Details on the audio! Summary and photos below.

The Billionaires’ Vagina Club, reported by Melanie Thernstrom at the New Yorker

• Desperate Billionaire Cunts and their Concierge Quacks - Just Nationalize Estrogen, Already

AOC Freezes Eggs - PBS story

• Times lists “Presidents who had babies” while in office, as if AOC should follow their example. Here’s how many Presidents had babies: ZERO. Where do these people get off? Don’t tell me

• I am running for president on The Frozen Eggs for Every Puberty-Struck Girl Manifesto.

The Surrendered Woman

• Lucky you, if you haven’t read about the Bestselling Grift on how to throw in the vaginal towel and submit

• Times reporter Vivian Yee interviews the connivingly profitable Laura Doyle

  

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We Used To Have Healthy Vulva Discourse!

I‘m a devotée pf artist Tee Corinne’s 1975 Cunt Coloring Book.

It makes me happy to think of the women who posed for it, and the legend was born. Thousands have been cherished and colored-in over the years, and the consciousness it engendered — that vulvas are as unique as faces and fingerprints, has never been equalled.

Please do keep your copy next to your Bible, it’s still in print. Share one with the younger generations. If you ever want to send me a photo of one of your “colored-in” pages, I’d treasure it.

Let’s take a look at some of Tee and Honey Lee Cottrell’s pioneering work on women’s vulvas— where would we be without them? They produced all this work when they were together, 1974-1975. Quite a revolution.

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Read Part 1, here.

I’m part of a 12-step group you may not have heard of. Yes, it’s adjacent to Al-Anon, but with its own special “qualifier.” We have all loved and lost with Professor Paglia. We thought we could handle it— we couldn’t.

I won’t hide the fact anymore that Camille ripped me to shreds in blistering sheafs of stationery. She broke the fountain pen, from the appearance of the splotches.

And I replied to her with abject kindness. I was raised that way!

“But what went wrong?” you ask.

I was flattered by her passion at first; like so many. I couldn’t imagine why she spent her precious time reducing me to a loathsome little worm.

In recovery, I realize I am common. My plight is banal. So many have received hate mail from CP, and then tried to make up in vain.

Our first step: to admit we are powerless over Camille.

I look forward to attend “Camille Anonymous” meetings with her ex-car mechanics, her ex-hairdressers, her ex-lovers, and of course her chain of intellectual nemeses. Come out, come out, wherever you are.

I’ll get up from my folding chair and tell the truth: I couldn’t stop reading Camille — not only her books, but her media blasts, her satiric retorts to everything from Monday night football to kiddie porn. Her homages to Greta Garbo and Princess Diana. She could deconstruct celebrity and perversion like no one else.

My friends tried to warn me; they said, “Camille Paglia is not a laugh. She is not a art wit. She is a tool of the right wing.”

“Hey, you are dead wrong.” I told them. “Camille is not a tool— she is a weather phenomenon.”

If you think Ted Cruz calls up Hurricane Camille for strategy sessions, you’ve got another thing coming. Monkey wrench, maybe; tool, never.

When I first met Camille, she was an unknown. She came to a reading of my book Susie Sexpert’s Lesbian Sex World, a couple months after she released her own Sexual Personae. She popped up during my lecture like a jack-in-the-box, saying she was my “only friend in academia” and laying into the fragile Institution of liberal humanities, like she was punching the Pillsbury dough‑boy right in the kazoo.

Her ferociousness took me aback. Of course I’ve had my own battles with a certain Prime of Miss Jean Brodie atmosphere that turns undergraduates into soldiers against whatever they think constitutes “vice.”

But I’ve also made allies on campus who are sexually adventurous and thoughtful. There’s lots of us. I wondered how Camille could imagine she was the only one.

I interviewed Camille a year after we met, in 1991, in a two-hour phone call. I was surprised to learn that she was willing to discuss how her theories about sex intersected with her own sex life. She was new to media interviews, and she opened up.

Sometimes she’d hold up a fig leaf of privacy to my outrageous questions. But it was a great improvement over the occasion I asked an elder Susan Sontag, still in the closet, what she thought of lesbian-made erotic works. Sontag turned her head away like someone had taken a dump on the carpet.

Camille, on the other hand, was candid about her life and childhood. She saw herself as unique at nine years old, as she is today.

She admitted she exaggerates to make her points; she thinks of it as guerrilla word-fare. I understood her hyperbole, it was so GAY. Camp.

Camille’s critics imagined she would pass by a woman getting raped on the street and only sneer, because she’s said publicly women need to stop being such . . . “victims.”

But that’s not her truer story. Paglia is the type who would fight a man twice her size (and she did!) if he was even condescending to a woman, let alone assaulting her. She is chivalrous, and hates a bully.

Yet she is a bully.

She says outrageous things you can poke holes in, and she dares you to start poking back. Right and Fight Makes Might in Camille’s battles for justice, and no one can outdo her rapid fire authority.

I had approached our ‘91 interview with deference. She was older than me. She reminds me of people I’ve loved. I laughed at her wild swings, and somehow that was the grease.

But everyone gets over-sensitive sometimes, and Camille finally punched my clock.

In 1995, well into her fame, Paglia began an essay in Playboy with a boast: “I am a pornographer.”

“You are not!” I yelled in my bed, where I ordinarily loved to feast on Camille editorials.“What do you know about being persecuted for sex?”

Whatever criticism gets leveled at Camille, her snubs from academia and New York, she never went to jail for dissing Susan Faludi. No one tried to kill her.

