CURRENT WISDOM
Jackasses, Assorted
CURRENT WISDOM This literary gazette's Keepers of the Current Wisdom, arguably the American academic body most comparable to the British Academy or the Academie Francaise, would like to take...
...Tolkien, before smuggling in what all connoisseurs of the NYR will recognize as one of the journal's goofball preoccupations, to wit, the moral and intellectual superiority of Iceland: Fantasy novels and some children's stories lend themselves to gay readings, Robb tells us...
...March 11, 2004) New York Review The ongoing influence of Hollywood on world peace: Blix believed that what he regarded as the Rambo tactics of some UNSCOM inspectors had, on balance, antagonized the Iraqis and, by humiliating them, made them more obstinate...
...Like a true Decadent," writes Robb, Holmes enjoys "introspective" German music and listens to it with "languid, dreamy eyes...
...He's a compulsive cleaner...
...New York Review The lamentable condition that historian Richard Hofstadter termed the paranoid style in American politics" creeps out of the wilder provinces of American politics and onto the augustpages of the NYR in the course of a review of Kevin Phillips' droll American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush: Phillips suggests that there may be some substance to old rumors that Republican operatives with CIA connections negotiated with Iran's mullahs to delay the release of the hostages in 1980—dooming Jimmy Carter's reelection chances...
...He arrives at his first legal hearing already mauled and with one eye closed behind swollen bruises...
...On the way to execution, he is whipped while fainting under the cross...
...I have a top job that pays well and my friend enjoys being the perfect homemaker...
...Theyconspired to punish two radicals in a way that shattered the left wing in America...
...We're happy...
...The ornate moth is, by Eisner's account, the sexual marathon champion of the insect world...
...My wife and I had to stop glancing furtively at each other for fear we would burst out laughing...
...Regrettably, perhaps, and certainly oddly, the best fantasies either desex females or use them wholly as decoration...
...Couples engage in the sexual act for up to nine hours at a time, which, for a creature that survives in its adult form for only a few weeks, is a lengthy coitus indeed...
...It is a cultural first that will surely be noted by the American Empire's Gibbon, who, the NYR's editors all assume, is at work even now somewhere in downtown Khartoum...
...I mean, if someone steps on the floor, I can see him preparing for the time when it can be wiped up...
...He's not dumb by any means, but he can't see why this is beginning to bother me...
...Rowling and J.R.R...
...He has great taste and has refurbished and decorated the apartment but he's so tidy and clean I feel nervous if I put an ash in an ashtray...
...CURRENT WISDOM This literary gazette's Keepers of the Current Wisdom, arguably the American academic body most comparable to the British Academy or the Academie Francaise, would like to take this opportunity to thank those incomparable hansdoodles now editing the New York Review of Books for supplying us with enough Current Wisdom to fill the entire Current Wisdom department this month...
...February 26, 2004) New York Review Reporting on The Passion of the Christ, the famously agelastic Garry Wills, after living the life of a public sourpuss for six decades, finally finds chuckles where millions found Yahweh: Even earlier, at the arrest of Jesus, he is chained, beaten over and over, thrown off a bridge to crash below...
...February 26, 2004) From the Archives Timeless tosh from Current Wisdoms past: New York Review Dr...
...We are the only country in the world that is without a left wing...
...April 8, 2004) New York Review An engage reviewer for the incomparable NYR contemplates two tomes devoted to poofter ideology and identifies one of the hitherto unrecognized giants of the 19th century erotic ghetto, Sherlock Holmes...
...It was a watershed moment...
...But the crowd just keeps whipping and beating him all the rest of the way...
...March 25, 2004) New York Review A helpful Correction supplied in the February 26, 2004 issue of NYR Now when will the requisite Correction appear to Elizabeth Drews's February 12, 2004 assertion that Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert is from Indiana...
...What next, "Nose Picking: A Radical Reappraisal...
...It's not normaL" (October 4,1983) The Bergen Evening Record The Honeymoon's over for two New Age pioneers: I'm a gay man and have had a wonderful, secure, I think, relationship with a man for almost two years...
...See Current Wisdom, TAS, March 2004): In Margaret Atwood's review of Studs Terkel's Hope Dies Last [NYR, November 6, 2003], the quote from Samuel Beckett, from his novel The Unnamable, should have read, "You must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on...
...Certainly The Lord of the Rings, although supposedly an antique "northern" tale, is lacking in anything except the slightly absurd "Fair was she" formula—in great contrast to the powerful and equivocal role played by women in Icelandic sagas—while The Wind in the Willows rejects Womankind as such, except for the old washerwoman, and to appear in the guise of one of them is Toad's chief nightmare...
...A soldier says to lay off or he'll never make it...
...December 28,1983) MAY 2004 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 69...
...Art for art's sake' is one of his mottoes—applied, not to poetry, but to the incongruously useful art of criminal detection...
...Stephen Greenblatt, reviews the ground-breaking monograph Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation by Thomas W. Laqueur, and raises mysterious onanism to the intellectual plane of metaphysics, war and peace, or perchance Beethoven's late quartettes...
...Whatever they did—if they did anything—my government that I love did worse...
...The editors regret the error...
...From then on, he is never moved or stopped without spontaneous blows and kicks and shoves from all kinds of bystanders wanting to get in on the fun...
...Sidney Lumet, director of the Rosenberg thriller Daniel, laments the state of Yankee politics and the passing of the two private citizens who made perhaps the greatest contribution ever to the spread of nuclear arms: Linnet said he knew practically nothing about the Rosenberg case at the time and still doesn't "My feelings are very simple...
...What does this mean...
...The IAEA team in Iraq had called the UNSCOM inspectors "cowboys" and in turn were christened "bunny-huggers" by the UNSCOM people...
...This peculiar behavior led Eisner and his colleagues into a detailed investigation of insect sex life, the findings of which are, to the naïve reader, often as startling and outlandish as anything invented in science fiction...
...The latter made a name for himself by masturbating for three weeks while reclining in a box under a white ramp on the floor of the Sonnabend Gallery in New York City: "so, art making," Laqueur observes, "is literally masturbating...
...Whether the Harry Potter series, say, will prove an exception is, I believe, yet to be seen...
...A series of grotesque photographs illustrates the transgressive fascination that masturbation has for such contemporary artists as Lynda Benglis, Annie Sprinkle, and Vito Acconci...
...Solitary Sex ends with a brief account of modern challenges to this theory of repression, from the championing of women's masturbation in the 1971 feminist best seller Our Bodies, Ourselves to the formation of groups with names like the SF Jacks—"a fellowship of men who like to jack-off in the company of like-minded men," as its Web site announces—and the Melbourne Wankers...
...April 8, 2004) New York Review A sadly unaccoladed Harvard prof, Dr...
...Art, aestheticism, and homosexuality made a rich trio in the nineteenth century, with mystery and detection as their friends and allies...
...Such extended couplings seem to be necessary so that the male can transfer his voluminous ejaculate to his mate...
...The problem is that he is too perfect...
...Far worse...
...March 25, 2004) New York Review The same daftprofnotes the scorta68 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 2004 CURRENT WISDOM tory failings of authors J.K...
...March 25, 2004) New York Review Whilst reviewing Thomas Eisner's entomological classic, For Fear of Insects, another whimsical NYROB reviewer discovers what must be the sexual ideal of every credulous NYR subscriber, the playboy ornate moth (Utetheisa ornatrix), a perfect model for the next series of Calvin Klein underwear ads: Only those males that tar their mates with a toxic brush, so to speak, get to have sex...
Vol. 37 • May 2004 • No. 4
