The twin secrets of dropping the pounds turn out to be:
(1) Eat slowly and little, and
(2) Be too bankrupt to buy enormous amounts of chocolate to cheer yourself up for being fat and slobby.
The situation wouldn't be complete without irony, so here's three pieces:
(1) I (re)met CW when I was at my heaviest and least confident. Last night there was a flurry of text messages ending with him sending "Love you". I'll wait till he says it in person and sober till I believe it, but things seem to be going pretty well for a couple who often don't see each other for weeks.
(2) He's somewhat underweight, and rather fancied by a lot of people. Roxanne actually thought I'd hired a rent boy when I introduced him (:-S)!. But he's convinced he's fat and unattractive.
(3) If I get one of the jobs I'm applying for, there'll be money for chocolate again.
I'm reading American Psycho. I'm also transcribing an interview on marxist philosophy of art for publication. One is intentionally turgid, surreal and mindbogglingly banal, and the other...isn't.
Here's an excerpt from each. See which one make you want to bang your head against a brick wall first.
...Whitney Houston [the album] (Arista) is one of the warmest, most complex and althogether satisfying rhythm and blues records of the decade and Whitney herself has a voice that defies belief. From the elegant, beautiful photo of her on the cover of the album (in a gown by Giovanni De Maura) and it's fairly sexy counterpart on the back (in a bathing suit by Norma Kamali) one knows this isn't going to be a blandly professional affair; the record is smooth but intense and Whitney's voice leaps across so many boundaries and is so versitile (though she's mainly a jazz singer) that it's hard to take in the album on a first listening. But you won't want to. You'll want to savor it over many.
(American Psycho, by Bret Easton Elis, p243)
I agree of course that art plays no major direct role in revolutionary change, cirtainly not the visual arts. There may be cases where cirtain kind of literature in the broad sense and perhaps theatre do that but I dont think that one can imagine the visual arts, apart maybe for cartooning, as real catalyists of revolutionary change in any significant way. I think the short answer to your question is that marxism is by necessity, by defintion a totalising system. I dont mean that marxism should pretend to be a theory of everything in the way that it sometimes appears to be in its 2nd and 3rd international formations, But I do think that without a skeptical version of the category of totality it isn't really marxism.
(Andrew Hemmingway in interview, July 2006)
What makes me want to bang my head against a brick wall is the image of anyone in white lycra shorts.
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