Furthermore, no one called her a slut. She was a woman who kept her clothes on, this country’s criterion for virtue. She is a lifelong academic, not an activist or a “purveyor of obscene material.” Her risks were different.

I don’t know why, in that moment, I got irate at Camille her putting on the cloak of porn martyrdom. Finally, I was offended! It could have happened a million times before.

Many Camille-aholics say this was the first step toward recovery. In my case it only upped the ante.

I wanted to show Camille the other side of lesbian life and women’s bohemia, to pierce her lonely tower. I wanted to see the narcissistic mask drop. For all Paglia’s education, she seemed isolated to me.

Thus, in 1992, when it was announced Paglia was coming to San Francisco to lecture at the Herbst Theatre, I faxed her a note suggesting we paint the town red.

Never heard from her.

Meanwhile, I was invited by the Herbst Theater showrunner to interview Paglia on stage. I thought that would be fun. I wanted to show slides of classical art and contemporary porn/erotica to elicit her stream of consciousness reactions. I love hearing her take on sexual representation. We’d talked about it before.

Well, things did not turn out that way.

Camille never talked to me. Various intermediaries did; they said that Camille was doing her act solo, and I could introduce her if I liked, two minutes. It was all very officious.

I didn’t appreciate the string of middlemen. Why couldn’t she talk to me herself? That ticked me off. Camille was not making her customary direct hit. Fame had changed her, what else is new?

After her successful show, reporters swarmed the auditorium, hoping to get an outraged feminist reaction, or an outraged something. I pulled a Lloyd Bentsen with a microphone’d journalist, saying, “Camille, you’re no pornographer.”

I guess she read her clippings.

Two months after Paglia’s lecture, I was in bed with a bout of grave pneumonia. An envelope from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia arrived. It was from Camille.

It was the meanest thing ever addressed to me in my life.

She was furious that I had not introduced her at the Herbst. How dare I say she had not “paid the price of her beliefs”?

“I have been unemployed,” she retorted, “unpublished, kicked out of one job, insulted to my face.”

She called me a diva, a naïf, solipsistic. “Wake up to reality,” she repeated. “Establishment feminism has destroyed women’s education. Don’t you see the destructiveness of the date-rape hysteria? I’ve taken more abuse on that alone than you ever have— hostility and defamation from Alaska to Miami . . . You lost big by your behavior toward me this trip.”

I wondered what my punishment might be, and she delivered it, in an inky postscript:

“I had been speaking positively about your new book — all this is now over.

“You have shown your true colors.”

Yikes! If I hadn’t gotten my next cortisone shot in the minutes following her letter’s revelations, I might’ve dropped on the spot.

Had I finally reached my bottom, was I willing to say no to the ridiculous?

Not yet.

I spent the next day writing Camille, saying I wished she had spent a moment talking to me in person so things hadn’t gotten ugly. I didn’t belittle the risks she’d taken with her career. I said I’d like to introduce her to a few people who might surprise her. Who’d fought the law. I told her not to believe everything she read in the paper.

I wrote, “I am not your enemy.”

I hoped that this approach demonstrated turning the other cheek, rather than exhibiting my codependency. How could she go from being my “only friend in academia” to my apoplectic adversary?

The last shoe dropped the day after Christmas. I got another envelope from the Philadelphia University of the Arts — this time, a big folder. Inside was my unopened letter, and the following message on letterhead:

“Due to the overwhelming volume of international mail, Professor Paglia cannot accept unsolicited packages, manuscripts or gifts. Nor does she have time to read or review poems, articles, essays, theses, books, videotapes, slides, or art works. Packages are opened by staff and their contents discarded, unless return postage has been enclosed.”

My goodness.

I’ve now made up my own form letter, which simply states, “Susie Bright does not accept unsolicited hate mail.”

I’ve laid my confession bare, and you can see how old habits die hard. I’ve made amends to friends and family. The spotlight moved on. I’ve come to believe that the higher power of Detaching With Solidarity is the only answer.

But damn you, Camille, you great big nut. Here I go, writing again.

Where is Camille Paglia Today?

Many Paglia-watchers have wondered what Camille has been up to the last year or two.

She has been uncharacteristically quiet, and at her age— she’s 79 at this writing— I’ve wondered if ill health was getting the upper hand.

From knowing Camille back in the day, I’m sure mere physical disability or vanity would never stop her from speaking out and writing. She didn’t have those qualms.

But if she ever encountered cognitive problems, it would be unbearable to her. I mean, it’s awful for anyone. For a quick mind, devastating. She is compelled to dominate, verbally. I knew that age, parenthood, divorce, all humbled her — as such things will. But if she could be part of a conversation, she would.

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I was speaking to a small audience at Giovanni’s Room bookstore in Philadelphia, when a disheveled bag lady jumped out of her seat, and waved her arms as if she were hailing the last cab at Grand Central, yelling, “I am your only friend in academia.”

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Once you have a credible, page-worthy manuscript, you’re looking for a publisher. An advocate, your partner in crime and author success. You want someone who sees the potential and the readers for your work.

How do you penetrate the literary agents and editors world, when they’re busy with people they KNOW, celebrities, “sure things,” and perhaps a jaded view of newcomers?

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We had a ball with our first book club group, and now our August 16 read is coming right up: “Ballerina Buttfuck Farm!”

— No, excuse me, it’s Yesteryear, the trad-wife revenge satire. Details and scuttlebutt below!

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You don’t have to be certain. It’s impossible to know the bottom. It’s an adventure.

You only require one crie de couer to set you in a tailspin. Betrayal, rejection, nausea. Contempt. Any day’s shocker is a potential candidate.

