Put It Away!
We have all seen it and been nauseated to the bone. Whence the recent idiotic practice of wearing a stethoscope around the neck? Any doctor of any decency and integrity would robustly repudiate this absurdity. Why not around the waist? Around the top of the leg? Strategically wound around the jock area? Around the head? Why just one? i consider the wearing of one or more stethoscopes around the neck as conclusive evidence of imbecility and at least sub-clinical psychosis. Perhaps this idiocy originated as a gag in a medical soap opera. Until recently, a doctor pulling this racket would have been contemned by colleagues, despised by customers, ridiculed by the media. The stethy still belongs, barely suggested, in the deep pocket of the obligatory white coat. Now there's even an etiquette, which I reject, about not upsetting drop-dead-stupid people, on top of an apparent obligation to let them get the better of you and get away with it. The next time a doctor tries to intimidate you and display to you by wearing a stethy around his neck, demand that he remove it and consider throttling him with it. Someone somewhere at some time has to say something. [Ed.: You said it.]
Since You're At It…
Why stop at the stethoscope? Fashionable too, I hear, is for doctors to wear around their necks a collection of implements, eg otoscope, opthalmoscope, laryngoscope, sigmoidoscope, protoscope etc., some gold-plated with flashing lights, manufactured with holes and strings to fit neatly, in rows, onto special neck belts. You can sense an approaching medic by his frenetic egomanic stride and the rattling and jingling of his neck junk. Spot the extra-competitive passive-aggressive nutcase medic, wearing six or more gadgets around his neck over his inflatable folded-arms kit. Can't wait for the consultation. I hear that surgeons have started to wear around their necks scalpels, boxes of blades, forceps, retractors, sewing kits, heart-lung machines. The more successful wear operating-room tables strapped to their backs. Neckwear for cosmetic surgeons includes various designs of breast implant. Anesthetists are wearing blood transfusion bags, vaporisers, Guedel airways, Yankauer tips, Bain circuits and oxygen cylinders.
Other Professions
Of course other professions are not to be outdone: idiotic psycho-dysplay must not be the monopoly of mere medics. Lawyers are starting to wear sets of lawbooks around their necks; judges wear gavels; accountants wear over-sized printer-calculators (the sort with the paper roll); office drones wear on-the-shoulders work cubicles etc., all while polishing that vicious 'Who the hell are you' look and the silly walk.
Getting My Own Back
The customer, rightly wary of all this and at least until we can stamp it out, would now do well to start wearing around his neck at least one household appliance: a food processor, a vacuum cleaner, a washing machine. He can start small with, say, an iron, a kettle, a hand blender and miscellaneous utensils, and a collander on his head, and advance from there. In a medical setting, he should wear around his own neck at least two or three of his own stethoscopes and many other instruments besides.
Where's The Money In It?
Profiteers in all this? Manufacturers, suppliers, wholesalers, retailers and re-sellers of and investors in neck accoutrement straps and harnesses, neck exercise machines, neck massage machines, neck muscle gels, hot compresses, cold compresses, muscle relaxants and anti-inflammatory pills. Osteopaths, masseurs and orthopedic men will do a steady trade. You have heard it here first.
At The (Padded) Cellular Level
More modern madness: the folded arms. The only thing missing: the straitjacket into which they fit naturally.
This heroic glorious intellectual achievement, from proletariat Soviet intelligentsyum, has recently come to my attention. I freely share with you dialectically. Worker-peasant vanguard intellectual Dr. Prof. A. V. Schnurgonchinskiiyy (1838-1913) — same A. V. Schnurgonchinskiiyy (to not be confused with many others of same, similar or the different name) who took Sverdlovsk Mathematics Academy by the storm with 1911 ideological hypothesis of 1912, and — after posthumous rehabilitation after posthumous conviction and sentence for posthumous Ismismisms against correct Party line after the several attempts to escape from Don Basin rest home for the burnt-out Stankovich smelters — posthumous winner of semi-prestigious 1937 Jóséf Whó? Prize for least worst essay written in the hot milk on back of Makarov 9mm pistol about the Soviet monkey chocolate spread, spent last ninety years of his life toiling on it, including fifty years spent in the high-security psychiatric clinics in straitjacket under the close observation. Conjecture states (in essence, at its briefest, so to speak, in a manner of speaking, as one might say, actually in fact) that every 3,721 years or so, femto-second occurs in which the Nothing occurs, happens, transpires, eventuates or takes place anywhere on planet. Everyone and everything everywhere is in the repose. No-one (including even Zinovievite-Kamenevite decadent deviationist revisionist reactionary internationalist anarcho-syndicalist subversionist delusionist reformist saboteur-wrecker slanderer counter-revolutionary theist bourgeois rightist-leftist-centrist-rightist cadre bloc center) breathes, talks, moves, struggles, denounces parents, shouts slogans, writes pamphlets, makes false arrests, prosecutes in show trial or agitates. Even within and between classes and the class elements and the shock brigades. The animals and the plants similarly at the rest. Apparently next A. V. Schnurgonchinskii(y)y Conjectural Proto-Reciprocal Femto-Second is due on or around the November 11, 2057, and will be detected by glorious heroic Marxist-Leninist detectors designed to detect and denounce disloyalty to Party and the incorrect stands and the lines and also to allay the lower-peasant concerns about next famine (did we say 'famine'? We mean 'the harvest').
Probably you'll think this food for thought is in poor taste but it needs digesting. American eating contests and all-you-can-eat restaurant buffets will play well in Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia and most other famine areas. There will be no shortage of all-you-can-eat sand, dirt and air to make the most ravenous, voracious and gluttonous of distended stomachs rest replete. All this is taking it to the next level to make a difference at this time. It's to know and what you need to know at this time. As for condiments of your choice at this time (to accompany at this time the beverage of your choice) to make the dirt of your choice more appetising at this time, if, breaking your silence, you feel that need, why not need to want to need to go ahead at this time with various secretions from your slowly expiring camel? [Ed.: Now you are going too far. It is obvious that we are all in trouble. Leave it there.]
