He was a young exiled man of scant personal resources who believed he was swimming with legislative dolphins when he was foundering among taxing sharks …
- “Most of the audience of ‘Jaws’ would say that [its] representation of sharks is fictional. In spite of that, the representation had, for many, an impact on their daily life, as it shaped the way in which they perceived real sharks and saw certain actions as justified”-- Anaïs Giannuzzo (Geneva) on fiction, feelings, representations, and rationality
The reader becomes a small, conflicted god, or a disbelieved prophet …
As a party strategy, I recommend soliciting people’s thoughts about marriage. Sometimes they tell you a juicy detail about a recent divorce, or complain, with relish, about a friend of theirs hell-bent on marrying someone totally unsuitable. Nothing thrills me quite like listening to a fresh set of personal vendettas, justifications, regrets and absolutions, and imagining how the other involved parties might describe the same situation. In the grip of this kind of voyeurism I find it comforting to recall Phyllis Rose’s characterization of gossip as “the beginning of moral inquiry,” in her wonderful book Parallel Lives: “We are desperate for information about how other people live because we want to know how to live ourselves.”
This Bat Uses Its Oversized Penis as an ‘Arm’ during Sex Scientific American. Something to talk about round the table