Got it?

There will be more than one wrecking day in the citizen’s life. We will shake our fist at the dark heavens. One’s self-care crumples like a paper bag.

What is the cure?

Some old-timers (okay, me) advise the short-lived yet pungent solution of a cocktail.

Which one?

Let me describe a legacy gin brew, employed by hapless British navy seaman in the mid-19th century. They could tell you a thing or two about a bad day.

“Worst day” concoctions are inevitably strong. But c’mon, we aren’t talking about rubbing alcohol. A “End Times” cocktail must taste incredible and, it needs to be BITTER. Insolent, even.

Welcome to “The Pink Gin,” if you are not already acquainted.

The Pink Gin remedy is a cocktail, not a brand. It’s a recipe you make yourself: 2 ingredients. You can do it while you weep.

Intriguingly, one of Pink Gin’s first proponents was author Charles Dickens. Dickens had a string remarkable descendants, and one of them, great-grandson Cedric Dickens, wrote about the old man’s original recipe.

In his 1980 biography/pub crawl, Drinking with Dickens, Cedric describes his recipe for ‘Burnt Pink Gin’.

Pour the gin into a wine glass and burn the Angostura in a teaspoon by heating over flame.

When well burning, let it fall into the gin.

Add cold water to taste.

Another one of my favorite Dickens’ descendants is actor Harold Lloyd, Charles’ great-great-great-grandson.

You know him, I venture! He played the villainous brother Viserys in The Game of Thrones, whom you’ll remember had a VERY VERY BAD DAY.

Maybe even worse than yours.

You shall have a golden crown

That men shall tremble to behold

To hear Lloyd’s range, listen to him narrate Great Expectations, and A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, in audio. What a treat.

The Pink Gin Recipe - Strictness Counts

Here are the ratios and rules of The Pink Gin beverage:

Into a shaker with ice:

• 3 oz. Plymouth or Old Tom gin— cold from the freezer is best

• 6 very healthy dashes of Angostura bitters

Shake hard— muscle the dilution.

The chemistry of this simple blend is amazing. As Ted Haigh pointed out, people who neither like gin nor bitters, fall in love with THIS.

Pour neatly in a martini glass.

On a bad day, I have not lit my bitters over the fire as Dickens suggested— I’ve poured the whole thing cold and fast. It was delicious.

The gin, however, does make a difference — the two I listed are “sweeter” Victorian gins.

You won’t go wrong if you stick with the British gins, who sometimes called this same drink the Gin Pajit, a nickname from the Raj era. It signals an Imperial dissolution.

From The Book of Gin, by Richard Barnett:

Peychaud’s bitters were sold around the world, but British drinkers tended to prefer the bitters developed by a German doctor, Johann Gottlieb Benjamin Siegert.

In the early 182os Siegert went to South America to serve in Simón Bolívar’s revolutionary army, and settled in the Venezuelan river-port of Angostura (now Ciu-dad Bolívar).

. . . he devised a new recipe for bitters, and marketed it as a treatment for seasickness amongst the crowds of foreign sailors in the city.

By 1830, he had made enough money to set up a factory, and the officers of Royal Navy ships visiting Angostura took up Siegert’s tonic with great enthusiasm.

The Pink Gin was originally served at room temperature, though most bars now serve it shaken over ice.

For abstainers there is a long version, The Campbell, made with lemonade standing in for the gin.

Officials in the Indian Civil Service spiced the drink up by adding onions pickled with chili—a “Gin Piaj”— and in colonial Malaya, where stomachs seem to have required more soothing, the “Gin Pahit” upped the quantity of bitters from a dash to one part in three.

The Pahit appears in the early short stories of W. Somerset Maugham, where it becomes one of the fixtures of colonial life . . .”

Somerset Maugham

“The P.&O.”

Maugham writes prolifically about Pink Gin in Southeast Asia. Here, he refers to a “gin sling”— one of his synonyms for the Pink.

Ian Fleming

The Man With the Golden Gun

Fleming was quite the gastronome. In addition to creating the Vesper martini, (shaken not stirred) he included a fudge recipe in his children’s book, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

John Le Carré

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

No one imbued a character with a cocktail’s legend as Le Carré wrote with his newspaperman Jerry Westerby, whom George Smiley seduces into admitting a shameful secret.

Patrick Hamilton

Slaves of Solitude

Here, the drink is referred to as a “gin and french.”

Graham Greene

The Heart of the Matter

Greene has drinks named after him, much like Ernest Hemingway. A gin man of the dying Empire. Here, we have two lovers quarreling over the cocktail cart:

“‘What about you, darling?’

He turned quickly away from her and began to fix two more Pink Gins.

There was a tacit understanding between them that “liquor helped;”growing more miserable with every glass one hoped for the moment of relief.

“You don’t really want to know about me.”

“Of course I do, darling. What sort of a day have you had?”

“‘Ticki, why are you such a coward? Why don’t you tell me it’s all off?”

He grinned miserably at his glass, twisting it round and round to let the Angostura cling along the curve.

Raise the Titanic

Alec Guiness orders “Two pink gins, full measure and don’t skimp on the Angostura.”

That’s what the Titanic will do to you.

Agatha Christie

In Agatha Christie‘s television show Poirot, the episode Triangle at Rhodes, our characters drink multiple Pink Gin’s, one of which contains a deadly poison.

Would that it were so simple!

“What About Me?— I’m Sober.”

Get thee to a creamery.

Order a Foster Freeze half-and-half soft-serve ice cream cone dipped in chocolate. The first one’s on me!