Back to those buffets. I hear that the Manhattan Uptown Reaching Out Because We All Really Care Club is shortly to hold an all-you-can-eat-and-then-floss social. The idea is to collect the flossed-out food particles in a bag, and send that bag (if you can get it through customs) for famine relief… [Ed.: (*)(*&%^*&!@#!] It all arose from the following correspondence in We Really Truly Care At This Time Magazine incorporating Sharing My Stance At This Time Magazine:-
Dear Aunt Augustinasaurus: Concerning the perennial issue of African famines, of which I have recently read in the NYT's Fashion section. At first I was kinda sorta like Whoaaa! and then Wicked! and then Whooaaaaa!! and then Dude!!! and then kinda sorta like Awesome! and then, like, Whoaaaaaaaaa!!! Of course now I get that we are where we are and it is what it is. I'd now like at this time to lift an expensively manicured pinkie to really help because, as the validated person I am today, I really care at this time really. It's who I am. It defines me. So. Here's the most original thought I've had. I feel it defines me. What is the etiquette concerning food fragments dislodged — deliberately or accidentally — in the course of flossing? Should one: (a) swallow them (as was the intention at the time); (b) having disengaged them from the floss (is there a special utensil for that or can one use tweezers, or fingers, or an old mascara brush?), consign them down the sink (that's not who I am or what defines me at this time); (c) collect them — this is really my point at this time, breaking my silence at this time — for starving people in Ethopia, who I endorse at this time; and if so, does one: (a) aggregate them into interesting shapes etc; (b) place them individually on blotting paper to dry; (c) sell them; (d) embrace some other way to share my stance at this time? By the way, does it matter that the meal can or can't be discerned from the flossed fragments? And should one treat baked goods differently at this time? Are they what they are? Yours, At This Time Caring and Deeply Concerned At This Time and Breaking My Silence At This Time And Raising My Voice and Sharing My Stance. ps: I am trisexual quadruple-reverse gender re-re-re-assignment and brain double reassignment. I shall not be renewing my subscription at this time: the people of Sudan need it at this time more than you do at this time, like.
Dear Caring etc.: You are a first-class ass (in the quadruped sense). Euphoric that you are now breaking your silence, raising your voice, sharing your stance and looking at this time to take your flossing to the next level at this time. Let me tell you something, Little Miss Mr Miss Mr Silence Breaker Stance Whatever. Concerning flossed food fragments, you ask a good question, and meritoriously. It is long overdue that people like you who really care address it. As you so vividly imply, there's a limit to what can be done culinarily with camel dung if you're all out of it. 'Focused Flossers Fighting Famine (At This Time)'! Look, millions of tons of viable, wholesome, nutritious food are indeed lost to African famine victims every evening by caring New Yorkers thoughtlessly flossing them down the sink or (in violation, it must be said, of all the rules of etiquette) swallowing them. Now then. Look, if we, as Caring People of the moral high ground, would only betake ourselves to further levels at this time and collect and consolidate those fragments and mould them into attractively shaped nuggets at this time, augmented by pouches and sachets of acceptable sauce, well just think of the hearty meals to be enjoyed throughout South Sudan at this time. And they'd do the same for us. I assume the NYT's board will support it, even Nossen 'Bodybag' McSloiklstein, and Rev. Chaps 'Holier Than Thou' O'Snoggers. Look, no, it doesn't matter to the recipients: they will or should love the fragments for what they are, not what they were. As they tuck in, they can particularly savor the original meals as they imagine them. Look, baked goods should not be made a special case of off of off of off of. ps: Look. Take your 57 cents and shove it.
Westerns and Toilets
Things that trouble me at this time about 1950s Westerns: no-one ever goes to the toilet, and no cowpuncher ever wears a floral-print cotton dress to the saloon. Nor does Randolph Scott or Joel McCrea. And who launders the barber's towels, especially the ones with the left-over shaving soap when the customer sheriff has had to cut short the shave? This brings me to American toilets. Seat too small (and often loose; rarely a lid). Bowl too small (and often loose). Aperture too small. Cistern too small. Flush handle too small. Flush pressure too low. It's a wonder anything gets done. The traveler to America is well advised to take his own plunger. (And in New York City, you'll need a strigil to scrape off the soap, the public water, at least in the hotels, being too soft.)
Classical Orchestral Renditions
Five things have contributed to the bastardisation of classical orchestral music:-
early recording techniques requiring volume; hence a tradition of excessively large orchestras playing excessively loudly. Ever thought what the 'solo' and 'tutti' score markings were intended to achieve? There is hardly a classical piece on earth that will not benefit from being played a tad quieter (more difficult)
early recording vectors requiring brevity; hence a tradition of playing pieces too fast, to squeeze them onto the shellac. Some pieces are still played too fast, and ruined. I think immediately of the second movement of Bruckner's 7th symphony, or the Barber Adagio for Strings. There is hardly a classical piece on earth that will not benefit from being played a tad slower (the opening of Beethoven 5th symphony is a completely different piece if played 2/3 slower; ditto tons of other pieces)
the conductor racket: it's impossible for a conductor to control an orchestra, and for a player to be controlled by a conductor, in full flight; but note the fraudulent misrepresentation of control, the illusion and delusion of control, and how the visuals appeal to the demented concertgoer (it should be illegal to fraudulently perform classic orchestral music in public)
the excitability and psychopathy of the 21st-century orchestral musician, especially the latest generation of rank-and-file string players: see the next item
the stipulations of large recording companies.
