In the investigation of a neurotic style of life, we must always note who suffers most because of the patient’s condition. Usually, this is a member of the family.
…To injure another person through atonement is one of the most subtle devices of the neurotic.
(Dr. Alfred Adler. Problems of Neurosis. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd, 1929.)
Neurosis — keep it all in the family.
(This was all news to me. So the theories advanced here are kind of fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants.)
Wonder Woman’s archnemesis Cheetah was apparently introduced in No. 6.1 of the original, Marston-penned Wonder Woman line (1943). The original Cheetah was Priscilla Rich.
via the wiki, Cheetah’s first appearance, 1943. Cover art by Harry Peter.
Priscilla Rich was depicted as a young, insecure debutante who suffered from a split personality developed because of her inferiority complex. Following a benefit dinner, Ms. Rich’s alternate personality became dominant, triggered by an encounter with Wonder Woman, whose superiority to earth women activated Ms. Rich’s coping mechanism for her low self-esteem. This other self, Cheetah, continues to come out from time to time to try and kill Diana, foil her plans for good, etc.
I noted with interest in researching her that, in a lot of the panels I read, it seems that Ms. Rich’s alter ego, Cheetah, actually hates the Priscilla personality almost as much as she dislikes Wonder Woman.
Priscilla retreats to her room and collapses before her makeup mirror. There she sees an image of a woman dressed like a cheetah. “Horrors!” she cries, as she gazes at her evil inner-self for the first time.
(the wiki.)
“Don’t you know me?” replies the reflection. “I am the REAL you — the Cheetah — a treacherous, relentless huntress!” The image commands her to fashion a Cheetah costume. “From now on,” intones the reflection, “when I command you, you shall go forth dressed like your TRUE self and do as I command you…”
(Ibid.)
It is not terribly difficult to see metaphors here for female cattiness. I think it goes back to what I wrote about earlier, the empty need for women to best each other. Ms. Rich and Wonder Woman had no actual beef: why did Ms. Rich create one? Because she felt insecure.
And why does Cheetah hate herself almost as much as she hates Wonder Woman?
I think because she despises her own weakness, and, as Cheetah, she sees her Priscilla personality as hampering her goal to become the greatest woman alive.
So a) she makes something out of nothing because b) she feels badly about herself, doubly over. That’s crazy and yet so true and typical.
She does not want to, but she must. Why? It is so unnecessary, just as it is unnecessary for women to gang up on one another in real life, too. But they always do.
Final note: the IGN ranked Cheetah in 2009 as the 69th Greatest Comic Book Villain of All Time, which is great synchronicity for our 69-day project.
via fyeahww on the tumblr
“Wonder Woman — and the trend toward male acceptance of female love power which she represents — indicates that the first psychological step has actually been taken. Boys, young and old, satisfy their wish thoughts by reading comics. If they go crazy over Wonder Woman, it means they’re longing for a beautiful, exciting girl who’s stronger than they are. By their comics tastes ye shall know them! … Wonder Woman satisfies the subconscious, elaborately disguised desire of males to be mastered by a woman who loves them.
… Normal men retain their childish longing for a woman to mother them. At adolescence a new desire is added. They want a girl to allure them. When you put these two together, you have the typical male yearning that Wonder Woman satisfies.”
(Marston, William Moulton qtd. in “Our Women Are Our Future.” Richard, Olive.* The Family Circle. August 14, 1942.
Art by Phil Noto.
Marston was Wonder Woman’s creator, but that’s a story for another day. Also he lived in a polyamorous relationship with his wife and the author of this article, Ms. Richard, but that is also a story for another day. I’m pleased that this brief dive into psychology has already uncovered an aspect of Wonder Woman that leaves me cold, or that I feel I do not share. I don’t mind taking initiative (especially in certain aspects of the relationship), but I hate being the stronger one.
Denise Milani.