BTW, any kind of sudden temperature change will inevitably change your frame of bad mind. I’ve been known to stick my head under a faucet.

Hold Up; I’m California Sober!

When you find yourself laughing, that’s the first bend in the road.

Maui Wowie Land Race Strain

Books and Music

When I was a young mom, I enjoyed reading a book aloud to kindergartners called Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.

Our antihero Alexander wakes up with gum in his hair and the following hours go downhill from there. It’s very cheering!

I want to run away with Alexander. I don’t have to corrupt him with Pink Gin— I just need a comrade with his quick wit, and I think we could turn a corner. That, and an apropos song!

Here’s to blue skies . . .

In Case You Missed It

Each shift, I pull patron requests, and this morning, one kid ordered every single tiger book in the entire branch, both English and Spanish.

I am intrigued.

I’m not allowed to pry into the identities of the requests, but I like to imagine it’s a kid like me, who went bonkers on “ocelots” one sixties summer at my childhood public library.

Yes, we volunteers have to sign confidentiality agreements, NDAs. It’s necessary! I privately laugh at all the improper things I could get up to, if allowed to run wild.

I could improperly call the woman (it’s gotta be a woman) who’s requesting the “God Has a Plan” titles. You know what I’d send her instead?

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I hate marketing. And I must admit, I’ve been an inflictor of the first order during my youth, on behalf of many publishers and studios.

I couldn’t always make a living writing, so I turned to the dark side. I have flogged other people’s work for money.

What a racket.

Madonna Ciccone has a new album relase with a 8-figure marketing budget. Nice, right? I have been in the corridors of expensive market manipulations myself, in book publishing and feature reporting. With all the hoop and la.

I understand quite well how the actual “product” (a music recording in this case) can be mediocre, unmemorable— and yet dominate the culture news for weeks, as a real triumph. It sucks all the air out of the room.

I remember crying to my editor Bill Tonelli once about getting a harsh review in Esquire for my newest title, and he chided me: “Please. Only 12 books will get reviewed this year, and yours was one of them.”

He’s right, it’s a miracle to get a widely-…

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Among gay, lesbian parents, our blood is curdling YET AGAIN.

This kind of thing: the surprise attack from a vindictive sicko with a plan to harm, has happened to every out-of-the-closet parent I know. Happened to me.

The malicious want to destroy us, and they know how to draw blood. “Despicable” doesn’t even begin to describe it.

Pete wrote in his letter, the past hours have been the darkest of his life. I know he’s not exaggerating. When I was threatened as a young mom, for what rightwing psychopaths perceived as my “sexuality,” here’s the things that went through my mind:

1. Pack our bags, leave this country forever. (but where to go? )

2. Never take another photo again, never share a birthday or Thanksgiving again (live underground like a mole)

3. Pull out of school, find all-gay school, (haha) find community where straight people never trespass (isolation from my coat of many colors, my friends and family)

4. …

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ESSAY BY WILLIAM BRIGHT

There has been a strong tendency to take writing, or literacy, as the most important feature which distinguishes “advanced” or “civilized” societies from those which are often labeled as “primitive” or “savage.”

In his The Domestication of the Savage Mind, author Jack Goody showed differences among human societies are related to changes in communications, first with the introduction of hieroglyphic or logographic writing, then the invention of syllabaries and alphabets, and still later the printing press.

Finally, in our own day, it’s the development of communication by instantaneous, electronic, and computerized means.

Each of these steps meant larger numbers of people were involved in networks of communication; each step meant greater amounts of information would be stored for later retrieval; and each step increased the gap between the non-literate and the literate worlds. —Not in a simplistic and dichotomous manner, but in ways involving entire structures of intellectual activity, and of mentality as a whole.1

Goody thought the results of literacy haven’t always been desirable: “. . . Through a series of forced and binary choices, literacy established the victory of the overgeneralized schema.”

How paradoxical that so many anthropologists, linguists, and folklorists have seen the development of writing as associated with “advancement,” and yet they themselves have preferred to devote themselves to field work among non-literate peoples.2

My personal view is, I’ve liked people in non-literate societies better than people in my own society. I may be accused of romanticism, of nostalgia for the “noble savage”— yet when I have become acquainted with American Indian societies, or of tribal societies in South Asia— who were non-literate, or at least only one generation removed from illiteracy— I have envied their intellectual prowess, flexibility and openness, their benefit.

Other Western anthropologists had similar reactions. It is understandable a process of Darwinian selection might operate to produce individuals with mental capacities which favor survival. Such capacities would include a highly-developed memory as well as a capacity for effective adaptation to the vicissitudes of daily life.

I would like to argue for the positive values of illiteracy.

I want to suggest non-literate peoples have retained powers of memory of a magnitude hard for us who are “civilized” to comprehend— and the holding of knowledge in such memorized form implies a deeper form of knowledge than such held by us who only have “book-learning.”

The written word may be an obstacle which separates human beings from effective knowledge. In the confrontation between literate and non-literate societies, writing is often been used by literate groups as a tool of oppression and discrimination, and as a weapon to destroy the values of non-literate peoples.

The Hindu tradition

The first scene which I wish to evoke is ancient India, on the power of memory and the importance of memorization.

On this question, Goody drew upon the epoch-making studies of oral epic in Ancient Greece and in Modern Yugoslavia3 which showed many oral literatures show constancy in over-all structure and in re-combinations of formulaic expressions, but not in word-for-word repetition.

It seems likely in the time when the Homeric epics were first sung, there was no single, fixed, or “correct” text; only the later introduction of writing led to the preparation of an “authorized version.”