Have you thought about any of this? When did you last hear Beethoven's fourth piano concerto played properly? Only a certain phrasing makes the first movement make any sense, and I've never heard it. I've heard dozens of renditions of the opening, and not one established pianist plays it properly. (A certain Russian female pianist of the 1950s, I think, comes close to the required sf, which should be a surprise f CRASH — I've heard world-famous pianists play it p — and she's unknown.) Or the first movement of Mendelssohn's E minor violin concerto played slowly enough to reveal the hidden melody?
Dysplay in Classical Music Public Performance
Only second-rate and lesser players dysplay in public (and in recording studios too, presumably, these demented days). Disgraceful behavior. None of their idiotic nonsense, none of which is in the original score, would have been tolerated even twenty years ago. I should like to have seen even a flute player raise even an eyebrow in front of Toscanini or Beecham. Modern conductors tolerate it because they themselves are full of shit. I should like to see how this insane dysplaying works in an orchestra pit! I have no idea why players do it — it is of relatively recent origin and has particular geographical and cultural connections — or why audiences, especially with music not being a visual art, seem to like watching it (and why listeners are not repelled, as a normal person would have been from the Berlin Philharmonic during WW2, from audio recordings of known dysplayers). In both cases, the show is ridiculous, unedifying and detracting. It may be that, lost in euphoric delusions of his own merits, a player genuinely loses bowel and bladder control, totters, drools, and becomes a rabid dog, but undoubtedly 99.9999% of it is an act. If giants of comprehensively better ages of classical music — Lhevinne, Rubinstein, Rabin, Menuhin etc — did not feel when on stage the need to desport and diminish themselves like demented jackasses, their inferiors should hesitate to take their cue from each other (and shame on the higher grade of performer, music school, music teacher, orchestra manager, etc who tolerates and encourages it, including those pathological menaces, the competition and the master class). One is of course not obliged to expose oneself to such outrages by attending or watching a 21-century concert, but concerts used to be a respectable way to listen to good music and not be insulted from the platform. A rational music-lover rationally expecting a rationally behaving, rational, controlled and self-controlled orchestra is entitled to have one. As a matter of principle I wish to see that situation restored and that expectation respected. But see the next item for why we can now say 'Go to hell' to all human musicians — ditto conductors — and why the dysplay problem is now solved.
The Classical Orchestra, Conductor and Soloist Discarded, and Good Riddance
Now of course one doesn't have to worry. Whatever has turned classical music into an ordeal of playing and listening has just disappeared forever. Every classical score ever published been uploaded to Rudolpho. On the jukebox principle, Rudolpho will play for you in any configuration any piece in any style on any instrument(s) at any speed, pitch, volume, etc. You control all the settings for everything including dynamics, phrasing, timing, rubato, expression, intensity, vibrato, portamento, noise, scratches, dust, instruments generally and particularly (Rubinstein's nasal flute Steinway; Michael Rabin's Del Gesu…), the styles and sounds of particular orchestras (even the 1960s Philharmonia), conductors (the Toscanini sound, the Beecham sound, the Klemperer sound, the Stokowski sound), soloists (any soloist you've ever heard of starting with Glenn Gould, Rakhmaninoff, Ravel, Callas, di Stefano, Menuhin; how about a string section of Menuhins? a Mozart piano concerto accompanied by a choir of 1950s opera singers?), recording studios (even the DECCA sound). You can mark up the score exactly as you want it played (starting with rephrasing that damn Beethoven). With gesture recognition technology, a yellow screen of a virtual orchestra with virtual players (you can design them etc.), and one central omnipotent omniscient processor, you can conduct anything any way you like and have your precise conscious (and maybe, if cerebrally hooked up to Rudolpho, subconscious and or unconscious) intentions realised in real time (more than any conventional conductor will ever achieve). On the Music Minus One principle, you can have an orchestra accompany you — playing in your own or someone else's style, on any instrument of your choice — and intuit exactly what you want. In short, with Rudolpho it's good riddance to real orchestras, real conductors, real soloists and real instruments. If you must have visuals, you can program your group to flounce, wince, dip, twitch, bob, frown, sway, eyebrow-raise, lose bowel and bladder control, drool, foam at the mouth and get taken away in straitjackets. If you're having an off-day re your own playing, you can have a virtual soloist and program it with its own ethnicity, age, costume, dysplaying, style, etc. You can finally hear your choice of music exactly as you want it to be played — other than just in your head — with no errors, no compromise and no dishonesty from any half-wit conductor or soloist. What a relief to not have to deal with a dull-witted unsympathetic conductor with whom one is out of tune! To not have to interact, and so indirectly, with modern dysplaying rank-and-file jackasses (save a certain double-bassist in an unforgettable eye-to-eye exchange in the penultimate bar of the second movement of K.595, at the Kennedy Center one evening, but of course that was then). Now we're finally getting somewhere in classical music. (Now if there were only a way to quickly master how to play four-part fugues…)
A Man and His Money
Unless one is a robot, a financial indiscretion at least once a week is, to my mind, inevitable. (It's best to keep an appropriate distance from women, to avoid an altogether deeper dimension of foolishness.) I speak as someone who on occasions has run out of food and had no prospect of timeously turning a shilling. And also being, somewhat uncomprehendingly, in the converse position. A man easily parted with his money despite his most valliant, even desperate, exertions is a danger to himself and possibly to others; his financial ineptitude threatens his very existence, however competent he might be in other things. He had better entrust all but essential pocket change to an honest, competent, fully insured, whole-truth-disclosure-in-real-time-all-the-time, professional, bonded, something-to-lose top-rated financial adviser. I intend to look into this on this page.
