich. I don't know what that says about me.
Absolutely. If I had to live without orgasming for the rest of my life, I'd feel a bit sad and frustrated, but if I had to live without really good sandwiches, I would be undone...
Just yesterday, I complained on another post my orgasms are pretty meh so it was such an easy choice. Give me a fricken sandwich with everything on it!!
IN THE COMMENTS: Meade says, "And remember— you can’t fake a sandwich."
I google "marcel marceau eats a sandwich"...
Precise opportunity seized.
"Mr. Hawley’s challenge is not unprecedented... Democrats in both the House and Senate challenged certification of the 2004 election results..."
"Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley said Wednesday he will object when Congress counts the Electoral College votes next week, which will force lawmakers in both the House and Senate to vote..."
"A pack of young bicyclists attacked a BMW in broad daylight in Manhattan, terrorizing the man and woman inside in a terrifying ambush caught on video."
"Russian riot police stormed into a monastery Tuesday to detain a rebel monk who has castigated the Kremlin and the Russian Orthodox Church leadership and denied the existence of the coronavirus...."
Andrew Sullivan detects anti-gay bigotry: "So you agree not wanting to have sex with someone because they have a vagina is a form of bigotry, right?"
So you agree not wanting to have sex with someone because they have a vagina is a form of bigotry, right?
— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) December 29, 2020
I had trouble understanding whether Molly — DFW was (at any point) joking. Until she says, she's free to say (at any point) that she was joking. (Cf. "Schrödinger's Douchebag " (Urban Dictionary "Word of the Day," December 24, 2020.)It’s bigotry and sir I am one of the biggest transgender supporters period. People like you would like nothing but to drop the T from LGBT.
— Molly - DFW (@MollyTex_) December 29, 2020
When I sucked on my formers lovers dick since she was pre op transwoman for me was just a big clit.
Foucault had sex with transwomen
"I’ve been against the space program.... After all, we knew there were no resources we could economically bring back from [the moon], and we knew there was no atmosphere."
Playboy: You said it was sexual.
Vonnegut: It’s a tremendous space fuck, and there’s some kind of conspiracy to suppress that fact. That’s why all the stories about launches are so low-key. They never give a hint of what a visceral experience it is to watch a launch. How would the taxpayers feel if they found out they were buying orgasms for a few thousand freaks within a mile of the launch pad? And it’s an extremely satisfactory orgasm. I mean, you are shaking and you do take leave of your senses. And there’s something about the sound that comes shuddering across the water. I understand that there are certain frequencies with which you can make a person involuntarily shit with sound. So it does get you in the guts.
Playboy: How long does that last?
Vonnegut: Maybe a full minute. It was a night flight, so we were able to keep the thing in sight in a way that wouldn’t have been possible in the daytime. So the sound seemed longer. But who knows? It’s like describing an automobile accident; you can’t trust your memory. The light was tremendous and left afterimages in your eyes; we probably shouldn’t have looked at it.
Playboy: How did the people around you react?
Vonnegut: They were gaga. They were scrogging the universe. And they were sheepish and sort of smug afterward. You could see a message in their eyes, too: Nobody was to tell the outside world that NASA was running the goddamnedest massage parlor in history.
Just so we're clear...
Just so we're clear, "Dick Cheney" is trending because people want ted Cruz to be shot.
— IMPERATOR_NASDAQ (@ImpNasdaq) December 30, 2020
Twitter is a cesspit of sociopaths.
Backstory: "Dick Cheney hunting accident" (Wikipedia).Ted, I enthusiastically encourage you to go hunting with Dick Cheney next time.
— Mrs. Betty Bowers (@BettyBowers) December 29, 2020
"In what is probably the definitive word on how little exercise we can get away with, a new study finds that a mere four seconds of intense intervals, repeated until they amount to about a minute of total exertion..."
"The statue by Thomas Ball depicts a Black man, shirtless and on his knees, in front of a clothed and standing Abraham Lincoln."
... you don't need to show this figure that close to the ground. And Lincoln looks still and lordly. It is a strange artifact. It's artwork from the past, never the greatest art, but carrying the weight of history, history that includes Frederick Douglass wanting to see a better image of a black man before he died.
