Saintperle

11/30/10

Erica Jong says? She barely knows the English language, so who cares what she says?

From Salon.com

Why is Mommy so mad?

Erica Jong, the novelist/essayist/feminist, does not like attachment parenting. No, siree, she does not. And she let everybody know about it last week via an essay in the Wall Street Journal, a pulled pin in a grenade attack that is only the latest offensive in the so-called Mommy Wars. In it, she derides the attachment parenting movement, asserting, among other things, that its philosophy of constant contact with your child favors the wealthy and keeps you from being a complete person. She also doesn't care for the "green" parenting movement; between the homemade baby food and the cloth diapers, women are more oppressed and stressed out than ever....
 
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OK, ever since Ms Jong's hot-shit super-cosmic-truth piece of fictional crap ("Fear of Flying") came out, I couldn't understand why anyone accepted that Ms Jong's catch-phrase ("zipless fuck")  meant what she said it meant.

A Zipless Fuck -- it means a fuck without any zip ... a fuck without any joy, verve, laughter, intensity, sweat, ecstasy, style, passion...

What she meant was a "zipperless fuck." 
 
Meaning the sex was as immediate and amazing as existed more or less only in porn films, what Richard Grossinger described, in Solar Journal  as portraying an "impossibly hospitable world." ("Hi, I'm the plumber and I'm here to clean your pipes.") 
 
Same kind of sex that, occasionally, during the wonderful years of grass, acid, went "Hi, wow, OH WOW."
 
But the issue was never important enough -- nor was she, in my estimation, to make an issue of it. I have been surprised somewhat, in later years, to see that her fans were NOT limited to illiterate devotees of the Jerry Springer Show. 

On the other hand, I have no doubt she told the truth in that book when she said she'd never had one of them thar things, given that from the first we ever knew of her she had, in the phrase Ed Dorn used in Gunslinger*:  "An attitude a mile long."

But hey -- who am I to criticize -- I'm just one of those people the write-for-money media has marginalized as "just some blogger." And she's an certified authority on dissatisfaction, no doubt from years of experience with it, with lack of zip in her sex, and countless questions about her nose (job?).
 
Why anyone would publish her opinions is still a mystery to me.
I would think Noam Chomsky and the Dalai Lama know more about the realities of parentingthan she ever will.
 
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*Gunslinger may be one of the great epic poems of the 20th century. Deceptively simple, easily read, but has worlds within worlds beneath that surface. This link takes you to the University of Pennsylvania's MP3 recording (free) of Mr. Dorn reading the poem, other works, and spoken commentary in various venues.

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11/23/10

Doctors Without Borders

Doctors Without Borders --

No bullshit
No politics
Nothing but medical care everywhere for anyone and everyone who needs it.

Everywhere, but especially in Haiti --
earthquake, devastation, cholera epidemic -- they're there.

We Americans tend to be compassionate and generous ...
very few heartless, soulless, hateful monsters posing as Christians, monsters like Pat Robertson ...
but despite our generosity, we do seem to have a short attention span.

(And besides, there are -- as always -- other situations of abject horror needing help (i.e., Pakistan,  etc)

But the fact remains -- a year later, things in Haiti are WORSE.
 
Doctors Without Borders are STILL there, doing the good work.

Please note the link above
and send them whatever you can, as often as you can  -- all the money goes to doing the job of angels.

Link
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11/10/10

Zombies? You haven't seen zombies...

Other than Newt Gingrich and Dick Army rising from the grave of corrupted / indicted politicians, the last really scary zombies to be seen were the ones Wade Davis found in Haiti, researching what they were and how they were created, as he described in The Serpent and the Rainbow -- and the real terror there was the Tonton Macoute -- Papa Doc Duvalier's murder squads, not the stumbling, shambling drain-dead pathetics "resurrected" from their dose of fugu, buried alive and, after an appropriate period of hideous terror in the grave, dug up with the caveat that disobedience will put that person right back underground -- still conscious.

And of course, 1968's Night of the Living Dead -- it was a new view, something previously unseen in its unrelenting attitude.

But now, The Walking Dead , a bullshit over-the-top ghastly graphic "STRETCH-IT-OUT-FOR MAXIMUM-INCOME" series, (already renewed for a second season) is claiming hereditary rights to the Zombie mystique but it doesn't come close -- kind of like the answer to Dan Quayle's clueless reference to himself being akin to JFK.  In this case, the answer is: "I've seen Dead Set in 2008 and believe me, you ain't no Dead Set." ('The Walking Dead is a living -- or non-living -- example of the famous Brit diss of our entertainments that said: "Americans always want their tragedies to have happy endings.")

It's a poor second in credibility and intensity to the 2008 English Dead Set a wonderful example of "Tell the story in 5 episodes and move on.  Leave while the viewers are still trembling. "  

Dead Set is now being re-shown occasionally on IFC and continually available under their listing in ON Demand.

No comas, no band of survivors -- just some people who wake up and find out it's "Here we are in the Zombie World." And the ability to understand it's time to drop all the bullshit minutiae of life and TV celebrity is rare (it takes place on a reality show with people having no information from or access to the outside world.)

The zombies are fast fast fast and scary scary scary unrelenting and savage, eating the dead while those few living are still trying to figure out what happened to their TV stardom, and not having to go all the way to ghastly images to make their point. Unlike The Walking Dead (or Lost for that matter), they didn't stretch it out for every last penny until even the fans said: "Fuck it. Let's watch something else."

Check it out and you'll see. If you don't have IFC on Demand, buy a copy it. (Amazon.com has it on Region 2 DVD -- PAL/UK and Non-Region NTSC.  Other outlets may also have copies for sale.)

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