Various Services Recently Noted

I've forgotten why, but it's traditional here for me to make note when anyone blogs about shoes. Ask Ma Kettle or Anonydoc, they used to hijack my comment-section with their discussions on fashion, then I threw in the pail. So here is one from Sondra.

Also, I want to share some enjoyably cruel lit-crit from Dalrymple. It's via Kurp, who writes:

"In the early nineteen-seventies young women who dabbled in the counterculture from a hygienic distance kept a copy of The Prophet, by Kahlil Gibran, on their nightstands. That era coincided with my college years, and I can’t recall ever seeing a man in possession of Gibran’s soporific little volume, and I don’t remember ever seeing a woman actually read Gibran. Owning it, keeping it close, was enough. If they fancied themselves bookish, some of these same women filled out their one-shelf library with Richard Brautigan, Hermann Hesse and Vonnegut. Pitiful stuff."

So here is the "hatchet job". The good doctor quotes these lines

"Dip your oar, my beloved,
And let me touch my strings."

And writes, "It is impossible to plumb the shallows of this."

But then, seriously:

"He (Gibran) expresses very clearly the idea that moral authority belongs to children and not to adults: “You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.” The cultural results of such advice, when it has been taken seriously, are all around us for us to see, but since it is easier for adolescents to stamp themselves on a culture than for children to do so, the resultant culture is adolescent rather than childish in the strict sense. In reading The Prophet we begin to see why so tedious and unimaginative a writer as Gibran should have appealed so strongly to the counterculturals."

(My mother observes of the '60s and '70s: 'All of a sudden the grown-ups wanted to be like the kids! As if they could have the answers.')

Later he compares Gibran to Pol Pot, for writing:

"When in the market place.
… suffer not the barren-handed to take part in your
transactions, who would sell your words for your labour.
To such men you should say:
“Come with us into the field.
For the land shall be bountiful to you even as to us.” "

It's not simply bookstore snobbery (his books being so ubiquitous), I post this link; nor vindication for the number of times I've had to pretend interest in Gibran while skirt-chasing (getting lost and never bothering to pick up the trail again).

The prophet was published in 1923. Maybe this is when we started going bo-ho, with all the cock-eyed moralism that was amoral and even immoral. Idealism with a childish "I": it's something to be truly feared.