Current Wisdom
Jackasses, Assorted
"Current Wisdom" Newsday Mr. Arthur Lubow, Newsday's professor of moral philosophy, makes bold to issue a pronunciamento bound to make him an esteemed figure at every zoo in America: Animal...
...Our children or grandchildren will look back at the barbarities tolerated by our civilization with shocked incredulity...
...Roz Wolbarsht Durham, N.C...
...December 1, 1977] Ms...
...The scariest horrors are grounded in unconscious guilt...
...December 10, 1977] 40 The American Spectator February 1978...
...I think a female's use of words abusive to females defuses them...
...And I wore it right out of the store, got in the car, drove down Hollywood Boulevard...and this amazing thing happened...
...Three to five women...
...July/ August 1977] Miscellaneous A scientific questionnaire, discovered in the women's locker room at Columbia University, proves that modern humankind's thirst for knowledge remains unsated and insatiable: SAUNA USERS: PLEASE FILL OUT AND PLACE IN ENVELOPE BELOW I am a student at Teachers College, and am interested in the ways in which women interact in the sauna, and how they feel about that interaction...
...How do you feel about the close physical contact that occurs when the sauna is crowded...
...we are alive...
...Animal liberation shall eventually arrive...
...The two great exceptions to this European mania are the Hebrews and the Indians, where the main point of matrifocality (and matrilinearity) is that the matrifocal system unfreezes the values of the other half of women's sexuality: the non-coital, non-genital mammary sex of females to soften, civilize, and humanize the strictly phallic society...
...Someday our horror movies, our Godzillas and Creatures from the Black Lagoon, will be seen the same way as our Mandingos and Gothic plantation sagas, and we will understand the vogue of movies in which rats or insects overrun the globe...
...David Felton notifies his ardent readers of yet another learning experience available to all post-Kafka intellectuels: I wanted a bunny suit...
...These are just nightmares, but perhaps only in our dreams can we recognize reality...
...And it was a time when it was axiomatic that everyone was a genius until proven otherwise...
...If yes, on what subjects...
...If no, why not...
...strengthened, more confident, healthier...
...They are no longer tools with which to shock and humiliate...
...CURRENT WISDOM Newsday Mr...
...If you come alone, do you ever initiate conversation with others in the sauna...
...If you have time, I would appreciate any insights you have as to why women interact in the above ways when in the sauna, and how (ideally) you would like them to interact...
...it is concerned with structure and function, not "form and content...
...On what days and at what times do you usually come...
...The only question is how many more animals must suffer until human contradictions are exposed...
...How would you describe the general atmosphere of the sauna when there are two unacquainted people using it...
...April 1977] The Nation Miss Lucy Komisar, authoress of Down and Out in the USA, reports breathlessly from the sweat-soaked floor of the International Women's Year Conference in Houston about a resolution that promises to unhorse the dismal science and a resolution bringing much-needed aid to women in the calaboose: A new proposal sought legislation to provide "equal pay for work of equal value," a concept that could prevent employers from paying secretaries less than unskilled male workers earn...
...Economics is a phallic reification that obliterates the claims of society...
...I am grateful for having been able to visit the forest, hearing sermons in stones and the songs of beetles...
...The values of the Sixties—nongrasping, nonauthoritarian, noninvasive—still make sense to me...and ten years or so later, it's nice to come back to memories and the music...
...This is biology, not psychiatry...
...Over five...
...And it's fun, after all these years of proper servitude to a restrictive language code, to bounce them all over the walls and hear not only their echoes but the abuse—take the power to hurt from the particular vocabulary list...
...Then we can begin to talk again...
...Why...
...The reason the Left cannot obtain what it desires is that it is functioning on the phallic system of thought...
...And he did—a white woolly one with floppy pink ears and a dumb round tail...
...Just as southern whites fantasized that wronged blacks would someday avenge themselves with rape and brutality, so we quake at the prospect of an animal kingdom rising to render justice: at monkeys freed from their cages imprisoning their keepers, at castrated cats mutilating their tormentors, at injected rats reversing the direction of the hypodermic...
...October 14, 1977] Rolling Stone The life of the mind as lived by Jonathan Cott, and gibbered into Rolling Stone's tenth anniversary issue, 178 pages of advertising, prodigality, and literary misery: For me and many others, the San Francisco Bay Area during the Sixties—like Aeschylus' Athens, Shakespeare's London, Apollinaire's Paris or Mayakovsky's Moscow—was a time when people experienced a true dramatization of life...
...Jennifer Bryce Age: Occupation: How often do you use the sauna...
...It seems only logical that animals be next...
...I just felt like it...
...Why do you use the sauna...
...It will transform our dinners: Can we stomach those chickens that wait in their tiny cages for the butcher's hand that ends their miserable servitude...
...We are not coke bottles...
...People began staring at me, and instead of feeling embarrassed, I felt...I don't know...
...August 1977] Liberation An intriguing critique of the political left from the intellectual left by Valentine, Nebraska's own Joan Matheson: When I read something like Kristeva's "Chinese Women: The Mother at the Center" (March/April), I am left with no one but the American Indians to identify with...
...Which I did...
...The plan also asked aid for the aged, the homemakers and women in prison...
...December 15, 1977] Rolling Stone The inimitable Mr...
...As a sauna user, do you prefer that others strike up conversation in the sauna, or do you prefer that it be quiet...
...The Progressive The fabulous Progressive raises up an economic exemplar appalling to all but the economic morons who are its loyal subscribers: China, by emphasizing human labor and massive recycling rather than energy-intensive technology, feeds 800 million people on the same number of acres used for agriculture in the United States...
...Churches are idols whose skirted male clergy reify the powers Nature and Nature's God vested in the females of our mammalian species, the female mammals whose mammary functions are the root of socialization...
...Recent philological findings of Ms...
...October 9, 1977] New Times More evidence of the awesome clamor for progress now resounding amongst the logicians of the social justice claque: The history of liberation struggles is a story of the progressive broadening of the field of concern: rights were granted first to property holders, then to all white men, then to all men, and then to women...
...Thank you...
...It will destroy some of our pleasures: Is a visit to the zoo so enjoyable once you know the lions pacing their cages would mangle you with understandable relish for depriving them of savannas to run and antelopes to hunt...
...It seems incredible to me that an article can be written about Chinese mothers that gets reduced to the phallus, in particular, and to genitalism, in general...
...Freudian psychology is an obsession, deforming the world it presumes to define...
...Arthur Lubow, Newsday's professor of moral philosophy, makes bold to issue a pronunciamento bound to make him an esteemed figure at every zoo in America: Animal liberation will cut deeply into our lives...
...In fact, f--k it...
...Our use takes away the power of the words to damage us...
...Roz Wolbarsht, the Durham Oracle: Why is it important for women to use "dirty words" ? The answer is so simple that maybe I'm just the last one to discover it...
...How do you think nudity affects the interaction of women in the sauna, if at all...
...Do you come alone or with a friend...
...I would appreciate your help in this, and would be happy to speak with you personally if you have any further insights, reactions, or questions...
...Perhaps only in our unconscious can we honestly face up to our sins...
...Naturally most of the shops were clean out of bunnies, it being the day before Easter, but finally one guy told me he might have one my size if I rushed right down...
Vol. 11 • February 1978 • No. 4