However true this picture may be for some parts of the world, Ancient India gives us a different picture.

Thus, once the Vedic hymns had been orally composed (in strict meter), it was considered their religious effectiveness depended on their being transmitted without the slightest change, and elaborate methods of teaching and memorization— all without any knowledge or use of writing— were established to ensure this.

The process led to the entire development of linguistic analysis as a field of specialization among the ancient Hindu scholars, culminating in the celebrated grammar of Pāṇini and to the tradition which in turn derived from that work.

Here we have the very first invention of linguistics as a science— which, when Sanskrit was discovered by European scholars in the 18th and 19th centuries, was to contribute so much to the development of linguistics in the occidental world.

It appears Pānini was illiterate! The early Sanskrit linguistic compositions date from the 5th to the late 4th centuries B.C.; but our earliest evidence of written Sanskrit, using an alphabet introduced from the Near East, dates from the mid-3rd century B.C.4

We have reason to believe Pānini’s grammar, which not only described but standardized a language, was composed and initially transmitted without the use of writing, i.e., in the oral medium alone.

This belief is supported by the form of sūtras or rules used by Panini and other early Hindu scholars— for a wide range of arts and sciences— in which memorization was facilitated by extraordinary brevity. Thus the famous last sūtra of Panini is a a, the interpretation of which is:

‘The long low vowel [a:] has, as its short counterpart, the raised vowel [ə]’5

Not only sacred and scientific texts, but long literary works were composed and transmitted orally in Ancient India.

The most famous are the two major epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, each many times longer than either the Iliad or the Odyssey, and each requiring days and nights for its recitation.

Even after writing was introduced to India, memorization of traditional texts has continued down to modern times. As the Ceylonese scholar Ananda Coomaraswamy noted:6

From the Indian point of view, a man can only be said to know what he knows by heart; what he must go to a book to be reminded of, he merely knows of.

There are hundreds of thousands of Indians today who still repeat, by heart, the whole or some large part of the Bhagavad Gita. Others more learned, can recite hundreds of thousands of longer texts. It was from a traveling village singer in Kashmir whom I first heard sing the Odes of the Persian poet, Rumi.

From the earliest times, Indians have thought of the learned man, not as one who has read much, but as one who has been profoundly taught.

For occidentals, who’ve relied for so long on writing, it is hard to recognize the capacities of the human memory.

What is said here of language, is as plainly said of music. Long musical compositions are composed and transmitted by memory, with little or no use of written notation.

Goody noted that much oral literature, e.g., in modern West Africa, is transmitted in variable form; yet there are reports such as those of Ruth Finnegan’s7 — also from modern West Africa — of extensive verbatim memorization.

In a very different context, Joel Sherzer8 reports “perfect repetition” is still practiced by the Guna Indians of Panama.

Yet for literate peoples, writing has come to be considered a necessity. To quote Coomaraswamy once more:9

“Necessities are not always goods in themselves, out of their context; some, like wooden legs, are advantageous only to men already maimed.”

The warning of Socrates

Classicists are familiar with a passage in Plato’s Phaedrus in which Socrates warns his young friend Phaedrus against the dangers of the written word— in those days, relatively new to Greece.10

Socrates:

“At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth . . . he was the inventor of many arts . . . but his great discovery was the use of letters. Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt . . . To him came Theuth and showed his inventions . . . and Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them . . . But when they came to letters, ‘This,” said Theuth, ‘will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit.’”

Thamus replied:

“O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.

“The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality . . .

“He would be a very simple person, who should leave in writing or receive in writing any art under the idea the written word would be intelligible or certain . . . I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence . . .

“Is there not another kind of word or speech far better than this, and having far greater power— a son of the same family, but lawfully begotten? . . . I mean an intelligent word graven in the soul of the learner, which can defend itself, and knows when to speak and when to be silent.”

Phaedrus:

“You mean the living word of knowledge which has a soul, and of which the written word is properly no more than an image?”

Socrates:

“Yes, of course that is what I mean . . . even the best of writings are but a reminiscence of what we know . . .”

Even many centuries after Plato’s time, writing was for the Greeks and Romans something secondary to spoken language.

The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges wrote an essay, “On the cult of the book” (1960), in which he reminds us, even in the early centuries of the Christian era, reading was done aloud.

Around the year 384 A.D., as St. Augustine tells us in his autobiography, he was astonished to learn his teacher, St. Ambrose, the Bishop of Milan, was able to read “without uttering a word, or even moving his tongue.” This is our first historical attestation of silent reading in Western European civilization.

Borges points out, “this strange art, begun by [St. Ambrose], was to lead, after many years, to the concept of the book as an end in itself, not merely a means to an end.”

This concept of writing and of the book as autonomous entities has dominated European thought down to the present time.

Pizarro and Atahualpa

In the period when the Portuguese and Spanish, followed by other European nationalities, began the exploration and conquest of the entire world, there began a period of intensified confrontation and frequent conflict in which the literate societies of Europe— armed not only with guns and cannons, but with their printed books of religious and legal commandments— sought to subdue non-literate societies of Africa and the Americas.

In the Western Hemisphere, the Mayan peoples of Yucatán and Guatemala already had a hieroglyphic writing system, used for books made of fig-bark paper as well as in stone inscriptions.

The Spanish religious authorities burned all the Mayan books they could find, considering them “works of the devil”, and proceeded to deal with all the native societies of the Americas as “savages”. (The surviving body of Ancient Mayan writing is still being deciphered.)