Sounds Familiar
The main theme of How To Marry A Millionaire (1953) is substantially the same as Duck Soup (1933); and of Austin Powers, International Man of Mystery (1997) the same as Take The Money And Run (1969).
Cookery and Laundry
Using the dishwater to poach salmon is understood. Less familiar is cooking Beef Wellington in the washing machine (forcing it though the detergent dispenser, pastry first). It does come out perfect on 90° one-hour cotton cycle and then an 800rpm spin. No ironing. Next: juicing oranges using the cordless vacuum cleaner (and why carton orange juice tastes foul and looks like paint, and why life is not worth living without an air fryer, etc)
Casting, Mis-Casting
We are all familiar with catastrophic mis-casting. Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra in Guys and Dolls. Gene Kelly in American in Paris. Peter O'Toole in Lawrence of Arabia (see below), and of course Clark Gable in Gone With The Wind. Selznick's preferrred Rhett Butler was George Formby, not available for having taken the lead in a re-make (never finished) of Keep Your Seats when Ronald Colman had an unexepected scheduling conflict. The part of Rick in Casablanca, originally envisaged for conjoined twins, was first offered to Wilfred Bramble, who objected to having to work with Claude Rains.
When Travelling…
Which Elizabethan ball gown to wear when formally dining out on a submarine or in a Sherman tank? And what deportment to observe when travelling in a Victorian bustle in an aeroplane's sardine class (and how to get the trunk and the lady's maid into the overhead)? (Try treating Monday as beginning at say 10pm on Sunday. Then you ease into it instead of being hit with it on waking up.)
Dr Blossom-Snogger recalled
Until recently, I thought that I had everything a man could possibly need: a roof over my head; running water; writing implements; a few items of clothing, some decent reading material; and a toothbrush and paste. How misconceived. I realise, now, that i lack the one essential: an air fryer. See, it dehydrates! This leads me to consider other implements one does not realise (until too late, but which time one's life has been ruined) that one does not have. There is Dr Blossom-Snogger's Patent Noise Obturator, a heavily polluting diesel-powered machine, the smallest model being the size of a walk-in closet, the function of which is to make, by the guttering spluttering of its engine, a noise sufficient to cover up a guest's eructations at dinner parties. Each guest brings his own. A Victorian thing. The dining room is soon thick with blue-grey smoke, and most guests are unconscious from smoke inhalation, but at least no-one will have been heard to do anything improper. And the Wear-A-Cubicle shoulders-mounted portable inflatable carbon-unit wearable portable cubicle with integral seat. No sense leaving yours at the office. Simply go home, and return, wearing it. Of course after the crush of each commute, the subway car is littered with those stupid yellow things, tacks, photos, etc, but for sheer convenience…
Imposter Syndrome Exposed
There's no such thing as Oedipus Complex, or neurosis, or repressed memories, or hysteria. There's nothing in any of them. Freud made them up. For creativity and credibility, he had what it took: expenses, Viennese, cocaine, publications, followers, rivals, patients who could afford to be ill, a medical degree, a waistcoat, more cocaine, a bald head, a stinking cigar and a beard. More clever than clairvoyant, he lied, too, about being able to interpret dreams. Most of what he wrote was, and still is, nonsense. With that in mind…
I don't believe a word of it. I don't believe there's any such syndrome, ever has been, or ever will be. I think imposter syndrome — love the irony — is just another opportunistic facile invention — one of many — of cunning calculating stupid dishonest psychologists who have failed to scratch the surface of what (if anything relevant) is really going on in the patient's diminished head and who are themselves imposters (at least on this subject) and are now, having spent their grant money and published, irretrievably dug in, to reputation depth, to a fabricated fictitious condition they are compelled to maintain, sustain and elaborate. And the more idiot subjects they can dig up or rehearse, the more everyone benefits: the patient, the psychologist, the grant maker, the publisher, the bank… Hell, there's something for everyone in this racket. Someone ought to bust it.
I think we're looking at (among others), genuine imposter, fake imposter, real fake imposter, fake real imposter, fake imposter syndrome, fake imposter fake syndrome, real imposter, real imposter real syndrome, real imposter fake syndrome, fake real imposter syndrome, real fake imposter syndrome, fake-imposter fake-imposter-syndrome syndrome, real-imposter real-imposter-syndrome syndrome, fake-real-imposter real-fake-imposter-syndrome syndrome, real-fake-imposter fake-fake-imposter-syndrome syndrome, fake-real-fake-fake-real-fake imposter fake-real-real-fake-imposter-syndrome syndrome, and some very stupid, very incompetent, very dishonest psychologists out there who have difficulty earning an honest living and need to find some pretext on which to solicit grants (and what sane grant maker would seriously want to fund any of this misconceived, misleading, useless, pretentious, tendentious garbage anyway? Well, if you can make it look real and relevant…).
I say that imposter syndrome as conventionally understood does not exist on numerous levels. It does not exist, for example, because the self-professed genuine imposter knows that he's not a genuine imposter (in the relevant sense) in the first place and doesn't really apprehend ever being exposed as one (but I will certainly expose him as a genuine fake imposter). He knows that he's genuine in the relevant sense and can never be found out or exposed as an imposter in the relevant sense.
One view: what he is actually unconsciously, semi-consciously, proto-consciously, proto-semi-consciously or consciously contriving unwillingly and unwittingly, if something odd really is going on, is some form of ritualised self-abasement and submission, like a dog, that he can fine-tune as circumstances require. The front-office dynamic is that he wants his psychotic diffidence to be noticed, he wants to draw attention to his own stupidity and fake vulnerability, and to ingratiate himself with the hierarchy. (Interesting to note the effects of promotion on these determined losers.) Pretending to pretend to be someone he is or isn't is his nutty way of doing it. The back-office dynamic is that he is doing all this to satisfy and gratify his own stupidity, for his own demented reasons (unrequited recognition, self-degradation, dyscalibration, morbid diffidence, self-effacement, self-abnegation, etc.).
