“A considerable proportion, if not an outright majority, of the medical profession is of conservative cast of mind: politically, that is, not technically. Perhaps a close and continuous acquaintance with human nature at its limits renders doctors, if not cynical exactly, at least circumspect about the prospects for human perfectibility. It is surprising, then, that the major medical journals these days, edited entirely by doctors, are riddled with — I almost said rotted by — political correctness. It isn’t easy to define political correctness with precision, but it is easy to recognize when it is present. It acts on me as the sound, when I was a child, of a teacher’s nail scraping down a blackboard because his piece of chalk was too short: it sends shivers down my spine. It is the attempt to reform thought by making certain things unsayable; it is also the conspicuous, not to say intimidating, display of virtue (conceived of as the public espousal of the ‘correct,’ which is to say ‘progressive,’ views) by means of a purified vocabulary and abstract humane sentiment. To contradict such sentiment, or not to use such vocabulary, is to put yourself outside the pale of civilized men (or should I say persons?).”

 

 – Theodore Dalrymple

 

---

The Sun Underfoot Among the Sundews
Amy Clampitt

 

An ingenuity too astonishing
to be quite fortuitous is
this bog full of sundews, sphagnum-
lines and shaped like a teacup.
                               A step
down and you’re into it; a
wilderness swallows you up:
ankle-, then knee-, then midriff-
to-shoulder-deep in wetfooted
understory, an overhead
spruce-tamarack horizon hinting
you’ll never get out of here.
                          But the sun
among the sundews, down there,
is so bright, an underfoot
webwork of carnivorous rubies,
a star-swarm thick as the gnats
they’re set to catch, delectable
double-faced cockleburs, each
hair-tip a sticky mirror
afire with sunlight, a million
of them and again a million,
each mirror a trap set to
unhand believing,
                 that either
a First Cause said once, “Let there
be sundews,” and there were, or they’ve
made their way here unaided
other than by that backhand, round-
about refusal to assume responsibility
known as Natural Selection.
                           But the sun
underfoot is so dazzling
down there among the sundews,
there is so much light
in that cup that, looking,
you start to fall upward.

 

---

 

 

1. Virginia Woolf

2. Charlotte Perkins Gilman

3. Alice Sheldon (James Tiptree, Jr.)

4. Carolyn Heilbrun

5. Sylvia Plath

 

Honorable mention: “Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. She tried to commit suicide but failed, and as a consequence, became the grandmother of Frankenstein’s monster, a dead man brought back to life.”

 

---

 

 

Mythomania (1977)

 

---

 

 

 

---

 

 

1. Cinderella

2. Pretty Woman

3. Grease

4. My Fair Lady

5. Lady for a Day

 

Extra: Dogfight

 

---

 

 

Men seldom make passes
At girls who wear glasses.

 

[Note, this has been proven untrue in recent tests. – E]

 

---

 

“Many years ago, as a new undergraduate student at a state university, I attended fraternity parties. Much to my surprise, I noticed time and again that the residents’ rooms were decorated with posters for Quentin Tarantino’s early film “Reservoir Dogs.” I found it a mystery that these same posters – of slick suited gangsters in shades, strutting in black and white down an anonymous city street – adorned the walls of so many young upwardly mobile undergrads. What had resonated with them in a film about a bank robbery run amuck?”

 

 

---

 

 

Q: What is the last book Mark Twain ever read?

A: Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure.

 

“He became interested in Hardy’s Jude, and spoke of it with high approval, urging me to read it. He dwelt a good deal on the morals of it, or rather on the lack of them. He followed the tale to the end, finishing it the afternoon before we sailed. It was his last continuous reading.”

 

---

 

 

 

[Yes, poet is on there, along with closet organizer. – E]

 

---

 

 

Blue and white are the most common school colours.

 

The first Lifesaver flavor was peppermint.

 

The letter N ends all Japanese words not ending in a vowel.

 

---

 

 

 

---

 

“Consider the word houyhnhnms for a moment. It is a word that is never typed or written other than anxiously. Its orthography resists complacency. It opposes the virtual invisibility that overtakes the familiar. Which is just as well, because this one word, on its own, demonstrates the power of language to equal the actual world. For literary theoreticians, it is axiomatic that language is unequal to the task of encompassing reality. Its failure is inevitable, a given. Then we consider Swift’s brilliant one-word encapsulation of the shuddering breath in a horse’s nostrils. Or mkgnao — Joyce’s more accurate word for the approximate and conventional miaow. Both words are triumphs of mimesis. Of course, you might object that neither of these words is words. Mkgnao is not a proper word, runs the objection. To which there is an answer: it is now. And so are Joyce’s two sharply observed and minutely differentiated alternatives: mrkgnao and mrkrgnao. Each of which is friendlier. Language is not limited to the hobbled, hideous, trammelled practice of the average theoretician. Or even the average writer.” – Craig Raine

 

---

 

 

“Is 40% or more of Moby Dick, David Copperfield, Anna Karenina, or Vanity Fair mere padding? Can these novels be usefully cut?”

 

 

“Work does play an important role in literature. It just doesn’t mirror the importance or merit the attention it gets in real life”:

 

 

 

“The Send button, so easy to click, invites too-quick a response. In fact, ‘Send’ may be the most dangerous four-letter word of the 21st century. Robert Fulford explains why”:

 

 

 

America’s Disappearing Book Reviews:

 

 

 

“Movie critics are held to a different standard than other critics. If a book critic were to pan a Jackie Collins novel, or a food critic were to point out that the Whopper isn’t Kobe beef, they wouldn’t be called ‘out of touch.’ Film critics, however, are expected to be cheerleaders”:

 

 

 

What the Pulitzer Says About State Of American Theatre:

 

 

The Most Expensive Movie Ever Made:

 

 

“Writers’ offspring tend to go into the family business with far less regularity than, say, the children of doctors or lawyers, and it seldom happens that over the long haul, and in the deepening shade, the younger equals or outstrips the elder — the way that Anthony Trollope, to take a famous example, bested his mother, Fanny. The exception these days is the curious writerly firm of Amis & Amis, founded by Kingsley, who died in 1995, and now run by his son Martin”:

 

 

What Granta’s List Of Best Writers Says About America:

 

 

---

 

Ladies, not sure you want to go on a date with him? Check out:

 

 

---

 

 

http://punkrockpenguin.net/waste/amuse/badcovers/sexbook.html 

 

---

 

 

Flower, array of fertile and sterile leaves,
“forming the reproductive fabric of angiosperms,”
my friend, the botanist, says,
a tube inserted in her chest below the breast,
through a cleft and fixed to a pump
she calls Marion, after her doctor.
Marion doses her chemo, day and night-her stem,
tendril, style-the elongated unfertile portion of the pistil,
she explains, between the stigma and ovulary, her fruit.
She’s wildflower-pipewort, or carrion wort,
depending-false Solomon’s seal,
nodding mandarin, asphodel.
Ziggurat of marzipan? she asks,
producing delicate smoked salmon,
lifting a gold-plated butterfish to my mouth.
When it rains, she says in a soft, clear voice,
the waters come so hard, the desert earth
cannot absorb. Torrential. Useless.
Her pose is a diagram of gesture-weight forward
on left leg, right behind, toe brushing floor
in decorous point, palms open, turned front.
She’s learning a little Arabic from a phrase book:
“Uncle, may I take an apple and an orange?”
“Of course, help yourself, son; we have peaches, too.”
“Barbara, taste how sweet this peach is.”
(Taste the peach this, of Barbara, see tasty how.)
Y