I dislike getting pushed in to the corner and forced to make decisions and ask repeatedly for a thing to be done that has to be done and can only be done by my partner. It makes me feel like a nagging bitch, which I fear and hate, and it’s not fair. I want to be equals, I want to feel like we can rely on one another. I don’t even necessarily want to be total equals; I don’t know that I’d want to completely submit to a partner, but it would be nice to relax and feel taken care of. Not to always worry, not to be the only one tuned in to the big picture — not to feel alone.
Art by quasilucid via fyeahww on the tumblr
And it starts out all nice-guy like, “No, you pick a restaurant. I don’t care where we go,” or, “Let’s get something you want to see,” but it builds in to this passive-aggressive thing where it turns to this slow-simmering resentment on both sides. Mine because I don’t want to be in charge, at all, ever, I hate feeling that way and I hate being forced to lose respect for someone I love; the other person’s because even though they have put me in this position of power it was really to avoid responsibility and now they’re feeling mutinous, the immaturity of which makes me see that they really are, in fact, weaker than me and makes me lose even more respect. When I can’t respect someone, then I don’t feel like I have a partner, and when I don’t feel like I have a partner, I don’t feel safe, and when I don’t feel safe, I am out of love.
I hate, hate, hate that aspect of a relationship. I hate being more powerful. There might actually be literally nothing that I hate more than that when it comes to love.
Cheese blintzes, looks like Day 2 was pretty damned educational for me. I’m going let that make up for the week and some odd days in between Days 1 and 2.
Kind of a sequel to the “asphinctersayswhat” pearl of Freudian wisdom from a few weeks back.
Photographed by David Samson.
When a woman has scholarly inclinations there is usually something wrong with her sexuality.
(Friedrich Nietzsche)
You have no idea.
via suicidewatch on the tumblr.
Percent of women in the U.S. with a Bachelor’s Degree or higher, according to the recent United States Census: 10.9, versus 9% of males. Folks who dig deviant dames, it is looking good for you!
Goethe Month coda and art by that One Guy.
The website from which I took this picture says:
This screenprint is based on a painting by the German artist Johann Tischbein. It depicts Johann von Goethe, a key figure in German literature as a traveller in a landscape of ruins. Warhol has cropped the original composition so as to create a head and shoulders portrait of the writer. Goethe had contemplated painting as an early career choice and published a book on the theory of colour. As the first person to study the psychological affects of colour, it is interesting to think what he would make of Warhol’s representation of him as a Pop icon.
via warholarts.com.
Near the end of his life, Goethe wrote to his friend and editor Eckermann,
My dear friend, I will tell you something that may be of use to you, when you are going over my works.
They will never become popular; there will be single individuals who will understand what I want to say, but there can be no question [that the work will be unpopular].
(Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, letter to Johann Peter Eckermann.)
Sometimes it is good to be wrong. Farewell, Goethe Month.
Who’s next?
Berlin, Germany
The quote comes from “Proverbs of Hell,” a chapter in William Blake’s gnostic text The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The book has been interpreted as an anticipation of Freudian and Jungian models of the mind, illustrating a struggle between a repressive superego and an amoral id. It has also been interpreted as an anticipation of Nietzsche’s theories* about the difference between slave morality and master morality.
(the wiki)
*cf: in particular Nietzsche’s camel – lion – child model of human thought and behavior as outlined in Also sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen / Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None (1883-1885).
Portions of this post appeared originally on December 5, 2009.
ATTN: Spoilers like a bat outta hell. Stop if you’ve never seen nor read Red Dragon and Manhunter and are the kind of person who yells at people on the internet for posting spoilers of things that have been out for decades.
I was relaxing after dinner and I suddenly remembered yesterday’s random Blake trivia — forgot about that!
