For months and months I’ve been looking for words that distinguish intellectual depression from the real thing.
Take it, Petrarch:
He who can say how he burns, burns little
(Fro-tip: Montaigne)
Nothing like spending Easter Sunday at Ruby Tuesday’s. I’m a sucker for the sight of young attractive couples with children—also very old couples laughing, and lollipops—and the one sitting next to me with their cute little tot was fifty feminine pounds and a male Star Wars obsession away from fitting the bill. Close as I’ve gotten in years.
“As Bernie Mac once said!” the man suddenly announced. “If you have a son, you only have to worry about one penis. But if you have a daughter you have to worry about every penis in the world!”
The wife cracked up.
He followed it with another penile aphorism by Bernie Mac. The chubby wife cracked up again, deeply.
I say this is closer to heaven than spitting up eggshells.
This very real clip from the newscast of a Fox affiliate in NY is the funniest thing since that time Jesus, Ghandi, Bill Clinton, and Ayn Rand all stopped off at a bar where a dollar bill was lying on the floor before boarding an ill-fated airplane with a short supply of parachutes.
Endure the first 50 seconds for the pay-off.
(Fro-tip: The Big Lead)
The gut-spilled reactions to the new Broadway production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof — the two recorded (so kindly) by Alec on this blog a few days ago — were both wrong. Watching it Wednesday night at the Broadhurst Theater, I felt like a cat out of Edgar Allan Poe, butchered and melted onto a tin roof so that the crime would be traceless.
James Earl Jones as Big Daddy satisfied the appropriate senses (and a few others), but the rest was torture. At one particularly that’s-what-she-said moment, a woman from the audience yelled out “Spitzer!” and Terrence Howard broke character and started cracking up. The audience, noticing this, cracked up even more, and back and forth it went. If it weren’t for Jones, whose voice boomed over the laughter, as if to order the audience to sober up and to install some terror into his co-star, the play might’ve ended right then.
Which wouldn’t be so bad at all, except for the one crucial scene we all would’ve missed: James Earl Jones bending his knees, pulling up his pants a bit, and humping the air again and again and again.
And the playwright explains why in a funny, extremely pleasurable essay for the Village Voice.
I’ve had a mute affinity for Mamet ever since his suggestion that Preston Sturges is a refutation of atheism, but this takes the cake. And just when you begin to wonder if he’s really being serious, he drops this:
“Aha,” you will say, and you are right. I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele, and a host of conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism.
Hey-hey! Grab a chair and stay for dinner, won’t you, Dave?
I insist.
Garin:
I feel like a tin roof on a hot cat, fearing that,
if I collapse, I would squash the beauty that resideth
underneath.
Alec:
I feel like a tin cat on a hot roof, who,
with a lucky goof, will finally fall
and land on its feet.
Tom Wolfe:
MENNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNDASSUTAAAAAAYYYYYY!
In this issue of The Weekly Standard, I review Andre Comte-Sponville’s The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality.
An Unbeliever’s Prayer
You don’t need God to be satisfactorily spiritual.
by Garin Hovannisian
03/17/2008, Volume 013, Issue 26
The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality
by André Comte-Sponville
Viking, 224 pp., $19.95
This Little Book of Atheist Spirituality would have been considerably littler if it had begun on page 134, where its creator first suggests that atheist spirituality is even possible. But we tend to forgive André Comte-Sponville. It is understandable that the eminent French philosopher should begin by unloading his own thoughts about love, death, and the universe. And besides, we enjoy the journey through his detours, paved as they are with charm, charisma, and lovely Parisian sentimentality.
Most important, we discover that Comte-Sponville is not a cranky, cantankerous atheist. He was born into Christendom, and raised there; and though he eventually defected, he was never disinfected of its moral graces. He calls himself a “non-dogmatic atheist,” a “faithful atheist,” even a “Christian atheist.” Comte-Sponville might not believe in God, but he admires Him. An atheist he is; a heathen he is not.
Read more…
