I like it very much when the comments on my posts end up being much more detailed and much better wrought than my own writing.  It makes this whole thing seem slightly less malignant in its narcissism.  Lately, I’m totally unworthy of my commenters.  I would really encourage you to read both BJG and B’s comments on my last post, and would especially encourage you to watch the video that BJG links to on Youtube. I’m completely riveted by this child, and totally guilty of helping this little Neocon nightmare go viral.  We have a new poster child for the movement, ladies and gentlemen!  I suppose that this pettiness isn’t actually in keeping with B’s wise declaration that we not “continue to label them misfits in order to feel better about our own brand of elitism”  by going “back to a more human and humanizing form of discussion.”  But B, this one is just too damn good!  I especially love the sign at 0:17:  “Thank you Fox-News for keeping us infromed!”  Everyone, let’s help luckygal90 achieve her dreams, which she ever-so-articulately describes thusly:  “Every 1 I Really want Glenn Beck to see this so plz help me 2 get this video viral so he see’s it and i can mabie be on his AWESOME show !”

No mabies about it, kiddo, you’re gonna be huge!  Infrom your friends!

* * *

I wish I had an awesome restaurant to tell you about, but unfortunately I’ve been mostly housebound by a nasty head cold the past few days.  The past forty-eight hours have largely consisted of me lying in bed watching the second season of Twin Peaks and dealing with the torrents of snot.  How exactly I managed to miss Twin Peaks until now bewilders me, but now that I’m watching it I’m a veritable junkie.  I’ll spare you any half-baked analysis of the show as it would be a decade late and a dollar short, suffice it to say that I’m finding Lynch to be good entertainment when viewed through a serious Nyquil haze.

When I’m hopped up on Dayquil, I’ve been reading biographies of D. H. Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis.  Call it dissertation reading lite. I’ve never been a biography reader before this, though I can now see the appeal of the genre.  It is very satisfyingly intrusive to have this much intimate information about someone. Jeffrey Meyers, who wrote the Lawrence biography that I’m reading, seems positively infatuated by Lawrence’s sex life, specifically various ladies’ accounts of his virility and performance in the sack.  After one such exhaustive account of Lawrence’s ability to “come back to a woman time after time,” I felt compelled to draw a heart in the margin containing J.M. + D.H.L. 4EVR! This might be the result of repeated viewings of luckygal90’s groundbreaking video.  Or maybe just all the cold medication.  Don’t get me wrong, David Herbert (at least in Meyer’s account) sounds like just the type of vaguely sociopathic fellow that I myself could lose a lot of sleep over:

“Lawrence was an immensely attractive man, but lacked the traditional English aloofness and reserve.  Spontaneous and volatile, he put a great strain on his personal relationships.  He had an uncanny ability to pierce his friends’ social façade, penetrate the essence of their character and reveal their inner core.  He wanted to transform their lives, often a disturbing and unwelcome process, and the ability to withstand this onslaught was a prerequisite for retaining his friendship.  Lawrence spoke and wrote to his friends with unusual—and even cruel—candor in order to destroy their defenses and revitalize their existence.”

– D. H. Lawrence:  A Biography (1990)

Meyers seems especially adept at describing the particular strain of masochism that us mere mortals endure when confronted with Artistic Genius, that is, the battle cry of girls-who-date-musicians everywhere.  He’s mean to me because he wants to transform me!  He’s not a jerk, he’s an Artist!  If I withstand his bullshit, I’ll be the better for it!

Anyway, I suspect that all biographers—and perhaps dissertation-writers—run the risk of falling in love with their subjects.  I fell asleep mooning over a picture of old Wyndham when he was a dashing young solider and proceeded to have this overblown romance novel of a dream in which Wyndham and I were lovers torn apart by the war.  I awoke overwhelmed by the weight of my own lurid dorkiness.

* * *

I have taken my last dose of my smuggled-in American Nyquil (!), so I’ll let Wyndham have the last word.  I think he certainly had us Coastal Elites in mind when he wrote the following:

“You need the anger of the shopkeeper as much as the opinion, or the imagination, of the commissionaire.  It is because you are fundamentally like, as like as two peas to, your less informed, less polished brother, that you have a need of him.  You need to be seen by him, to keep close to or far from him.  You are always a pea disguising itself from a million other peas.  The other peas all know you are a pea, and love to think of a pea like themselves being a soft, subtle, clever, insolent pea!  But your identity is precarious.  Yes, you must be lavish; otherwise—you will receive that deadly look that one pea gives another when pretence is laid aside.  You must furthermore be careful never to touch, mingle with, or attack anything before first convincing yourself that it be, in fact, a pea.  Do not be so fatuous as to interfere with a melon!  it might not result in harm, but it is no fun!  The whole game is constructed, all its rules made, for bodies roughly speaking, identical in volume and potentialities.”

– Blasting and Bombardiering (1937)

UPDATE:  Luckygal90 apparently does not appreciate my publicizing her Youtube video to my six readers.  Too bad, we were only trying to do our small part in helping her achieve her dreams of going viral.  Nevertheless, I’ve removed the link at her request.