More likely: he is not at the mercy of his own stupidity at all but is really being quite cunning, rather stupidly. He is fully consciously aware that there can be no call to entertain the slightest genuine apprehension of ever being exposed, and is a comprehensive fake faking his imposterness and faking the apprehension of being found out (by whom, exactly?) (This phony-baloney contrived fake apprehension of being found out is the essence of his real mental illness.) He knows he is just pretending to feel that he is an imposter, he knows that he therefore has nothing to be apprehensive about on that score, and he knows he is acting and faking, manufacturing for display and attention, his apprehension. He is only pretending to be an imposter. He is only pretending to have this (highly convenient) technically named, clinically plausible, professionally recognised imposter syndrome (just like the lunatic who avers an Oedipus Complex). All very apparently scientific and official, and (if his discernible inner workings are to be given credence) he wants or appears to want a piece of it. And highly effective it is, too, especially if he is an interesting position of employment. Apprehension about his own qualifications and merits is the perfect thing to fake. It's easy, It's plausible, It's pathetic. All he is doing is messing everyone around (and alarming the few people who know what he's really up to). He resembles the imposter who energetically asserts to the police that he has committed a notorious crime.
Not that the world is not full of genuine imposters and opportunistic importunists. But the genuine imposter, knowing that he is a genuine imposter, will not feel that he is an imposter, nor allow himself to be made to feel as if he were an imposter, nor ever have the slightest unfounded apprehension that he will be found out and exposed. The genuine imposter will positively know that he is an imposter, and his apprehension that he will be found out and exposed — that in a well-ordered world his downfall is, in theory, only a matter of time — will always be all too genuine and well founded. These are material differences between the fake imposter craving attention and the genuine imposter largely seeking to avoid it. But the fake imposter is doing more than just multiply faking his multiple fakeness. The fake imposter, who is both genuine (aside from his pretensions to sanity) and certainly not a genuine imposter except in relation to imposter syndrome, goes out of his way to grandiosely fantasise about being found out for being something he knows he is obviously not. This is obviously dishonest. So far, everything is clear, n'est ce que ce que ce ne que pas, hein?
I think that people who claim to have imposter syndrome are (while they might indeed be faking other things, and might be stupid; they are certainly psychologically dysfunctional — inexplicably so — to the point of stupidity) all faking imposter syndrome, and are actually afflicted with (for example) type 6.3.2A distorted ego syndrome (Szrabe Mental Illness Classification System, a multi-dimensional analysis that takes into account all angles of a situation, including local culture, politics, intellectual sophistication and the stupidity and superficiality of psychologists, not just the sufferer's chosen presentation), a sadomasochistic dishonest narcissist impersonation racket to get attention, in league with dumb psychologists who haven't bothered to look into what's really going on with these over-stimulated, uncivilised, unstable nut jobs and have accepted their pathetic pleas of "It feels at this time, like sorta like, at this time, breaking my silence and sharing my stance at this time, sorta like, at this time, that like I'm an imposter like, at this time, like, sorta", and have reciprocally complicitly invented this disease to cover up the real mental illness for the victim and create a plausible myth for themselves and each other (rather like one of the grandest and most preposterous bare-faced plain-view criminal frauds and inventions of all time, that outrageous imposture on the wrong-minded monied middle classes, Oedipus Complex. To digress a little, Freud didn't even get the mythology right. The Oedipus of Aeschylus, Euripides, Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, etc. deliberately and with intention killed his father without on any level realising that fact, and deliberately and with intention married his mother without on any level realising who she was, and apparently wasn't gratified by any of it on any level except the masochistic. I don't know of any psychoanalyst who has bothered to mention even in passing these obvious points, or to point out that the entire syndrome — which started out as a practical joke that Sigmund dreamed up over a chocolate, iron filings and herring mousse one lunchtime at Chaim Chelminski's house, and kept him choking with hysterical laughter about it for hours — always has been and still is a dishonest invention to annoy rational people and make money from idiots). An American invention. Making it up, elaborating it, writing papers about it, are easier than really looking into it and really thinking about it. As with everything in life, faking it, especially for gothamites with cash, is easier than doing legitimate science.
Let's start with one obvious superficial defect in the superficial diagnosis. And this one gives credit (which is not due) for the illegitimacy of one possibly relevant external stimulus. Not one research paper on imposter syndrome that I've seen (some here) considers the source and quality of the distrusted, disdained yet (if we are to believe these contrary contradictory headcases) unconditionally accepted praise, or the intellectual mechanism underlying that distrust — the intellectual mechanism underlying that acceptance is the narcissism previously mentioned — or the mutually dependent relationship between the sufferer and the inferior idiots who flatter him, appoint him, hire him, pay him, sponsor him, protect him, etc. You see, this possible fake paid imposter (cf. genuine imposter, which does not exist) syndrome arises and occurs not spontaneously or idiopathically (other than spontaneous idiopathic masochism, which is probably different) but solely when the sufferer interacts with one or more idiots, in positions of confidence, influence or advantage, idiotically loose with their idiotic encomia, from which the idiots, sparing in their criticism out of the same self-interest, benefit by reflection and extension. Fake imposter syndrome is a feature specifically of environments in which inferiors preside over their intellectual superiors. By the way, the fake imposter has no problem spending her salary, putting his name to papers, writing books, speaking at conferences, interacting in the front office, billing customers etc. So if the fake imposter really does have imposter syndrome, all this would be beyond subjectively dishonest. So the fake imposter claiming dishonestly to have imposter syndrome (which doesn't exist) is also comprehensively lying in his interactions in the real world. It would be easy to make a real criminal case out of some of this.