***
I looked to see what year Douglass died. It was 1895. I clicked through on the name of his first wife, Anna Murray Douglass:
Anna Murray was... born free, her parents having been manumitted just a month before her birth. A resourceful young woman, by the age of 17 she had established herself as a laundress and housekeeper. Her laundry work took her to the docks, where she met Frederick Douglass, who was then working as a caulker. Murray's freedom made Douglass believe in the possibility of his own. When he decided to escape slavery in 1838, Murray encouraged and helped him by providing Douglass with some sailor's clothing her laundry work gave her access to. She also gave him part of her savings, which she augmented by selling one of her feather beds.
After Douglass had made his way to Philadelphia and then New York, Murray followed him, bringing enough goods with her to be able to start a household.... She helped support the family financially, working as a laundress and learning to make shoes, as Douglass's income from his speeches was sporadic and the family was struggling. She also took an active role in the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society and later prevailed upon her husband to train their sons as typesetters for his abolitionist newspaper, North Star. After the family moved to Rochester, New York, she established a headquarters for the Underground Railroad from her home, providing food, board and clean linen for fugitive slaves on their way to Canada.
Murray Douglass received little mention in Douglass's three autobiographies. Henry Louis Gates has written that "Douglass had made his life story a sort of political diorama in which she had no role."
"I loathe domestic life.... I don’t want anyone in my house that I don’t know when they are leaving, so I don’t want there to be anyone else in the house."
"Like Nietzsche’s Socrates, Trump was 'the buffoon who got himself taken seriously.' Unlike a Socratic buffoon, however..."
With Socrates, Greek taste changes in favor of dialectics. What really happened there? Above all, a noble taste is thus vanquished; with dialectics the plebs come to the top. Before Socrates, dialectic manners were repudiated in good society: they were considered bad manners, they were compromising. The young were warned against them. Furthermore, all such presentations of one's reasons were distrusted. Honest things, like honest men, do not carry their reasons in their hands like that. It is indecent to show all five fingers. What must first be proved is worth little. Wherever authority still forms part of good bearing, where one does not give reasons but commands, the dialectician is a kind of buffoon: one laughs at him, one does not take him seriously. Socrates was the buffoon who got himself taken seriously: what really happened there?
William Gibson — deploying the old "grocer's apostrophe" — says something inscrutable about Nazis and the Space Force.
How was it, given fascism's theoretical predilection for kitsch, that the Nazi's generally had such strongly stylin' uniforms? Could it all have been Hugo Boss? https://t.co/C9Su69H1Nb
— William Gibson (@GreatDismal) December 29, 2020
"One of the more unexpected character arcs of the Trump era is the emergence of 'Dilbert' creator Scott Adams as a pro-Trump political commentator."
"This is the best gift idea I've ever had."
@kylescheele This is the best gift idea I’ve ever had. #greenscreen #photoshop #christmas #gift #family #familypictures #funny
♬ original sound - kylescheele
"We're told Biden doesn't have a 'vision.' He doesn't. We’re told he doesn’t have an ideology. He doesn’t. But he has a public image..."
"Successfully making art requires accepting yourself, in Mr. Koons’s philosophy, so that you can pursue your interests without shame."
"Oakland’s Ceramic Bust Of Breonna Taylor Smashed In Brazen Act Of Vandalism."
Who would do such a thing?
If you've been having trouble with the "Dr. Jill" nomenclature, just see it as a stage name... a sobriquet... a nom de guerre...
The "Hook" name was inspired by Sawyer's eyepatch and a reference to Captain Hook of the Peter Pan fairy tale, although, humorously, Captain Hook was neither a doctor nor wore an eyepatch. Ray Sawyer had lost his right eye in a near-fatal car crash in Oregon in 1967, and thereafter always wore an eyepatch. The eyepatch led some to believe that Sawyer was 'Dr. Hook'....
I feel lured into talking about Hilaria Baldwin, but what do I want to say? What did I say about Rachel Dolezal... and is this the same... or worse... or better?
But while, say, the New York Times decided that Hilaria's cosplaying as a Latina stereotype was off-limits — even as they wrote growing profiles of her as well, including uncritically her "slight Spanish accent" — the paper of record has celebrated children having their college admissions revoked for a video of them singing the N-word along to a song when they were 15 as a "reckoning."
That episode — "The One With Ross's Tan" — has more thematic unity than I originally thought!
Well, clearly, blackface is a very specific problem that has been isolated, and everyone has been warned about it, so violations are harshly judged. The same is true of the "n-word," though the presence of lots of recorded music with the word creates confusion for young people who might not understand that this is the ONE thing you don't sing along with.
But accents... accents are different. You can do fake accents... can't you? I've seen people pick up a New York accent or a Southern accent... to try to fit in or to be thought well of. Many actors do accents and get special acclaim. Meryl Streep, etc. etc.
