Category: Varia

What Ever Happened to Linda Lovelace?

Her real name was Linda Boreman. The daughter of a New York City cop, she was raised in Yonkers and attended Catholic school where she was known as "Miss Holy Holy" because of her noli me tangere attitude. She died in April of 2002. Read her sad story here.

Her case and that of others, Kerouac for one, point us to what I will call the problem of the inefficacy of religion for moral improvement.  Linda Boreman attended Catholic school and ended up a porno star.  Kerouac, for all his Catholicism and Buddhism, two ascetic religions, ended up most unascetically destroying his body, the temple of the Holy Spirit, with sex and drugs and booze. 

Of course, the counter-question can and must be asked: How much worse would we be if not for the moral teachings we have received from religion?  And even if you yourself got no such instruction in your impressionable years, you were buoyed up by a society in which those teachings were partially, if inadequately and often hypocritically, embodied.  (The hypocrite at least pays lip service to high standards, lip service being better than no service at all.)   The boneheads of the New Atheism cannot of course understand this.  They would sweep religion aside without considering what good it has done, and how the genuine problems it addresses will be solved without it.

Ned Polsky, Maverick Sociologist

Polsky book Reader Ray Stahl of Port Angeles, Washington, kindly mailed me a copy of Ned Polsky, Hustlers, Beats, and Others.  It is a work of sociology by a maverick sociologist, academically trained, but decidedly his own man.  I wasn't aware of it or him until a few days ago.  The preface already has me convinced that this is a book I will read and digest. A writer who writes like this is a writer to read:

Many readers of this book will feel that I object to the views of other scholars in terms that are overly fierce. These days the more usual mode in academia, thronged as it is with arrivistes aspiring to be gentlemen, is to voice such objections oleaginously. But luckily I cut an eyetooth on that masterpiece of English prose, A. E. Housman's introduction to his edition  of Manilius, and so am forever immune to the notion that polemical writing and scholarly writing shouldn't mix. I believe that polemical scholarship improves the quality of intellectual life — sharpens the mind, helps get issues settled faster — by forcing genteel discussion to become genuine debate.

(Hyperlinks added. Obviously.  But it raises a curiously pedantic question: By what right does one tamper with a text in this way?  Pedantic the question, I leave it to the pedants.)

Polsky died in 2000.  Here is an obituary.  You will have to scroll down to find it.

Apologies to E-Mailers

If you have e-mailed me and haven't received a response, I apologize.  During the last three days I have been revamping my 'work station,' including configuring and getting used to a new computer.  It may be a day or two before I figure out how to access my e-mail account.  There are some old e-mails that it looks as if I will not be able to answer.  I don't have the time or energy to answer everything, and I do have a life away from the computer.

Time was when I couldn't understand how people could fail to respond to e-mail.  "It's so easy; just click on reply and type something.  The least the guy could do is acknowledge receipt." Now I understand, having become what I criticized – there is just too much of it and too many other self- and other-imposed tasks to contend with. 

Innumeracy in the Check-Out Line

The Sarah Lee frozen pies were on sale, three for $10, at the local supermarket. I bought two, but they rang up as $4.99 each. I pointed out to the check-out girl that this was wrong, and she sent a 'gofer' to confirm my claim. Right I was. But now the lass was perplexed, having to input the correct amount by hand and brain. She had to ask me what 10 divided by 3 is. I was nice, not rude, and just gave her the answer sparing her any commentary.

(It's a crappy job, standing up eight hours per day, in a confined space, an appendage of a machine. I make a point of trying to relate to the attendants, male and female, as persons, at the back of my mind recalling a passage in Martin Buber's I-Thou in which he says such a relation is possible even in the heat of a commute between passenger and bus driver.)

But now I can be peevish. They learn how to put on condoms in these liberal-run schools but not how to add, subtract, multiply and divide? And how many times have I encountered pretty young things in bars and restaurants who are clueless when it comes to weights and measures?  At a P. F. Chang's the other day I asked whether the beer I wanted to order was 22 oz.  The girl said it was a pint, "whatever that is." This was near Arizona State and it is a good bet that she was a student there.  How can such people not know that there are two pints in a quart, that a pint is 16 fluid ounces, that four quarts make a gallon , . . . , that a light-year is a measure of distance not of time, . . . .

Can we blame this one on libruls too?  You betcha!  A librul is one who has never met a standard he didn't want to undermine.

You many enjoy John Allen Paulos, Innumeracy.  In case it isn't obvious, innumeracy is the mathematical counterpart of illiteracy.

Brew 102

BeerCans041

 

 

 

I asked an old friend if he remembered the huge Brew 102 sign visible from a Los Angeles freeway back in the '50s and  '60s. (See photo below.)  His response:

'Deed I do remember Brew 102.
Over the Hollywood Freeway.
My arm 'round a cutie in a '55 Buick
Goin' long 'ol Highway 101.

Here is my verse response which is not meant autobiographically:

'Twas Brew 102 that did me in
 And got me to drownin' in liquid sin
 Soon I was a rollin' down that lost highway
 Where many a boy has been known to stray
 On 66 I got my kicks
 And on 101 I had my fun.
 But now I'm here to tell you true
 We ain't on this earth to booze and screw
 The female ass and the whisky glass
 Have brought many a man to a sorry pass.
 That's my wisdom take it straight
 And head while there's time for the narrow gate
 It's not too late and it's not too far
 As long's  you don't stop at the next whisky bar.

LaLaLand in the 1950s, Hollywood Freeway, and Brew 102 sign (left-click to enlarge):

Brew 102 Building

Merry Scroogemas!

Scrooge In this season especially we ought to find a kind word to say about the much maligned Ebeneezer Scrooge. Here's mine: Without Scrooge, the sexually prolific  Cratchit wouldn't have a job and be able to support his brood!  This thought is developed by Michael Levin in In Defense of Scrooge.

And is there not something preternaturally knuckleheaded about the calls from some liberals that  the presentation of Dicken's masterpiece be banned? They ought to consider that there is more anti-Capitalism in it than Christianity — an irony that no doubt escapes their shallow pates. 

Minimalist and Maximalist Modes of Holiday Impersonality

'Tis the season for the letter carriers of the world to groan under their useless burdens of impersonal greetings.

Impersonality in the minimalist style may take the form of a store-bought card with a pre-fabricated message to which is appended an embossed name. A step up from this is a handwritten name. Slightly better still is the nowadays common family picture with handwritten name but no message.

The maximalist style is far worse. Now we are in for a lengthy litany of the manifold accomplishments of the sender and his family which litany may run to a page or two of single-spaced text.

One size fits all.  No attempt to address any one person as a person.

"It's humbug, I tell you, humbug!"