Though weak, gauche, cowardly, dependent and infantile, the victim does have a vestigial, prodigal critical faculty (of which he is unaware and that he does not understand) and fairly rejects (at the same time as he accepts) the idiot's praise as irrational, unjustified and unsustainable (while considering that not all praise, even from an idiot, is mere flattery), and — here's the bizarre incongruous pathology — then irrationally extrapolates the known idiot's idiocy to justified praise (which he accepts) from known sensible sources and to his own rational assessment (which he accepts) of his own merits. Because of that one unconsciously assessed and rejected (and accepted) idiot's vacuous superficiality and those various perverted intellectual pathways, and some internal mental nonsense about sympathetic association, the victim consciously rejects (and accepts) all objective credible sustainable justified indicators and indications of self-worth. Fake imposter syndrome — of course I'm not speaking of people who really are genuine imposters, or even genuine fake genuine imposters — is triggered and sustained by this dynamic victim-idiot reciprocal sado-masochistic interaction. It synthesises the sadist idiot's credibility and the callow, naïve, weak, impressionable, vulnerable, praise-starved victim's credulity and vanity.
These toxic interactions particularly occur in communities of excitable, unstable, conventional, conformist, over-socialised, over-sensitive, hollow, emotionally dysfunctional, stupid individuals (now where am I talking about, do you think?). Cure: the sufferer, who is actually enjoying every minute of her suffering and eventually packs in the day job for other reasons she prefers to disguise as mental breakdown but is probably a deficiency of pain, must first be forced to just calm the *** down and shut the **** up, because absolutely no-one could care less. If there really is an intractable imbecility, the sufferer must be forced — this approach might appeal to a rationalist — to consciously and vociferously discriminate consciously, shrewdly, astutely, correctly and overtly between the sycophancy of idiots and the praise of sensible people. That ought to put everyone in his place. Not one published psychologist (to my knowledge) has considered these obvious points, including the infiltration in the first place of inappropriately vocal idiots — the real genuine imposters — into positions of authority and the victim's and the psychologist's deficiencies of honesty and integrity.
And the real mental illness you've been waiting for? Why, McTwernski-Gernski Syndrome Complex (after Sir Cupid McTwernski-Gernski (1739-1955), the famous whatever). I should know. I've just made it up. Betraying its Freudian roots, it involves you half-wittingly killing your second cousin's best friend's milkman's wife's sister's uncle and unknowingly having illicit relations with three barnyard animals of your choice. It is of course incurable except by me. That'll be $100. Until next week…
Woody Allen and The Sandwich
It has long troubled me that, in writing otherwise thoughtfully about the sandwich, Woody Allen omits mention of two elements: (1) the symmetry of the two integuments, without which a sandwich is technically something else; and (2) the manual pressure required, whether or not the sandwich be wrapped, to hold the thing together, especially if we have, say, salt beef on rye from any self-respecting New York delicatessen. (The brightest among us have failed to devise, beyond the simple embossed leather sandwich sleeve, a compact diesel-powered press and feeder machine that holds the thing together while advancing it by degrees into one's open mouth: very necessary in an increasingly moronic world, would you not say?) By extension, we appear to have lost the primal ability to disconnect the lower jaw to accommodate even the lowliest cheeseburger. Snakes do it. Presumably humans must at one point have been able to do it — a now lost pterygoid-masseter-temporalis-labii etc process — in order to swallow the cheeseburger whole, without chewing. I am reminded… [Ed.: What is this rubbish?]
The Leisure Of An Egyptian Official, Edward Cecil (Hodder and Stoughton, 1921; available gratis at archive.org; there are some modern reprints). This is English wit of high order. It will escape the generality of Americans, who are not esteemed — hell, they're not even known — for their literacy, coherence, articulateness, wit or for their comprehension of this level of English writing. (They may think they are, but that's a different issue. I cannot but mention one outstanding piece of American talentless witlessness: flat, talentless, illiterate, expressionless voiceovers, an established part of Americana. I've never heard a decent voiceover in any American documentary, including Michael Moore. And in movies? Ever heard John Steinbeck, of all people, read O. Henry in O. Henry's Full House (1952)? I rest my case.) Cecil's collected accounts of the Suez Canal explosion; the committee meeting; his manservant Suleiman the Untruthful; the train incident on the way to Port Said ('Do not alarm the passengers…'), and other vignettes, are masterfully done. There are numerous evocative character studies (of the English, Mrs Fitz, Mrs Despard, etc.), always in good humor. (But on that point I wonder how, if he had had the misfortune to encounter one in the wild, he would have despatched today's late-middle-aged tenth-rate insufferable English female of a certain type.) Humor suffuses every line. Much is imparted by example about constructing a civilised, atmospheric English sentence to savor. I should be fascinated to know whether he drafted extensively or, as one seems to sense, wrote spontaneously without revision, raconteur style. This book does what a good book should: it promotes and encourages reflection, imagination and self-improvement. And it stands the test of good writing by richly repaying indefinite re-reading.
Le Cousin Pons, Honoré Balzac (1847; various translations from French into English are available for free at archive.org; I have made no attempt to compare any of them with the original or with each other; perhaps you would like to do that). This is high tragedy in a small compass (making shortly many of the same points laborioucised by Dickens in Bleak House, 1852-3). What a miserable man must have been Pons, and Schmucke. If you are interested in inheritance crime, Pons has a number of features and situations, vividly conveyed (curiously full of close coincidences to some of my own cases): the dishonest barrister; the pathologically rapacious perfidious criminal acquaintances; Pons' valuable art collection(!); Pons' fateful bequest to Schmucke; a succession of wills; morbidly unsatisfactory law; the disquieting iniquitous dénounement.
