The Week's Quotes

More fun stuff from the December 6th, 2004, edition of The New Yorker:

• Most Obtuse Award
  "Apostrophizing the then consummated epoch of Abstract Expressionism, when modern art definitively triumphed in American culture, 'Broken Obelisk' stirs warring feelings --ecstatic assent, vertiginous doubt-- that have attended the fitful ambitions of artists since the nineteenth century to establish cosmopolitan, secular equivalents of religion." --Peter Schjeldahl, on Barnett Newman's piece's placement in the then-newly-reopened MOMA, p. 117


• Most Unbecoming of the Subject
  "And, terminally unpleasant or not, Eminem is occasionally astonishing, able to upend expectations and redeem his many tedious attempts to épater all of us." --The inimitable Sasha Frere-Jones, stretching credulity while reviewing Mathers'/Shady's/Eminem's latest Encore, p 119.


• Most Illiterate Comment
  "In 1899, he [Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, the Lord Baron Dunsany] joined the Coldstream Guards and sailed off to South Africa to fight in the Boer War.... Of his initiation under a hail of Boer bullets, he cooly wrote, 'I have no wish to say anything critical of anyone's shooting, or to belittle some rifle that may be dear to its owner, but I cannot see why they did not get the whole lot of us.' The African landscape, with its vast, parched stretches of unpeopled wilderness, sunk in more deeply; lonely deserts became one of his favorite fictional settings." --Laura Miller, simultaneously misstating the facts (it was the Second Boer War), rehashing the same old slander (that the Rand was empty when the Boers got there -- a self-aggrandizing fiction perpetuated by South Africans straight through to the Apartheid State), and begging the question, "If there was nobody there, who exactly was fighting the war?", p. 113.

From Other Sources:

• "One of the things that I think is the most unfortunate about the gay marriage movement is that its implicit message seems to be that framing our relationships in ways that the state might recognize is more important than defining our practices of love on our own terms." --Priya Kandaswamy, in "Is Gay Marriage Racist? A Conversation with Marlon M. Bailey, Prya Kandaswamy, and Mattie Udora Richardson," from That's Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation, ed. by Mattilda (aka Matt Bernstein Sycamore).



• The goal of the eotechnic civilization as a whole until it reached the decadence of the eighteenth century was not more power alone but a greater intensification of life: color, perfume, images, music, sexual ecstasy, as well as daring exploits in arms and thought and exploration. Fine images were everywhere: a field of tulips in bloom, the scent of new mown hay, the ripple of flesh under silk or the rondure of budding breasts: the rousing sting of the wind as the rain clouds scud over the seas, or the blue serenity of the sky and pond and watercourse. One by one the senses were refined.
  (...)
  Throughout life, alike for rich and poor, the spirit of play was understood and fostered. If the gospel of work took form during this period, it did not dominate it.

  
  Later, during the Paleotechnic era (roughly during the Industrial Revolution),

  Sex, above all, was starved and degraded [under the low-quality living conditions of the poor laboring classes]. In the mines and factories an indiscriminate sexual intercourse of the most brutish kind was the only relief from the tedium and drudgery of the day.... Among the agricultural population in England sexual experience before marriage was a period of experimental grace before settling down: among the new industrial workers, it was often preliminary to abortion....
  Even among the more prosperous middle classes, sex lost both its intensity and its priapic sting. A cold rape followed the prudent continences and avoidances of the pre-marital state of women. The secrets of sexual stimulation and sexual pleasure were confined to the specialists in the brothels, and garbled knowledge about the possibilities of intercourse were conveyed by well-meaning amateurs or by quacks whose books on sexology acted as an additional bait, frequently, for their patent medicines. The sight of the naked body, so necessary for its proud exercise and dilation, was discreetly prohibited even in the form of undraped statues: moralists looked upon it as a lewd distraction that would take the mind off work and undermined the systematic inhibitions of machine industry.

  --Lewis Mumford, describing neither Nipplegate, nor John Ashcroft-related-sillyness, but the aesthetic differences between pre-Industrial and post-Industrial Europe. From Technics and Civilization; first quote from pp. 148-50, second from pp. 179-80.