Okay, soooo, I used this picture yesterday in the “Tyger” post …
… because it comes from Manhunter (Michael Mann, 1986). This is part 1 of its Movie Moment because I need to cover technical aspects a different day. Today I want to just sort of compare Manhunter and a more recent adaptation of the same fucked-up and riveting material. Manhunter is the original filmed adaptation of the Thomas Harris novel Red Dragon (1981), in which the writer William Blake plays a very large part of the dissociative disease that leads the antagonist to kill and sets off the action of the novel/film.
Manhunter, the original Red Dragon screen version.
In 2002, a different adaptation, whose title was the same as the book — Harris’s novels have a weird and haphazard history of screen-arrival in Hollywood — was released in light of the success of the year before’s screen adaptation of Hannibal (novel: Thomas Harris, 1999; film: Ridley Scott, 2001), a rather late-breaking sequel to the infamous film version of Silence of the Lambs (novel: Harris, 1988; movie: Jonathan Demme, 1991).
Red Dragon, second adaptation.
A totally different animal, not even attempting to remake in part the cinematic masterpiece that is the color-drenched, painstakingly-framed Manhunter, the alternate more recent film is what I consider a sloppy adaptation of Red Dragon. It is nothing like the very-admirable entry into the Harris genre that is Hannibal, which despite the replacement of Academy Award-winner Jodie Foster with Academy Award-nominee Julianne Moore as the infamous “[Hello,] Clarice” Starling managed, I think by virtue of Sir Anthony Hopkins’ reprisal of the sensationalist character of Dr. Hannibal “the Cannibal” Lecter combined with Scott Free productions’ attachment to the project in the wake of smash-hit Gladiator, to make quite the box office splash. As it ended up, that success was deserved.
Check out Vegetarian Times in the background. No. 1 favorite Hannibal still with A Bullet.
The Red Dragon revamp that followed it the next year, on the other hand, falls short of its predecessors due to cocky casting and the hasty pudding nature of the picture. It is almost unfair to stack it against such a stunning piece of eye candy and psychological discourse as Manhunter. But I’m going to anyway.
“The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed In Sun” — William Blake. Blake’s illuminated print-making process is actually still partially guessed at, as he never troubled to write down most of how he did it. Another post — I promise.
The novel Red Dragon, the first in the Hannibal Lecter series of books by Thomas Harris, has as its main detective not Clarice Starling, but rather a young FBI mindhunter named Will Graham. The book and 2002 film take its title from the antagonist’s personal inspiration (and devil with whom he dances) for his transformation to what he views as a higher being. This is a highly detailed, uniquely gnostic series of ritual murders which the “bad guy” bases around Blake’s work, particularly his illuminated manuscript print “The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed In Sun.” The killer calls this multiply murderous, cleansing-by-blood process “Becoming.”
This antagonist is called the Tooth Fairy by the press, a name he loathes, but he’s tipped to the reader early on — by his preferred nomenclature as the Red Dragon — to be a shy and cleft-palated industrial photographic-development-expert named Francis Dolarhyde. Francis is an abused and orphaned soul with an unfathomably deep dark side due to psychosexual torture in his upbringing.
Meanwhile, young Will Graham is a bummed-out “good guy” chilling in Marathon, Florida with his family on the beach, trying to get his mojo back after unhappily closing the toughest case of his career as a profiler with the FBI: arresting former friend and consultant, reknowned psychiatrist, classical music fan, and noted long pig gourmand one Dr. H. Lecter — M.D., Ph.D., hella murderer.
As the action unfolds, the already tightly-strung Dolarhyde — who, as the Red Dragon, writes in supplication to Dr. Lecktor/Lecter appealing for help in his quest to purify his weak flesh and Become, further enmeshing the good doc in the plotohs — finds his demon not only hunted by highly-skilled semi-retired agent Will Graham and the FBI, but also must elude his own dark side’s brutal orders when he suddenly finds himself in an unlikely and empathetic mutual attraction with a plucky handicapped co-worker and falters in his faith in “Becoming.”