A Code of the Law of Actionable Defamation [etc], George Spencer Bower (Butterworth, 1923; apparently available gratis online, if you can face it). I maintain, as (I maintain) would anyone who has given it serious thought, that law, like human and animal anatomy and physiology, should be taught in elementary school. These subjects could and would then not become the fiefdom of mystics — the intellectual direct descendants, in an unbroken line of succession, of medieval clergy — whose vocation is to turn us into subservient, craven, enthralled, gibbering, tongue-tied, moronic jackasses.
Spencer Bower was an oracle because, like his works on actionable non-disclosure and actionable misrepresentation, he dissects and re-states the subject rather than — cf. a typical textbook hack — regurgitates it: the difference between an interesting thinking man in control of his subject and, on the other hand, a nothing. This book is a classic exposition still serviceable at the highest levels and full of nuggets. When I can be bothered to study it, I look forward to reading his discussion of how to deal in defamation court with allegedly defamatory assertions of criminality (is there a criminal trial within the defamation trial, or what?). Everyone who can string a sentence together should have a working knowledge of the principles of tort-defamation. Its antiquity notwithstanding, this book provides it.
the gene therapy plan – Taking Control of Your Genetic Destiny with Diet and Lifestyle, Mitchell L. Gaynor MD (Viking, 2015). This evolution-centric book being full of well-reasoned technical thoughtful specific bases (including fun recipes) for rational life-affirming, life-enhancing optimism, I am at a loss to know why its author killed himself, aged 59, in the year of publication. It tends to undermine his irrefutable theses. Who could have saved him? Who tried?
The first of two Parts comprises six chapters, 'The Basic Plan' followed by five medical conditions: obesity, heart disease, cancer, diabetes and ageing ('aging'). The basic plan (simplified) prescribes a full-frontal attack on a suicidal diet of the wrong kind of cabohydrates and the wrong kind of fats; a healthy diet of natural fresh food; supplements of a very wide variety, many from natural sources; clean air; relaxation; breathing; and — that intensely annoying word — exercise ("If you don't drink water, you die pretty quickly (around a week). if you don't exercise, you die more slowly, but you're still dying."). The particulars are enlivened by clear, vigorous argument.
This book might be (ironically) a life-saver, if only by inspiring a more thoughtful approach to how and why we expose ourselves and each other to things that kill us.
The English Amongst The Persians During The Qajar Period 1787-1921, Denis Wright (Heinemann, 1977). This book, the attraction of which, as any book, is initially in its feel, its appearance, is designed and typeset execrably. Perhaps a misguided attempt to save paper. Most disagreeable and inconvenient to the reader, it must have been disappointing to the author to have had his manuscript so comprehensively pissed on by the publisher at crucial stages of production. I wonder what went so badly wrong. Remind me to avoid this publisher re any of my books.
Once your eyes have adjusted to the layout and type — which make it difficult for you to return to it and almost impossible to dip into it — you have a most entertaining, enlightening, educating work, notable for its erudition (the Bodleian has his papers, in eleven languages), which is of course understated (an old and probably obsolete English approach alien to Americans). The footnotes are particularly suggestive of the author's range.
A retired Foreign Office diplomat of accomplishment who fitted the mould (as an audio interviewee on official matters, parochially, incongruously pusillanimously pompous — characteristic of the English, however well-travelled, of a certain vintage of a certain background at a certain level; confusingly severe and self-effacing), Wright (1911-2005) draws out three particuarly interesting points: the Shah's habit of lucratively granting extensive commercial concessions to intrepid, venturesome (and in some cases naturalised) British; the resulting displeasure of the Russians, always meddling; and the eventual discovery, in Masjid-e-Suleiman in May 1908, of oil: 'This discovery marked a turning point in Persian history as well as the beginning of the Persian, and indeed the Middle Eastern, oil industry.'
If your interest in Persia, its geo-petro-politics and other curiosities is to be brought up to date to say, 1976 by an empirical expert rather than a researcher, this is the one.
Plain Tales From The Raj, Charles Allen (Abacus, 2015). Just as well I haven't heard the associated radio show, with those sickening English fake strangulated accents. Much better to just read it. If one knows the English types, this book is delightful. Otherwise it is nauseating. It makes some interesting points. India might well have long languished in the Stone Age — at any rate, would have known the internal combustion engine much later — but for the British. Many British civil servants in India were fond of the country and its people (as Cecil loved Egypt). Some stayed protractedly, foregoing leave, wives, children, temperate climate, the unique color of English green grass, the peculiar smells of the English countryside, English intellectual and social stagnation, the criminally bad English education system and the disgusting and insalubrious English diet. The India Office tactfully (especially after 1857) housed the military out of sight of and bounds to almost all the civil population. Per the Indian Civil Service, the civilian Imperial presence was not unobtrusive, including in the nominally independent princely states. Hierarchy and snobbery dominated the life of Anglo-Indians (an annoying, multiply ambiguous term); club committees were highly discriminating, drawing adverse distinctions even in relation to respectable Englishmen in trade. Everywhere, Delhi to Shimla, Shimla to Delhi, were plant pots, chintz, elephants to ride, tigers to shoot (Allen sensibly plays this down), and extreme social distress to patronise and do little or nothing about. Much is implied about British general and technical proficiency in a number of Asiatic tongues, intriguingly for a cosmopolitan race that when in England still refrain from speaking a word of a foreign language and one supposes is still viscerally xenophobic. This engrossing book is the domestic end of how a few, largely sensible emissaries of a country smaller than Oregon held and dominated a country more than ten times larger and with an infinitely larger, impressionable servile population. Mercifully short, well edited, judiciously constructed, its first-hand reminiscences convincingly and without excessive sentimentality conjure a microcosm of Imperialist loners, misfits, eccentric conformists and do-gooders. They convey a little of how Imperial India worked and seem to explain how, for all of the awe-inspiring Viceroy and loyal British-officered Indian Army, the British managed to make it out in 1947 without being massacred to a man.