So must Hilaria Baldwin be denounced because she's doing what she's doing while being a highly privileged person? Or are accents different from skin darkening?
ADDED: As for the article where the NYT "celebrated children having their college admissions revoked for a video of them singing the N-word along to a song when they were 15 as a 'reckoning,'" here it is: "A Racial Slur, a Viral Video, and a Reckoning/A white high school student withdrew from her chosen college after a three-second video caused an uproar online. The classmate who shared it publicly has no regrets." Excerpt:
Since the racial reckoning of [last] summer, many white teenagers, when posting dance videos to social media, no longer sing along with the slur in rap songs. Instead, they raise a finger to pursed lips. “Small things like that really do make a difference,” Mr. Galligan said.Galligan is the high school student who posted the video and, according to the NYT, has no regrets.
“I wanted to get her where she would understand the severity of that word,” Mr. Galligan, 18, whose mother is Black and father is white, said of the classmate who uttered the slur, Mimi Groves. He tucked the video away, deciding to post it publicly when the time was right.
He decided the time was right a month [???] later, during the George Floyd protests, when Groves posted on Instagram to say "protest, donate, sign a petition, rally, do something" in support of Black Lives Matter. By this time, Groves had chosen her college, the University of Tennessee, and — reacting to "hundreds of emails and phone calls from outraged alumni, students and the public" — the university pressured her into withdrawing. Groves's case isn't unique, we're told. There are "at least a dozen cases" like this.
Ms. Groves said the video began as a private Snapchat message to a friend. “At the time, I didn’t understand the severity of the word, or the history and context behind it because I was so young,” she said in a recent interview, adding that the slur was in “all the songs we listened to, and I’m not using that as an excuse.”
ALSO: I wrote "a month later" but I'm now questioning my reading of the article, which isn't clear about the timing. Twice, it uses the phrase "last school year" to refer to when Galligan got hold of the video that he "tucked... away" for future use. But I see a highly rated comment over there that says:
I guess I’m the only one bothered by the fact that Galligan purposely waited for years to release this video, with the express purpose of destroying her college chances. This goes far beyond wanting to “educate” her — this is vindictive and chilling behavior.
And I'd like to say that if I were raising a child today, I would intervene the first time I heard the child play a song that had the "n-word" in it, and I would tell the child clearly that I never want to hear that word and that he should never say that. If I were in a public place with my child where a song with that word played, I would immediately talk to my child about it and say it is wrong. If I were in a restaurant where the word was played, I would never go back there again (or if it was a place I really liked, I might talk to them about it and see if they apologize and promise never to do that again). Really, I do not see how we can go on with songs like that played around young people.
It's not the strict adherence to a plan... it's also the strict avoidance of trying to do it very well — 4 decades of rigorous anti-perfectionism.
"Trump reverses on coronavirus stimulus deal, signs package he called a 'disgrace.'"
Is that a "reversal"?
After weeks of negotiation and bipartisan votes of approval in the House and Senate, Trump on Tuesday unexpectedly slammed the COVID stimulus legislation but stopped short of saying he would veto it. The message upended Washington, drew bipartisan condemnation and threatened to end a chaotic year with a government shutdown.
Unexpectedly?
But after a growing number of Republicans pushed back on Trump's reticence – and Democrats quickly embraced Trump's idea of larger direct payments and used it as a cudgel against GOP lawmakers – Trump relented. The president, who has been spending the holidays at his Florida resort, hinted he had won concessions from lawmakers but it was not clear if that was actually the case.
When you're alone and 5G is making you paranoid, you can always go... downtown....
Speculation is growing that the AT&T building was intentionally targeted in the Nashville Christmas Day bombing as the FBI probes rumors that the main suspect in the attack harbored deep paranoia about 5G technology.
Police on Sunday confirmed that Anthony Quinn Warner, 63, is a person of interest in the investigation launched when an RV exploded outside Nashville's AT&T building on Friday morning, leaving three people injured and dozens of structures damaged.
At a press conference police officers described how the RV, which was covered in cameras, played an ominous warning about the impending explosion and the song 'Downtown' by Petula Clark in the minutes before the blast went off.
"Although Westerners date the origins of restaurants (those independent of inns) to post-revolutionary France, when chefs were suddenly freed..."
"It is with a heavy heart we say goodbye to one of the most iconic voices and musicians in bluegrass. David Anthony ‘Tony’ Rice passed away yesterday, Dec. 25, at his home in Reidsville, NC. Few will ever match his skill and influence."
