Well, there goes Oscar Wilde. There go Jane Bowles and Jean Rhys. There go Verlaine and Rimbaud, Dylan Thomas, Jack Kerouac, Colette, Percy and Mary Shelley, John Ashbery and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. There goes Norman Mailer and there, in spades, go William S. Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson. Add your own. It's a long list, as long as a piece of string.
(There, it might even be argued, goes Virginia Woolf, for here she is, fooling His Majesty's Navy. That's her on the left-hand end: click on the photo to enlarge, or, as we say in the blogosphere, embiggen. Has anyone ever done a proper academic feminist/postcolonial analysis of this affair, against the background of British/African relations c. 1910? I think there's a thesis in it.)
Gosh, someone should write a thesis on VW's costumes, full stop. I read somewhere that she & Leonard once dressed as bookshelves, she as Fiction, he as Non-Fiction. I'm planning to copy that whenever someone I know has a costume party (might well be me, I'm sick of waiting).
ReplyDeleteIndeed. Or VW's interest in cross-dressing and transsexuality/sm, culminating in Orlando.
ReplyDeleteWhen does the compulsory drug screening commence?
ReplyDeleteI know office workers who are expected to piss in a bottle on demand: should literary types be exempt?
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'I know office workers who are expected to piss in a bottle on demand'
ReplyDeleteWell that is too bizarre for you to be making it up. Jesus.
I think literary types should indeed be exempt. Bad behaviour is the Rice Bubbles in the chocolate crackles of literature.
Same office workers are also being trained in how to walk up stairs... Major corporation, mining sector.
ReplyDeleteIf you accept money from a corporation, you are not merely selling your time & expertise. They also expect to own your body and your personality.
Chocolate crackles; their days are numbered.
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Anonymous, I used to work for a major corporation in the oil and gas sector. I never had to piss in a bottle, but people I know who still work there get randomly tested from time to time ...
ReplyDeleteDI(nr), I can understand why companies would want to test people doing dangerous things like working on oil rigs in remote locations.
ReplyDeleteBut the extension of testing to computer-bound office workers is so petty & irrelevant that it must be more about power than safety, surely.
I suspect someone has realised that OH&S requirements intended to protect employees can equally be used to subjugate.
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