This complex character is played equally well by Tom Noonan in Manhunter and Ralph Fiennes in Red Dragon. Noonan gets the edge for creepy wordless scenes such as rasing his head to the sunlight like an animal drinking in vital and engrammed diurnal directives; Fiennes has the advantage in the all-important following tattoo-revelation scene and Red Dragon cry of chagrined triumph at tabloid reporter and luckless human torch Freddy Lounds (Steven Lang, 1986; Philip Seymour Hoffman, ’01: winner Hoffman on that one — ♥ that dude’s freaky energy 4eva-evah).
YOU OWE ME AWE.
Totally disturbing scene.
Tormented by the demon with which he wrestles, Dolarhyde attempts to steal and eat the original Blake painting which has been, in his mind, masterminding his murders. He believes that by consuming the painting, he will stop the voices, visions, and impulses torturing his brain with which he valiantly argues.
He finds himself particularly rising in opposition to the Red Dragon’s orders that he murder Reba (infinitely worthy and perpetually underused Joan Allen plays her in Manhunter while shiny-eyed dope Emily Watson —I know it’s an unpopular opinion but this chick bugs the hell out of me — got the role in the revamp), the outspoken, sexually bold blind woman from the photo labs with whom he has fallen in love.
Punch Drunk Love, Cradle Will Rock, me shaking my head and saying “Boo.” (limited theatrical release)
Dolarhyde is a sadder, sympathetic and strangely more touching, conflicted character than the early Lecter (or even his later and in my book cheaply slapped together Hannibal Rising incarnation) and much more relatable than Dolarhyde’s equally compulsive 1988 series successor, Buffalo Bill — “it puts the lotion on its etc” — are ever portrayed to be, yet because of Dolarhyde’s disorderly mind and act-driven kills, the Red Dragon as a predator has scenes that are in some ways more resonantly chilling than any of the often-quoted histrionics hailing from either star of Silence of the Lambs‘ gruesome sideshow.
As an example, in the above screencap, the Red Dragon side of Francis’s beaten, slavish personality makes the nervous newly-dating Dolarhyde give blind Reba McClane a drink of water from a glass with not only ice floating it but also the anciently misshapen and hideously rotting false teeth of the author of his schizophrenia, Dolarhyde’s dreadful dead grandmother, which dental implements he fits in to his own mouth and bites his victims in a frenzy during his kills. (Hence the hated nickname.) That part is not a-okay with me.
Forensic expert showing an FBI-Atlanta PD task force meeting a plaster mold of Gramma Dolarhyde’s choppers.
Um. Yeah. All that biting and teeth stuff? And the yells from the Red Dragon and his grandmother to murder Reba before he accidentally tells her how they have him trapped in his own mind? That’s fucked up. And oh, god. When those teeth knock against the glass as Reba thanks him, raises it to her lips, and sips, there is not a cringe-free face in the room.
So. In Manhunter, the first jump of Red Dragon from novel to screen, Will Graham is played by William Petersen, and Brian Cox plays Lecktor — not a typo. The film spells it this way. (You may recognize my darlingest dearest awesome Mr. Cox, pictured below as “Lecktor,” from Rushmore, The Ring, or Supertroopers — he is a personal fave from Way Back).
In 2002’s adaptation of Red Dragon, Edward Norton performs the part of Agent Graham with Sir Anthony Hopkins reprising his role as Dr. Lecter. Hopkins did get to have a little fun, for once off of his familiar smug game of “fava beans” and psychological bullshit, because this whelp of a wolf among the lambs has just recently been chained in the Red Dragon storyline.
The Lecter of Red Dragon is still a young and relatively vengeful Lecter, pacing a gym on a harness and leash for mandatory exercise to keep the other prisoners of his psychiatric facility safe (no mask just yet), unthinkably pissed at Graham for having caught him several years earlier, even lunging for him in an unguarded moment of rage — Lecter is not yet completely at home in the role of Fucking With the Po-lice as is the maturing character encountered in Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal.