Rice was “the single most influential acoustic guitar player in the last 50 years,” said Ricky Skaggs, who played alongside Rice in the group the New South in the 1970s and later rejoined him for a classic duets album, “Skaggs/Rice.”...
“Sometime during Christmas morning while making his coffee, our dear friend and guitar hero Tony Rice passed from this life and made his swift journey to his heavenly home,” Skaggs wrote. “
"You have, then, the calm conservatism of George H. W. Bush and the fevered conservatism of Patrick Buchanan; the balm of Jeb Bush and..."
Moderate conservatism is a vital counterbalance to liberalism, as the Trump years have shown. For it to disappear into a populist cult, hostile to democratic norms, contemptuous of all elites, captured by delusions and sustained by hatred and ressentiment, would not be completely unprecedented. But, unchallenged by moderate conservatism, populist or “hard right” conservatism will be deeply destructive. In that sense, the battle for moderate conservatism is now inextricable from a battle for liberal democracy itself.
IN THE COMMENTS: hawkeyedjb says:
Liberals pretend to respect Moderate Conservatism, but when a moderate conservative like Mitt Romney comes along, they turn him into an evil, money-grubbing, cancer-giving Hitler youth. Just one example out of many that comes down to the same thing: all Republicans, of any stripe, are Hitler in the end. So why not be Trump?That's a different perspective on what — to use Sullivan's phrase — "the Trump years have shown."
"Ms. Petro said she and her husband still make time for sex, even if it’s just, say, every third Sunday. 'I shove thoughts of chores undone out of my mind...'"
"As retro as a shelf of books might seem in an era of flat-panel screens, Books by the Foot has thrived through Democratic and Republican administrations..."
The criterion is, of course, whether or not it gives you a thrill of pleasure when you touch it. Remember, I said when you touch it. Make sure you don’t start reading it. Reading clouds your judgment. Instead of asking yourself what you feel, you’ll start asking whether you need that book or not. Imagine what it would be like to have a bookshelf filled only with books that you really love. Isn’t that image spellbinding?... [F]orget about whether you think you’ll read it again or whether you’ve mastered what’s inside. Instead, take each book in your hand and decide whether it moves you or not. Keep only those books that will make you happy just to see them on your shelves, the ones that you really love.... There’s no need to finish reading books that you only got halfway through. Their purpose was to be read halfway. So get rid of all those unread books....
Imagine touching a book "by authors like Hillary Clinton, Bill Maher, Al Franken and Bob Woodward" and feeling "a thrill of pleasure." I don't have to touch these books to know I would not be thrilled! I can't even imagine another person who could be thrilled. It's a difficult feat of imagination, and I cannot do it.
"All of a sudden, Ms. Duke, a vocal critic of 'mommy wine culture' and a member of the Sober Mom Squad, a virtual community created during the pandemic, was fielding questions..."
Hard-driving New Yorkers do not drink at an hour many consider the afternoon. Cocktails at 5 o’clock is for Cheever stories. In New York, the custom was to knock back later. If you were drinking at 5, it was probably at 5 in the morning, when you finished your shift. But the pandemic changed our sense of time, especially in the early days of winter and again now when the light fades so early.
How the word "how" has become the most deceptive word in the history of headlines.
I'm sure some "how" headlines sit atop articles that really explain how to do something, but I must cry out against the infestation of "how" in headlines.
I'm seeing headline after headline that would be more accurate if you just crossed out the "how," because the article isn't really going to tell you how X happened. It's only going to tell you that X happened.
I've been meaning to rail about this for quite some time. What pushed me over the edge this morning was this, in Rolling Stone: "How Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ Brilliantly Mingled Sex, Religion." No, you don't know how he did it! You only know that he did it. Or, at best, the manner in which he did — i.e., "brilliantly."
Just keep an eye out for "how" headlines. That's all I'm saying. Sometimes they are good, and I'm guilty of deploying "how" to lure readers, but as a reader, I am among the potential victims, and I'm trying to heighten my distaste for bait.
"At French Resorts, Skiing Has Become an Uphill Sport/The government closed ski lifts, fearing they might spread the coronavirus. The skiers came anyway."
“When you go out skiing in the cold, the first thing that happens is your nose starts to run,” said Miles Bright, an English mountain guide based in Chamonix. “And what do you do? You wipe your nose. So your gloves are covered in snot, you join in the lift queue, you touch things.”“I just can’t see how it can be hygienic, getting in and out of the ski lifts,” he added. “But for the nation’s health, I think it’s absolutely essential.”