In South America, the Spaniards encountered an exceptional large and highly organized empire— the Incas, which extended from Colombia to Argentina; the Quechua language, spoken throughout this area, was not written, but official records were kept in the form of knotted strings, called quipus.

In 1532, at Cajamarca, in Peru, there came the fateful encounter between Pizarro, the Spanish conquistador, and Atahualpa, the Inca emperor. Several chroniclers reported the event in varying ways, and we cannot be sure of the details of what happened11; but the following account, translated from Léon de Bercy in 1818, points up the drama of the meeting, and the uncomprehending rage which Atahualpa must have felt when he was asked to submit his imperial powers to the authority of a book:

“Since this monarch happened to be near the Spanish camp, the chaplain of the expedition, Vicente de Valverde, approached him with a crucifix in one hand and a breviary in the other, and asked to speak to him in the name of the King. And after having explained, through an interpreter, the principal dogmas of the Christian religion, and the right held by the Pope to distribute crowns, Valverde told Atahualpa the successors of the Apostle Peter, through Alexander the Sixth, Supreme Pontiff of Rome, had divided all the lands of the world among the Christian kings; with the obligation for each to conquer a part of them.

“He urged Atahualpa to recognize his authority and embrace the religion of Christ, assuring him, if he yielded, then Don Carlos, the King of Spain, would allow him to continue ruling.

“Atahualpa replied to this insolence with these words: that he did not understand how this Peter or his descendants could give away what had never belonged to them; that such a division was more a division between bandits than it was an order of the just and powerful God who ruled the universe; that Peru belonged to the Peruvians; and that he had received his crown from his fathers and would never renounce their religion.

“Further, in response to the insistence of the Christian priest, the Inca said: ‘Are these the benefits of the religion you boast of, of sweetness and love between the Christian and his neighbor?’

“The monk told him to obey and be silent, at which Atahualpa lost his temper and said to him: ‘Despicable scoundrel, preach to me no more of a God who is born and dies. The One whom I worship is immortal, and the poor power of humans cannot reach Him: even you can see my God is much superior to yours, who you say was killed by men.

“‘Besides, how do I know you are not deceiving me with talk of such ineffable mysteries, of which neither I nor anyone in my country has ever had the slightest notion? Where did you learn all the extraordinary things you have told me?’

—“‘In this book,”’ Valverde answered, showing him a breviary, ‘the truth is contained; the word of God is imprinted in it, and all I have told you is written in it. You must believe, and have no doubts.’

“The Inca took the book, examined it with care, held it to his ear, and then said to the monk: ‘I have looked at your quipus and seen nothing; I have held it to my ear and heard nothing; if the truth is written in it, why does God not give me the grace to read, as he does to you, who are nothing but an upstart, come from afar to murder my people and pillage my realms? Begone, disgusting impostor! I know your real nature,’ added the monarch, throwing down the book with contempt.

“The outraged monk exclaimed: ‘Christians, to arms! The word of God has been profaned; exterminate these heretics!’

“Pizarro immediately gave the order for the slaughter. The explosion of the artillery petrified the Peruvians, who stood for a moment dismayed and motionless. More than four hundred were killed by the soldiers of Pizarro, who marched up to the Inca, seized him by the arm, and led him in captivity to the camp.”

The epilogue to this was Pizarro held Atahualpa ransom for an immense amount of gold; but in the end the Inca emperor was baptized under coercion, then strangled to death with the garrote.12

The Spanish conquest of South America proceeded. To the present day, the majority of the population of Peru— and much of its neighboring countries— consists of Indians who speak Quechua, who know little if any Spanish, and who are illiterate in both their own language and that of their conquerors.

A religion based on illiteracy

In the late nineteenth century, in the northwest United States, a number of different Indian tribes, speaking a variety of languages, (including some English) —but generally literate in none— had been settled on reservations under the authority of the American government.

In this context, a new religion arose, the “Indian Shakers”— which involved a combination of native and Christian practices, and was named after the custom of “shaking” or trembling (as in many other religious groups) under the power of divine inspiration.

This religion has been the subject of an anthropological study13, and continued to be practiced into the twentieth century, as I observed during the 1960s on the Smith River Indian Reservation, in the northwestern-most corner of California.

The Indian Shaker religion was founded by an Indian named John Slocum, living just south of Puget Sound in the state of Washington. In 1881, at about the age of 40, he fell sick and apparently died; but at his wake, he revived, sat up in his coffin, and told of a visit to heaven, in which he had been instructed to return to earth and to found a new religion— which would be specifically for Indians, and as such would be based on no written scriptures at all, but on direct communication between the individual and God.

This revelation naturally aroused excitement, but Slocum himself proved ineffective as a religious leader, and eventually died in obscurity.

However, a messianic fervor began to spread, assisted by the organizational talents of an Indian named Mud Bay Louie— after the village of Mud Bay, just west of the state capital of Olympia; the head of the organization which he founded still bears the title “Bishop of Mud Bay.”

The reaction of the white authorities to the new religion— which invoked the name of Jesus, but rejected the Bible— was hostile.

Even though “shaking” was also practiced by many pentecostal or “holy roller” sects, the white members of such groups were at least nominally Bible-reading; by contrast, Indian “shaking” as a manifestation of unmediated communication with God was barely tolerated by the government, and with stern restrictions.

Two notices posted by the U.S. Indian Service at the Quileute Reservation were posted:14

The first read:

Notice to Shakers:

You are hereby permitted to hold meetings . . . under the following conditions:

On Sundays not longer than three (3) hours at one time and on Wednesdays not longer than two (2) hours at one time.

