The Knifethrusts Are Dedicated to the Superb Scholar, Editor, Teacher, Author, Essayist, Columnist and Commentator on Art and Letters, Culture, Contemporary Morality, and the History of Thought, the Incomparable—-
ROGER KIMBALL
“I bring reason to your ears, and, in language as plain as ABC, hold up truth to your eyes.” — Thomas Paine, December 23, 1776
“So much remains in our hearts and minds as unrealized suggestion.” —Andrei Tarkovsky
“Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid.” —Fyodor Dostoevsky
Whenever I’m getting ready to start a new writing project, I feel the way I imagine a tire feels swelling with air.
“Authentic” celebrity is never the product only of the efforts of the person who is celebrated. The actor commanding $10 million a picture is able to do so because in his second appearance in a film the screenplay was written by a genius, the director was a wizard, the producer kept his eye on the ball, the studio cut a hell of a distribution deal, or his co-star was a $15 million a picture celebrity whose notoriety (always a career booster) led to a record-breaking opening weekend. Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of never-will-be’s strive and sacrifice, “prepare” themselves and writhe with desire and hope until their intestines cycle into spin/dry, yet never get a call-back. The predicament is too humanly destructive for a glib or frivolous comment about being in the right place at the right time (however apt that may be). It’s just the way things are. It’s the luck of the draw. The only consolation the multitude of disappointed might savor is the knowledge that after that first big success, the celebrity in question gets his choice of five or six of all the good parts on offer at the moment and, more often than not, either exercises terrible judgment or never again receives a smidgen of the good fortune he enjoyed his second time out. Bye, bye, happiness. Still, there is a difference in being a 45-year-old car salesman who never delivered a line on screen, and a no-longer-employable leading man with fifty million dollars in the bank and a Gulfstream jet. That is an irony that calls for sarcasm, but I am sorry—I just can’t seem to find it in me.
People who react to experience not spontaneously, but rather by first considering how the reaction might “play” for them—or in the case of our crusading intellectuals, how they might use it in the prosecution of their pet sociocultural narratives—and what its corresponding value will be, worry the hell out of me because interposing anything that is arbitrary between reality and our awareness of reality, which is to say, preconditioning our consciousness, is an ego defense that makes me wonder what’s wrong with them that they don’t want revealed through inadequate, inappropriate or inept behavior. I put them in the psychodynamic category that contains socio- and psychopaths, junkies maddened by desperation and rabid ideologues of all denominations.
Madness as Sanity, Reality as Madness: These were popular terms in the nineteen-seventies, a time when the twinning of opposites seemed profoundly philosophical and concepts such as these were intensely meaningful to someone with an armful of horse.
Oxymoron: new movie
For the musicians in a symphony orchestra to wear tuxedos and evening gowns when they perform in our contemporary hostile—to refined appreciation—cultural environment is not only quixotic but enormously to be admired and marveled at.
I’ve just been realizing how easy it is to imagine I’m being funny after my sense of humor turns acidic and petty. At such times I’m only making fun of people instead of exploiting situational and attitudinal distinctions. The latter is something that requires empathy (without which no human understanding is even possible, and what is the good of a brand of humor that doesn’t induce understanding?), honesty and diligence.
“As riches increase and accumulate in few hands, as luxury prevails in society, virtue will be in a greater degree considered as only a graceful appendage of wealth, and the tendency of things will be to depart from the republican standard. This is the real disposition of human nature.” — Alexander Hamilton
If Germany ever undertakes to build something new that references its historical past, the results should be something to see.
Blatherbloat: Nothing means everything. Nothingness is all. Not even meaning—I mean the word itself—means anything. Life is an infinity of lard.
People who consider it in their interest that no rules inhibit or limit their behavior find the pleasures of their excesses short-lived and incomplete. Why else would they keep repeating them so neurotically?
Egos today are like those huge balloons floating bland-faced and with absurd solemnity above the crowds in Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, except the balloons are tethered to the reality of tow-trucks navigating a complex course through congested streets.
People who say they want to be entertained, as opposed to being edified, really mean they want to have their senses stimulated. Their minds never occupy their thinking, and thinking never occupies their minds.
When you’re taking a shower and you find yourself thinking, “You know, there’s more than just soap and water running out of this stall. My life’s going down the drain, too,” it is time to begin playing with yourself.
Some of those who cast off religion (as being insufficiently hip) but continue to experience spiritual hunger wind up plunging into such ethereal realms of soul-questing as astrology, Scientology, fortune-telling, white witchery and New Age blatherbloat. Before long they’re channeling Rock Hudson and Bella Abzug and joyously waggling their hands like Yes-God-ing gospel singers; and their throbbing souls (which they had said they didn’t “believe in” anymore) are ripe for plucking by manipulating apostles. Gore Vidal and Joyce Carol Oates wrote novels about this rhapsodic idiocy that will scare the hell out of you.