In spite of Hopkins’ fun stretching his wings, I still feel that Brian Cox plays him with a hair more dignity and better-hinged chilliness than Hopkins does, which gives Lecktor, vs. Lecter, that slender shoot of a just-germinating seed of polish-mixed-with-go-for-broke-ruthlessness which is so necessary for the character’s believable development in to who he is by Hannibal. I think Hopkins saw the chance to finally show the less-controlled, animalistic side of a character he’d been at home playing as an after-the-fact “tyger” — caged and angry but a careful planner — for a long time and jumped, maybe too high, at the opportunity for this gamier potrayal. Just an opinion.
“You think I’m stupid?”
“No, Dr. Lecter. I don’t think you’re stupid.”
“But you still caught me.”
“You had certain … disadvantages.”
“Disadvantages? Such as … ?”
“You’re insane.”
You are correct to recognize Petersen from the original, Las Vegas-set television series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. Fun fact: for Halloween 2002, the producers deliberately teamed William Petersen up in his role as Gil Grissom, the brilliant but troubled detective able to get in to killers’ minds, in pursuit of a nemesis freaky killer performed in the October 31st episode by Tom Noonan (Francis Dolarhyde, aka the Tooth Fairy) as a nod to their parts opposite one another in Manhunter. Noonan played a demented illusionist, escape artist, and master magician known as Zephyr. Near retirement, the Zephyr still had some scores to settle and a lot of pyrotechnic sleight-of-hand tricks up his sleeve before he was ready to call it a day. The episode actually ends in delightful ambiguity, but I will not spoil it.
Special thanks to wetpaint, a CSI: fansite, for the screencaps.
I used to wonder with great conflict why, having lost someone special to me to a real life version of this type of shit, I am okay with fare such as the Lecter film and novel shenanigans, CSI:, and the like when I am so vehemently opposed to so-called “true crime” and often even discussions of such stuff in company or on the news. I will leave the room on certain topics and I don’t consider that burying my head in the sand — I have seen all I want to see for now of what people will say “needs to be reported” like as some kind of lesson.
Fiennes and Watson in Red Dragon; my professor friend and I looked nothing like this during our deep conversation (below) — I just felt like I had not shown enough stills from it as opposed to Manhunter.
Not too long ago, I wound up one day in deep, private conversation after a where-am-I-going-in-life conference with a former professor I dearly love about Harris’s novels and perhaps Patrica Cornwell’s, or some line very similar, and I confessed that I felt conflicted about my reading of that type of material because of things I’d dealt with in the past. He surprised me by saying he’d also lost a friend to violent crime growing up and despised, as I did, the cult of violence and serial-killer-admiration that seems to grip the tabloid television shows and bestselling non-fiction shelves. Yet he, too, read with genuine enjoyment many series of fictional genre crime thrillers. He said that, like me, he’d often disgustedly questioned himself as to how he kept both opinions in balance, and why he differentiated between hating the one and being all right with the other.
We need this hero.
He said he’d read a great scholarly article just a few years earlier, and I cannot remember the writer he quoted because I am garbage and frankly slugging a margarita on the rocks right now (it’s hot where I live), which forever answered our question for him.
This psychological scholar and literary critic posited that the murder mystery — all the detective thrillers and suspense novels and cop vs. boogeyman films the genre spawns — even with a detailed portrayal of a base, disturbed and seemingly random monster like Lecter or Dolarhyde as their antagonist — far from the feeding of dark fantasy that we anxiously supposed, serves instead a need in humanity to see our fears realized (as we had already done in reality) but the conflict then resolved.
Couldn’t go the whole post without a Silence of the Lambs scene.