Winston Churchill — An Informal Biography of A Great Man, Robert Lewis Taylor (Cardinal, 1952). The reader does not know, and neither the author nor the publisher, nor any reviewer, deigns to tell him, exactly with what he is dealing. Exactly what the hell is this book? It is obviously not sustainable biography (for reasons discussed below). Is it, then, fictionalised biography or a misguided attempt biography improperly presented so as to render it unreadable? Avoid it unless your wish is to read perforce, unwillingly, a fictionalised biography on the lines of Irving Stone's (who would have done a better and more honest job). For its unprofessionalism, this book is impossible to read as true history or true, investigative biography. There is much vacuous claptrap about 'wonderful', 'historic', etc., and dangerously misleading, unsupported flattery about how the author interviewed lots of people (no evidence is provided of even one conversation with even one person). Even the International Churchill Society accepts this book without the least procedural or substantive criticism. Here's the problem. It is impossible to trust any statement anywhere in this book about anything because the author gives no source. Not one source. Only the most simple-minded untrained superficial unlettered illiteratus insensitive jackass idiot will accept or consume this book as technical biography and permit its infiltration onto his bookshelf. It is particularly untrustworthy in every particular — let us take the violin anecdotes as an instance — because the author also wrote fiction. To move from frank fiction to professedly rigorous technical biography (Stone spent years reseaching the subjects of his fictionalised biographies), requiring particular intellectual and procedural processes and disciplines, is a hard habit to break: the unexplained, inexplicable, striking, annoying and fundamentally fatal absence of footnotes, endnotes, acknowledgments, bibliography etc., — not even a preface or introduction — and the curious absence (so far as I can presently tell) of a single review of this book by a demonstrable Churchill specialist, do not bespeak the author's success — any self-respecting historian would reject even the germ of an idea of ever publishing a version of his scholarly work emasculated of the very data elemental to its credibility, inevitably rendering it technically useless — but rather provoke unease, found profound unease, and justify the decision to throw this travesty of a book, this disturbing, unsettling failure of a book, straight into the trash, since not one statement anywhere in it can properly, rationally, responsibly be accepted, or should be, as factual and the reader is deliberately left not knowing exactly what he is dealing with or where he stands. If the writer had even one source for even one statement, why not cite it? A discreditable, doomed work of unprofessional wasted authorship, for it is neither one thing nor the other. A reprehensible byproduct of a dysfunctional venal publisher.
Lawrence of Arabia (Columbia, 1962). Jack Hawkins' profile is uncannily close to Augustus John's sketch of Allenby. Bad points: (1) Brighton's clapping; (2) O'Toole's "You really don't know?" outrageous pointless overacting; (3) the blood, an incredible lapse of judgment from an obsessional director and a dismissable offense by the color consultant; (4) 'Johnny Turk': I doubt T.E. would have ever said this: too English provincial, and the Turk was not close to being a 'johnny' in any relevant sense; (5) casting a six-foot-something to play a five-foot-something. Norman Wisdom would have correctly conveyed T.E.'s stature; (6) Antony Quinn's preposterous, sometimes badly fitting nose; (7) not one scene in which T.E. is shown reading a book (apparently he was never without a book); (8) 'Pound them Charlie, pound them'. The Allenby character clearly refers to 'this Arab army on the right'. The next apparent reference is 'god help the men who lay under that'. We are told that the Turks are under that, not the Arabs; no indication that Arabs were ever pounded by the British; (9) the flippant, jarring part of Maurice Jarre's score; (10) the pointless, incongruous, obscure, embarrassingly badly done 'I killed a man … I enjoyed it' scene. T.E. must have advertently killed thousands of men, presumably with some degree of satisfaction; (11) Florence of Arabia's (Noël Coward) immaculate hair.
Angels One Five (ABPC, 1952). A superb tragic, understated, finely observed depiction of certain magnificent upper-middle-class English public-school types (not always sympathetic) daily risking their lives and hoping to survive. Their insouciance, if that is what it was, is beyond comprehension. You have to know the milieu to 'get' it (though John Gregson's character is not familiar to me): apparently over the head of the New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther (his crass April 30, 1954 review). Dulcie Gray's acting is a mistresspiece of subtlety, Veronica Hurst's of English emotional repression; Jack Hawkins and Michael Denison are perfect; Gordon Bell is beyond delightful. Some of the actors (Cyril Raymond, Ronald Adam) were re-enacting their own war (In WW2 Humphrey Lestocq air-towed targets, which surely required some nerve). Every time I watch it, a new impression, a deeper appreciation. One wonders how G-C Small's valediction to "Never get into a kite until you're sure you can out" Septic would have been — and it must have happened — in real life ('Cheerio old boy, best of luck, tally-ho'?). By a long way one of my favorite films.
Recent discoveries, old favorites: Chain Lightning (1950); Edison, The Man (1940); Boom Town (1940); The Glass Harmonica (1968). This streaming site is, for my money, by far the best free movie streaming service (but tiresome search facility): https://www.lookmovie2.to/movies. This is an interesting list: https://www.openculture.com/freemoviesonline. This is a nice idea: https://bnwmovies.com. This site has some interesting films: https://rarefilmm.com. This old favorite there, L'invitation, is a charming sad film (definitely not a comedy) with an agreeable soundtrack. And go watch Il Postino lest this immortal film be forgotten. And Latcho Drom. The opening of Il Postino reminds me of a good practical joke which I might share with you some other time.