3-11—08—A rising tide of inflation pressure around the globe is putting more stress on the beleaguered US dollar, as central banks from China to Chile fight rising prices by letting their currencies strengthen. ... the United Arab Emirates is re-examining its crrency’s peg to the dollar... WSJ A1
--in about 7.59billion years from now Earth will be dragged from its orbit by an engorged red Sun and spiral to a rapid vaporous death... NYT D1
SPITZER AND PROUST
--The neighbors who are separated from me by a partition make . . . love every day with a frenzy that makes me jealous. When I think that in my case this sensation is weaker than that obtained from drinking a glass of cold beer, I envy those people who can cry out in such a way that the first time I thought a murder was taking place. . . —Proust (Tadie, 695)
--One is tempted to observe that while the French seem more liberal in amative matters, the opposite appears true of the English. The irony is the degree to which many English writers who prove so expert in the mediating media of language also prove unsettling in the personal media of their love lives. In other words, if the point of art is to provide access to rapture, one would think that an artist is sensitive to ascertaining rapture, and competent in employing media to recapitulate rapture. Yet English writers are constrained by both their media (language) and their cultures (sexually prudish). The cause, effect, or correlation, seems to be an eruption in their personal lives: either their erotic intensity feeds their art, and/or their art does not suffice to satisfy their erotic intensities. If nothing else, it makes an interesting parlour game to mark the heterodox sexual behaviors of authors who now populate the orthodox canon of English literature. A quick glance through The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature shows that Byron became a “constant companion of his half-sister Augusta,” as well as attaching himself later to a married woman (Teresa, Countess Guiccioli)(85-86). Shelley left a collapsing marriage for a “triangular relationship” with Mary Godwin and her step-sister (531). Charles Dickens found the young actress Ellen Ternan preferable to his wife Catherine (159). George Eliot “joined H. H. Lewes in a union without legal form (he was already married) that lasted until his death” (183). Swinburne demonstrated preoccupations with de Sade and masochism (566). Wilde was gay, and so, it seems, were Forster and Auden (29, 216, 633). D. H. Lawrence eloped with the wife of one of his professors (328). Rebecca West had an illegitimate child with H. G. Wells (628). Even the saintly C. S. Lewis enjoyed sadism in his sex (Wilson, 49-50, 57, 272).—EXTREME PROUST sec. 40
--If human beings cannot break through to the Paradise I have described, they will embrace any third-rate unmediated experience which approximates It. And it is these third-rate approximations of Paradise which underpin your consumption economy and its concomitant coarseness. –EXTREME PROUST, sec. 85
No comments:
Post a Comment