Juvenile delinquency, first recorded in 1816. The term, first used in 1817. Which comes first: the word or the act? Since you're stuck in your books and haven't got a clue about what's happening around you in the so-called real world, you should hastily add: doesn't Hacking write about this somewhere? Normalization. The old Foucauldian theme.
Years back, my old boss wrote me a rather nasty e-mail: "you have no right to call me by my first name, your parents haven't brought you up well; you are a juvenile delinquent..blah, blah, blah." Which made me quite happy, really, winding the old bugger up like that. As luck would have it, he was kicked out of this place two weeks later for 'amending' his son's examination grades/transcripts. And for two whole months after that incident I had a kind of cult status around here, as if to say: don't say anything to this guy, because he's in league with the spirits and he'll put a curse on you or the evil eye or...
Of course, I continue to be outspoken about lots of things but mostly my star has waned. It was just one of those freakish things and those in power continue to think of me, perhaps somewhat sympathetically, as a childish clown. Which, again, is fine since when fate is on my side again I will take great relish in seeing them trashed and, to be honest, you wouldn't have it any other way: when the child was a child...
The maturity of adults bores you stiff. Always fumbling, always antagonizing and agonizing, calculating and plotting. More unlikely to hit on the truth or see themselves clearly or understand the difference between means and ends. Always pontificating, thinking they-and only they-have figured things out. Khair...
~~~
'I count on this. Not on perfect understanding, which is Cartesian, but on approximate understanding which is Jewish.'
'I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the middle of chaos. A stillness that characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm. I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.'
'Novelists are wrong to...speak "the last word." It is better that the novelist should trust his own sense of life. Less ambitious. More likely to tell the truth.'
---Saul Bellow.
'I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the middle of chaos. A stillness that characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm. I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.'
'Novelists are wrong to...speak "the last word." It is better that the novelist should trust his own sense of life. Less ambitious. More likely to tell the truth.'
---Saul Bellow.
1 comment:
"Her antagonism inspired him, pushed him to into ever more extreme positions, and by the time he was ready to leave the house and go off to college, he had indelibly cast himself in his chosen role: as malcontent, as rebel, as outlaw poet prowling the gutters of a ruined world."
And why B, just why would you ever take seriously whatever I say your way? Not to say, I meant juvenile as a compliment, given your self-reported Methuselah-ic age. Read candid, if you please. B-good!
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