Admit it, why don't you: you're attracted to crackpots.
Well, yes, at a theoretical level, I guess. Heaven knows why. But yeah, the small communities in California, say, that have gone out there in their radical solitude to escape the world of things, like the Syrian eccentrics in Peter Brown's Late Antiquity. Ec-centric, off-centre, out of the loop in an innocent kind of loopy way. The Bohemian world-weary hippies, drop-outs who think freedom shouldn't be tied to a flag. Someone who wants to fall and doesn't give a damn or who's got some one-time solution to the world's problems, has dreamt up some utopia in a sweaty night vision and is willing to sell it for 64 cents. Transcendental meditation, Zen stillness, a Buddhist mantra penned by the man himself when he was in Oregon, the "inner you" meeting the "outer you" and other crazy shit that makes LSD look like liquorice.
"Every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal wearer [and] sex maniac" now thought he had a political message.
---George Orwell.
But also the Christian revivalist types, thumping on wooden desks, crying out to the wilderness about the redemption of all ye sinners, the number of devils hidden in a woman's licentious lips and lustful gaze, or how you will burn in hell until you're dry like a bone and all that type of stuff. It just has, I dunno, great comic potential. Anyway, I love those stories about hell-fire.
Closer to home, the fundos and crazies here are less entertaining (because more dangerous). But the all-American crazy,with Durer's eyes and the wild, erratic sentences, that kind just cracks me up.
Admit it, a kind of crazy type of woman is attracted to you. Someone who is really "deep" or is looking for that depth. Oh yes, the thing to be avoided at all costs is superficiality. The other day someone wrote to me on facebook something like: "I've totally fallen for you..blah, blah..."
"What, in three days of knowing each other?"
"Yes"
" Well, all I can say is that you've got very poor taste"
(which is like the classic line from Groucho).
"I get the feeling that you're a very private man. Am I right? What's your sign?"
There's something deeply suspicious about people who think everything is "mysterious", not quite what it seems. Everything has to be a sign for something else, a world of perfect substitutability, a medievalist's fabulous scheme. "62," Freud said.
"I can tell a man's personality by a single word. Say one word."
"Xylophone"
Then you've got your sort of regular delusionals, the conspiracy-theorists or the people who believe they can see real world events in their dreams before they actually happen. If it ain't the joos it be dem dere negores. World domination by the losers cooked up by the dregs of the system. You wonder if that ain't but the effect of 19th century peasants coming to the city.
Well, yes, at a theoretical level, I guess. Heaven knows why. But yeah, the small communities in California, say, that have gone out there in their radical solitude to escape the world of things, like the Syrian eccentrics in Peter Brown's Late Antiquity. Ec-centric, off-centre, out of the loop in an innocent kind of loopy way. The Bohemian world-weary hippies, drop-outs who think freedom shouldn't be tied to a flag. Someone who wants to fall and doesn't give a damn or who's got some one-time solution to the world's problems, has dreamt up some utopia in a sweaty night vision and is willing to sell it for 64 cents. Transcendental meditation, Zen stillness, a Buddhist mantra penned by the man himself when he was in Oregon, the "inner you" meeting the "outer you" and other crazy shit that makes LSD look like liquorice.
"Every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal wearer [and] sex maniac" now thought he had a political message.
---George Orwell.
But also the Christian revivalist types, thumping on wooden desks, crying out to the wilderness about the redemption of all ye sinners, the number of devils hidden in a woman's licentious lips and lustful gaze, or how you will burn in hell until you're dry like a bone and all that type of stuff. It just has, I dunno, great comic potential. Anyway, I love those stories about hell-fire.
Closer to home, the fundos and crazies here are less entertaining (because more dangerous). But the all-American crazy,with Durer's eyes and the wild, erratic sentences, that kind just cracks me up.
Admit it, a kind of crazy type of woman is attracted to you. Someone who is really "deep" or is looking for that depth. Oh yes, the thing to be avoided at all costs is superficiality. The other day someone wrote to me on facebook something like: "I've totally fallen for you..blah, blah..."
"What, in three days of knowing each other?"
"Yes"
" Well, all I can say is that you've got very poor taste"
(which is like the classic line from Groucho).
"I get the feeling that you're a very private man. Am I right? What's your sign?"
There's something deeply suspicious about people who think everything is "mysterious", not quite what it seems. Everything has to be a sign for something else, a world of perfect substitutability, a medievalist's fabulous scheme. "62," Freud said.
"I can tell a man's personality by a single word. Say one word."
"Xylophone"
Then you've got your sort of regular delusionals, the conspiracy-theorists or the people who believe they can see real world events in their dreams before they actually happen. If it ain't the joos it be dem dere negores. World domination by the losers cooked up by the dregs of the system. You wonder if that ain't but the effect of 19th century peasants coming to the city.
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