Bright, like the rest of skiers on the mountain, was ski touring — ascending the mountain using skins attached to his skis, then detaching them to descend normally. He estimated it would take him four times as long to go up than to ski down.
Will you ever think about a ski lift the same way again?
"Every day these people would wake us up. At first, I was polite and asked them to please be quiet. Then after a few days I was shouting, and my husband was like: 'Stop it! You can’t do that.'"
"It would be nice if the wall-to-wall marathon showings of A Christmas Story on TBS and TNT led to a rediscovery of Jean Shepherd's other work..."
Shepherd's oral narrative style was a precursor to that used by Spalding Gray and Garrison Keillor. Marshall McLuhan in Understanding Media wrote that Shepherd "regards radio as a new medium for a new kind of novel that he writes nightly." In the Seinfeld season-six DVD set, commenting on the episode titled "The Gymnast", Jerry Seinfeld said, "He really formed my entire comedic sensibility—I learned how to do comedy from Jean Shepherd."...
Shepherd was an influence on Bill Griffith's Zippy comic strip, as Griffith noted in his strip for January 9, 2000. Griffith explained, "The inspiration—just plucking random memories from my childhood, as I'm wont to do in my Sunday strip (also a way to expand beyond Zippy)—and Shep was a big part of them."
In an interview with New York magazine, Steely Dan's Donald Fagen says that the eponymous figure from his solo album The Nightfly was based on Jean Shepherd.
Though he primarily spent his radio career playing music, New York Top-40 DJ Dan Ingram has acknowledged Shepherd's style as an influence. An article he wrote for the March–April 1957 issue of MAD, "The Night People vs Creeping Meatballism", described the differences between what he considered to be "day people" (conformists) and "night people" (nonconformists).
A few days ago, in conversation on Facebook, I reconsidered my lifelong policy of averting my eyes from the film version of "A Christmas Story." Just to present my own comments:
I've never seen "A Christmas Story" because I am too devoted to Jean Shepherd and the original story as told over the radio....
I know [you hear Shepherd's voice-over narration in the film], but I don't want to see the ideal replaced by a literal acting-out of the story by human actors. The adult's voice creates the kid feeling. I don't want to see a real boy acting out the emotions for the camera. It's radio, the ultimate in radio, and not film...
I think I need to change my position. "A Christmas Story" is a deviation from Shepherd's usual show, because he was reading a story — not riffing in real time — that had been published in a book and a magazine (Playboy). So it wasn't the pure radio ideal that I'm so staunch about. It is not one of his stories about his own youth, because he says before reading the story that the boy is *not* him.
So did I finally watch the movie? No. Not yet, anyway. But I was motivated to listen to a random old show — something about midwestern drug stores. Nothing to do with Christmas, but I was listening on Christmas.
I don't think of Shepherd as Christmas-y, and it annoys me a bit that so many people do. The radio show should be much more important that that one film version of a story he used to read on the radio. Should be, and perhaps is, as its influence is deeply woven into many things we actively enjoy today. It's baked into this blog.
Here's the podcast where I found my random old show yesterday. Here's a webpage with a lot of the old shows.
At the Christmas Café...
... you can write about whatever you want. And I hope you got whatever you wanted.
"Our vaunted capacity for abstract thought often gets us (or others) into trouble. We may be the only species to pursue scientific inquiry..."
Christmas TV.
ADDED: Speaking of British TV:Instead we are now watching the Twilight Zone where Art Carney is the drunk Santa.
— Ken Jennings (@KenJennings) December 25, 2020
My answer is always when it's British TV.Ok I’m deeply curious about this, how often do you use subtitles on your TV?
— caitie delaney (@caitiedelaney) December 25, 2020
Except most of those things we can't do right now, Bob....
A Christmas Message from Bob Dylan:
— HarryHew (@harryhew) December 24, 2020
"If you got the holiday blues, I feel for you. I know life is hard. But you don't need anyone to tell you how to feel better. ... What you gotta do is go out and help someone more unfortunate than you." pic.twitter.com/2szVpc147Y
Happy Christmas!
— #RingoStarr (@ringostarrmusic) December 25, 2020ADDED: From Craig Brown's "150 Glimpses of the Beatles":
Alone of all the Beatles, Ringo possessed no talent for composing. But one day, in a sudden flash of inspiration, the germs of a song entered his head, as if from nowhere. He worked on the song for three hours, and presented it to the other three the next day. After an awkward silence, they felt obliged to point out that it had already been written and recorded by Bob Dylan.
