Category: ideas

“It turns out that our usual measures of intelligence – particularly IQ – have very little to do with the kind of irrational, illogical behaviours that so enraged Flaubert,” who spent his final years compiling an encyclopedia of stupidity.

In recent decades, Douglas says, everyday technologies have forced us into a discombobulated state of constant alert. Our phones beep around the clock with news of emails, tweets and text messages. And entertainment networks have largely abandoned long-form narratives in favour of the strobe-like intensity of reality television.”

With the help of Rosalind Russell as Auntie Mame, J. Bryan Lowder tries to clear up the confusion, which he traces to Susan Sontag.

“[Roland] Barthes, the French writer, philosopher, and academic best known for his work in semiotics, turns out to be the most advanced – or, more appropriately, nuanced – analyst of camp who has ever lived, at least if you read him my way.”

“Word aversion is marked by strong reactions triggered by the sound, sight, and sometimes even the thought of certain words … ‘Not to the things that they refer to, but to the word itself. The feelings involved seem to be something like disgust’.”

“[The] whole project of the assimilation-directed gay civil rights movement of the past few decades is largely predicated on the suppression of queer quirks like camp. By that logic, old, mildewy camp should have burned off the moment the closet door swung open; yet, curiously, we’re still wading through its seductive musk 40 years later.”

“Road traffic has killed more people than homicide, but then again, this was the century of the car. Less difficult to believe? The fact that the cigarettes (often distributed to soldiers over a century of conflict, ironically) have killed nearly as many people as the wars themselves.”

“Shakespeare academics have until now had their heads in the sand, hoping the doubts were ludicrous enough to fizzle out. However, they have been alarmed by the spread of authorship challenges in universities on both sides of the Atlantic.”

“The boomers have turned out to be like cockroaches surviving all sorts of cultural catastrophes and even their own apparently allotted life span.”