The following REGULATIONS to be observed:

1st, Keep windows or a door open during all meetings.

2nd, Use only one bell to give signals. No continuous ringing.

[The usual practice, as I have observed it at Smith River, is for members of the congregation to ring individual hand-bells during most of the meeting. The effect is deafening, conductive to an altered state of consciousness such as might be associated with religious experience.]

3rd, Do not admit school children at night meetings.

The second notice, dated six months later, shows a more exasperated level of the written bureaucratic style. It is in the form of a letter from a superintendent to the local Indian policeman:

“It has been reported . . . there are some women who are violating the Rules and they shake at all hours of the day and night. You will therefore tell the women quietly to stop shaking at any other times than the times specified in the rules.

“If they do not stop, you will lock them up until they agree to stop. Shaking for the sick must not be allowed. We do not want any trouble in this matter if it is possible to avoid it; but “continual and private shaking” must be stopped.”

In the long run, of course, the tradition of the Indian Shakers could not continue unchanged. By the 1960s, there was a schism among Shakers: on the one side were the “conservatives,” who— though by now mostly literate in English— still rejected written materials, considering them a barrier to direct religious experience; on the other side were the “progressives,” who believed in carrying Bibles to church— not actually to read, but (as one member told me) so they would look respectable before their Methodist, Baptist, or Catholic neighbors.

To the inheritors of European civilization, written language has become second nature— or even, we might say, first nature; it has come to mold our ways of thinking, even when we are not actually reading or writing; and it has come to possess, in our minds, a symbolic value of its own, entirely separate from its usefulness in communication.

But this powerful status with which writing has been endowed can diminish our memories, our perceptions, our flexibility of understanding.

The American musician and writer John Cage15 records this anecdote:

“I went to hear Krishnamurti speak. He was lecturing on how to hear a lecture. He said, ‘You must pay full attention to what is being said and you can’t do that if you take notes.’

“The lady on my right was taking notes. The man on her right nudged her and said, ‘Don’t you hear what he’s saying? You’re not supposed to take notes.’

“She then read what she had written and said, “That’s right. I have it written down right here in my notes.’”

Krishnamurti was, of course, the famous teacher from India, who was forcibly transferred to the Western world as a child, and who for years taught in an ashram in Ojai, California, near my native town of Oxnard.

Krishnamurti taught for years without publishing a word, or permitting anything he said to be published. Eventually, he permitted others to publish transcripts of tape recordings made at his lectures, and now there are many volumes by Krishnamurti in print.

After I read this anecdote in Cage’s book Silence, around 1967, my cat urinated on the book, and I had to throw it away.

By a perversion of memory, I have been telling the story over since with Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki— another of Cage’s gurus— as the central figure, instead of Krishnamurti. No one ever corrected me until I started writing this lecture, when I found Cage’s book in the library and corrected myself.

A member of a non-literate society would not have made my mistake— or have fallen into the absurdity recorded by Cage.

We who are literate, cannot cast off the literacy which has become part of us; but we can become aware of what it has cost us, of our conscious efforts to recapture the virtues of illiteracy.

Notes on the Lecture —

Susie’s Reflections on Bill’s Story, 40 Years Later

As I edited this piece, I kept thinking of how Bill and my mother (also a linguist) raised me, and I wondered how much they might have intentionally encouraged me to develop my “pre-literate prowess”, ha!, and how much was just simply repeating how they were raised.

I’d like to share my recollections, as well as the translation of the Borges poem, and the detailed citations Bill put together for the lecture.

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The Same Guy Who Threw Up on Himself at the Lincoln Memorial

Is the Next President of the United States

Visit Polymarket to place your wager now

You could

be a winner

But you won’t

You’ll sleep with the fishes

the mob is on the lawn

Everyone here is a man except this misshapen clay

mud

This man,

the false Prophet Joshua

who, it is said, did not come out of a womb

but a trashcan

T-rex Tryin’

It was a beautiful day at

the trashcan

this shit-hole country

Remember what Malcom said

This is what I say:

It’s a miracle if you live to 50 in America standing on your own two feet and know how to read

In the ring, when

the fury shrieked St. Michaela’s name,

millions of the dead rocked back and forth

all over Mesopotamia

and Palestine

The ones the Americans murdered have a ghost laugh.

And all the dead in the dead

prairies and the dead

provinces and dead

coasts at home.

Starved and sick in fields of gold. “I wonder what

the poor people are doing today.”

Every time the dead girls laugh, another American turns

to cinder, stone, yesterday

cigarette butt

We’re getting everything that’s coming to us.

Share

Other people go to Paris— I want to work at the library, just like Mom.

The librarians suggested I might volunteer for two projects. One, they’ll have me pull online reader requests, which then get shipped to the patron’s home branch.

It will be fascinating to see what everyone in town is reading and curious about, eh?

Second, Would I like to lead a monthly book club?

Oh, yes I would. I want a readers’ room of books you can’t put down. Hot topics. The zeitgeist.

Naomi Kanakia wrote a great piece about the peril of the dreary book club. I don’t quite subscribe to her rules (we will have fiction!) but I respect her hard stops.

Could I make rules for my branch readers? Who wants to obey or rebel?

• I’m the book club leader, therefore I get to pick all the books. See how easy that was? There will be variety, the spice of reading life.

• No reciting the plot.

• Any gossip, behind-the-scenes knowledge, conspiracy theories on titles — welcome.

• I actually don’t care if you “read the whole thing,” but you better be ready to hold your own.

• We can’t drink, imbibe, or spread crumbs at the library. Shame. We could continue later at the park down the street? Maybe “potluck picnics” after, when the weather is nice.