What he basically said was that every time he and I watched CSI: and Grissom caught the Bad Guy, or read a James Patterson book on the beach and cheered as Alex Cross brought in his latest nemesis, we were solving our friends’ murders and seeing the people who disrupted our lives brought to task for their wrongdoing. We were gaining our much needed closure. Even people who have not suffered loss but empathetically and logically fear it because they love people in their own lives and understand that the possibility of these lives being taken by cruel injustice is never far away, seek and enjoy that same positive resolution to this basic human anxiety as it plays out in genre crime fiction.
Lecter caged and contained, kept in by the Forces of Good and therefore shut up like a witch in a well of a fairy story. (temporarily in this case but you get my drift) The people of the village are Safe.
It blew my mind, and I almost wanted to reject it because it was so far from my self-loathing castigation, but it felt very true. I know he was right. I am no longer so guilty nor constantly probing myself for some latent and despicable, prurient interest in fictional depictions of things that in real life have caused me pain. I understand now that I am actually acting out in my mind, against a cathartic and safe backdrop, the conflict and agonized anxieties from which I shy away in real reports on the news, and deliberately seeking through a book in my hands a satisfactory resolution which will lay my mind at ease that justice has been reached — and, by extension, that justice can and will be reached in reality.
That strayed pretty far afield from Blake and Manhunter but I’m kind of not sorry.
All of this entry’s screencaps come from kpannier and thewadingegret on the lj; rottentomatoes forums; and personal grabs here and there over the years.
“Catwoman Warrior,” by PurgatorioInferno on the deviantart.
“Courageous, untroubled, mocking, and violent — that is what Wisdom wants us to be. Wisdom is a woman, and loves only a warrior.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche
It’s true, I think I don’t have a great enough store of anger, or, if I do, I sublimate it into something else, repress it so it snaps out in an unguarded moment over something unrelated, or manifests itself in a sleepless night. I’m not saying I want to be rage-filled in perpetuity. But a little bit of healthy expression of displeasure would be good. I haven’t got enough anger. Not enough to defend myself when I maybe should, that’s the thing of it. I let myself get bulldozed. I don’t fight back. I need to work on that.
Photographed by Pompeo Posar.
Miss February 1973 was the lovely and talented Cynthia Wood, a model and actress from an established Hollywood family. Her mother was an actress, her father a recording-company executive and, as a Hollywood native to boot, Cyndi naturally gravitated to the entertainment world. “My parents’ friends were actors, producers and directors; my friends were their sons and daughters.”
“For as long as I can remember, my life was nothing but lessons.” Cyndi admits that there were times she felt pressured. “Whenever there was a school play, I’d try out for it. Whenever the chorus auditioned, I was there. Between those activities and my dance and music instruction, I had little time to think about what I wanted to do.” But she’s far from bitter about the experience. “I’ve always liked being in the spotlight,” says Cyndi.
No complaints from this corner. You keep on shining, kiddo. Psst. This playful shoot by Pompeo Posar has a fun theme that sends up Cyndi’s Beverly Hills background; see if you can guess it before the end when I display the spoiler picture.
(If this pictures does not asplode your brain with its cuteness, you have an old and joyless soul.)
For a while, our Playmate tried her hand at fashion designing (“just for myself”), songwriting and even sound engineering (“I do some great mixing and can work off any 16-track”).
Well, hey, Mr. Deejay. That is pretty cool shit. I do not imagine a lot of ladies were doing that, even by ’73. (Cue slew of vitriolic emails from the Historical Society of Female Deejays Against Boobies. It’s cool because I always wanted a reason to talk to Samantha Ronson.)
“I love being in front of people,” Cyndi says. “I suppose it appeals to the actress in me. In fact, much of my work in commercials calls for acting. Sometimes I even get a chance to sing and dance, too, and that’s great.” (“Class Act,” Playboy, February 1973)
Some of Cyndi’s credits include Warren Beatty’s Shampoo and, even more prestigiously, Apocalypse Now, in which she played the Playmate of the Year (breathtaking range, like, are you blown away?). You can check that out on the youtube. Her scenes in the 1979 theatrical release of Coppola’s masterpiece were brief though memorably jiggly, but in the 2001 Redux directors’ cut release, her part was expanded significantly.