Brown doesn't say what Dylan song this was. But what song could it have been? It would have to have been something simple. But what? I try to think of a simple Bob Dylan song from the 1960s, and I think "I Want You," because that's a simple sentiment: "I want you/I want you/I want you/So bad."
I have somewhere else I want to go with this post, but writing out the chorus like that, I'm smacked in the head with the realization that a non-Ringo Beatle did in fact write — and record — that very song originally written by Bob Dylan, same title and all: "I Want You." Lyrics: "I want you, I want you so bad."
Did no one feel obliged to tell John Lennon that Bob Dylan had already written and recorded that song? No, obviously not. And it's not as if Lennon fleshed out the song. His "I Want You" hardly has any lyrics. It's just "I want you so bad/It's driving me mad" repeated.
Originally, I was going to say that Ringo couldn't possibly have believed he'd written "I Want You" because it has complicated Dylanesque lyrics: The guilty undertaker sighs/The lonesome organ grinder cries/The silver saxophones say I should refuse you... But Lennon's "I Want You" shows how Ringo might have done it. Just use the chorus. The chorus is perfectly simple.
"Now Ann has baited me into promiscuously spiking my anxiety stew with carnalized onions..."
"I’ve honestly started wondering if this is just how men’s minds actually work in real life and now instead of being uncomfortable about passages like these, I’m uncomfortable about life."
A comment at the subreddit menwritingwomen.
The commenter is reacting in general to snippets of writing that have been posted in that group and specifically to this one:
Of course, the NYT "loves" this... if love includes loving the virality of something so clickable and sharable.
Click and reclick the image to read the full comment that begins "It all depends on your attitude."The New York Times loves this comment
— Joe Gabriel Simonson (@SaysSimonson) December 22, 2020
In early lockdown, I spent most evenings in the front room of my mother’s house, drunk, staring at a computer, reeling at the prospect of my body being deprived indefinitely of touch.... Only weeks earlier, I was in New York for an extended visit, recently single and pleasantly crazy with the desire to date far and wide. My romantic and sexual value seemed higher then and there than it had ever been anywhere else.... [One man] looked fondly down at me in a hotel room and inexplicably exclaimed, “I love New York!” at the sight of my body.
Inexplicably.
And then in March came the shutdown. ... I was urgently trying to recast the concept of pleasure as something that could occur without other people.... I made the mistake in this period of suggesting in a Facebook post that single people, especially those living alone, could not be expected to go an unlimited amount of time without socializing or close contact. Some people reacted to this as though I had proposed an orgy on every street corner, pandemic be damned, but that wasn’t what I meant. What I meant was that human beings can’t be expected to endure the sudden and total loss of social comfort....
The coronavirus pandemic has brought out a nasty puritanism in some people.... One doesn’t even need to actually break a rule to earn their disgust, only to express dismay over things they consider unimportant or, worse, hedonistic. To even complain about what it feels like to live alone and not be able to date right now is regarded as unseemly, dismissed as trivial....
Most of society does not really believe that casual, nonmonogamous encounters can actually hold meaning, rather than simply serve as crude ways to blow off steam. I know that they can. Living as a purposefully single and promiscuous person was one way to know others, one way to find joy in the world, and it’s gone for now. Single people have lost something important, and should be allowed to bemoan it.
This is a very well-written and impressive statement of a point of view that should be part of the discussion! She's not saying her desire for physical love is more important than children going to school and elderly people staying alive. She's saying the interest in living real life is important too.
Now, Nolan invites attacks by calling other people names. Her antagonists are puritans — and nasty ones at that. And she makes their argument easier by using the word "promiscuous" to describe the interest she wants us to take seriously.
Back to the comments. I see this from Low-Notes-Liberate, who says he's a musician and thus "supposed to be wildly frivolous in general." But he prefers "long-term intimacy."
After the initial hide and seek of bodies is, for me, when the real adventure begins. Who is this person, who am I, who are we together. It is perhaps more a journey into the mind through the body. Not to say that love simmering like carnalized onions in an iron skillet, animal nature is incredibly sexy.
Carnalized onions!
But I like the journey taken over time. That said, I can easily relate to the horrifying ten months of deserted island sexuality many of us have endured. I was happy to see this article because it needs to be discussed and out in the open. What is a life of masturbation? Videos? Amazon brown boxes arriving with the hopes of a new variation on the same old theme?