IN MY SPARE TIME: I sew and design clothes and write and sing tunes.
GREAT FOODS: Spaghetti and stew.
I LOVE BEING A PLAYMATE: Because it pays well and it’s great publicity. I also have no hang-ups about nudity when it’s in the right place or situation.
(Playmate data sheet)
Heck, yeah, spaghetti and nudity. Ms. Wood, you have won my hard heart. You may slide on up to Northern California any ol’ time to hoark down some pasta and marinara with me while we sew and sing “Hello, Dolly!”
In some of these pictures she looks like Sharon Tate when she had her hair strawberry blonde for Polanski’s Fearless Vampire Killers (the picture they met making), and it’s kind of weirding me out. Is anyone else seeing it? Bueller? No? Just me, then? Cool.
According to the imdb, “Cynthia gave an especially lively and winning performance as sassy spitfire Moon in the enjoyable drive-in comedy romp Van Nuys Blvd.” I have not seen this 1979 film, so I cannot speak to claims of her lively winningness, but the imdb offers the following lines as “memorable quotes:”Officer Albert Zass: Why won’t you help me?
Biker: Because you’re The Man, man.
and
Bobby: If we don’t get a doctor down here right now out I’m gonna shut your mouth permanently!
Nurse: You cant talk to me like that!
Bobby: Oh, I can’t, can’t I?
[slams fist down]
Nurse: Okay, okay! Stay right there.
This Bobby seems like a rough young customer. Nurses are nice people, mister. Show some respect — that woman went to school to help sick people. Sheesh. The description of the movie mentions “topless dancers,” so, two guesses what part Ms. Wood played.
Besides making appearances as herself on “The Sonny and Cher Show” (awesome) and “The Jim Stafford Show” (I’m too young to reckon at all what that was), Cyndi did CSA (that’s casting agent) work for Michael Lesner, which is either a typo or his completed projects have not made it on to imdb. A mystery.
That was the theme of the shoot. Go back and look at the pictures and see how the story comes together. Cute, right? I think it’s cute. I suppose I should be chagrined and outraged or whatever by the “Rich Bitch” slogan, but I think it’s funny. Besides, didn’t I hear that women had, like, reclaimed the word “bitch” or some such? I don’t remember, I was probably busy ironing and cooking a roast while serenely giving birth. All with a book balanced on my head to practice posture. That’s the kind of good old-fashioned second-class class I’m bringing to the picnic. Hope you can keep up.
These days, Ms. Wood is actually Doctor. Despite admitting to some aimless early-on academic meandering in her Playboy interview, it seems she finally found a true interest and pursued it with admirable tenacity, earning a Ph.D. in psychology. That should keep her in zebra-skin rugs and studded tank tops quite adequately. Rock on, gorgeous!
I got another writing project. This one a) is legit-illegitimate, where I have to straightforward plagiarize and cannot delude myself the person needs the help or is using this as a model paper or some folklore, and b) has some whiff of the racysauce to boot. Double ooh!
Cheezits, I don’t even like being bad, this is me putting an upbeat face on it. Well…I can’t say the topic is the worst thing ever in my book, I admit.
Alternative Secretary poster design by Dawn Patrol on the IMP awards website.
So, yes, I came home from the SJ trip with Miss D and, after meeting up with Paolo at Chevy’s for some strategy and relaxation (gown is safe and sound in the actual town where the wedding will be, one less care on the list this week, thank god!), I got back to the ol’ compy and found I’d won a bid on a paper for which I’d forgotten even devising a quote. Got all those dogs in the fire, stanimal, I keep saying so, and a few other frankly distracting things swirling around me.
Quelle surprise: the topic is masochism. SS Funtimes, ahoy!
The Thought Experiment 