• “What did you learn from this book?” —Absolutely NOT. This is not an after-school special. People who come to library afternoon book clubs are grown-ups.

I will start reading aloud a passage from the book at the stroke of the hour. Then we’ll segue to saying hello and I’ll throw out an opening question to consider. It’ll be a good one.

“Hot Topic” Book Club Ideas I’m Kicking Around

I want variety. I want lively times. The book has to be a pageturner and impossible to have only one opinion about! I’d welcome your suggestions, too.

FICTION/FANTASY, & MEMOIR

Yesteryear - Caro Claire Burke

Strangers - Belle Burden

Both Yesteryear and Strangers are the tear-away bestsellers of the year thus far. And the debate is fierce. Why do New Yorkers get to have all the fun? We shall set our hair on fire in Santa Cruz.

ROMANCE/EROS

“M/M Fiction” - The Rachel Reid Explosion and Long Tail of Getting Pucked

Can I say “pucked” on a library flyer?

S/F

11-22-63 - Stephen King

Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury

(Did you know F-451 is back on EVERY bestseller list right now?)

HEALTH

Into the Wood Chipper - A Whistleblower’s account of how the Trump admin shredded USAID - Nicolas Enrich

This is also known at “The Ebola Book.” We can consider this as either Health/Politics, or Horror genre. Either way.

FOOD

“Le Cookbook Special” - In the fall, before the holidays, I want to chow down on all the most cherished, “I don’t want to return this” cookbooks we borrowed this year— what we’re making, harvesting, drinking. I’ll find out, and reveal, what are the most “checked-out” foodie books in the system.

BIOGRAPHY

Emerson Circle: The Concord Radicals Who Reinvented the World - Bruce Nichols

I feel a bit guilty to not choose a West Coast version of this notion, (what would you suggest?) but the fact is I am fascinated by the Massachusetts bohemians who so profoundly created an American philosophy and way of life. Yes, a bestseller right now.

Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love - Brian Evenson

This title will be my exception to the “everyone’s talking about it” rule — I doubt anyone in Santa Cruz besides my family has read (or better yet, listened) to Evenson’s memoir/biography of Carver, but they OUGHT TO. Whew. I want to change a few lives. Here’s my previous review.

COMIX

Persepolis - Marjane Satrapi

Marjane’s recent and somewhat mysterious death has everyone in tears, and her title has jumped back to the bestseller lists. The fact that it’s set in Iran reveals even more today than the day it was composed.

POLITICS

Regime Change - Maggie Haberman

Hoo boy, this will be fun. A great “hate-read” if there ever was one, an author many despise, but it’s great to read it at the library and then begin the ruckus!

PSYCHOLOGY

The Third Reich of Dreams: the Nightmares of a Nation - Charlotte Beradt, editor.1

Few will have heard of this buried German classic — it is literally a record of dreams Germans were having during the rise and unfolding of the 3rd Reich. Yes, let your mind explode. I thought for this session, I’d ask everyone to bring in a dream they’ve had lately which included scenes/characters from contemporary world/American politics. And then maybe we’ll act them out, Jungian style!

OKAY, LET’S DO 2 CLUBS! - In Town —and On Zoom

The club at my local library branch is for everyone — free, in person, registration through the library. Come sit by Mike’s fireplace. There’s a 10 person limit; it’s a small room

The other monthly book club will lives HERE, for paid subscribers.

• Every month I’ll pick the book and set the date.

• I’ll record a video chat (yes, you can attend, live).

• I’ll read aloud a juicy passage from our title, and get the conversation going with my questions, as all the publishing gossip, conspiracy theories, the behind-the-scenes, any “fuck-marry-kill. that might be involved.

No plot summaries. No “how did you improve yourself.” Adult intellectuals only!

If you want a seat in the room, get an annual paid subscription to my newsletter. We’ll start Sunday July 19, 2026 — at 5pm PST. I’ll plan for the third Sunday of each month for the rest of the year. I’ll archive the videos so you can always re-watch or catch up.

• When you sign up, please click on annual membership, (where you pay a year in advance), or you may upgrade to “Seminars” if you wish. (a bit more, for those who are taking my publishing classes as well)

Join Susie’s Online Book Club

My most outrageous book group night

One day, a local readers club of policewomen, sheriffs, and other first responders — all gals — said they wanted me to come talk to them about Santa Cruz Noir. They also commanded, yes, commanded, that my partner Jon appear, who had a story in the pages about a Westside Surfer who went over the edge.

Well, when we arrived, the women surrounded Jon and demanded to know who his fictional n’er do well antihero was!

“I arrested that bastard!” “I married him!” “Is he in jail for good?” “I oughta nail his dick to the wall.”

Jon tried to explain it was a composite character — SURE JAN — but they wouldn’t stop hounding him.

He took it as a real compliment that he got the meth, violence, and toxic blow-out atmosphere nailed. We all know a guy like that around here, and when we’re not laughing about it, it’s a heartbreaker.

To edit a book of murder stories, where the cops and the medics are often part of the scene, and have every detail click, that was work well put in.

Okay, now I wanna hear what you’re reading!

In Case You Missed It

I’ve got a question to you, Susie, as a veteran and super-experienced audiobook editor and producer:

My book, ________, was just officially released by The Big 5 Press about three weeks ago. I’d like to get an audio book out soon. How can I make this happen?

I asked my publisher about it and she said a member of her team “has pitched your title to our audio publishers and is hoping to hear that one of them wants to license your work for their audience.” She added that the process takes time and that audio publishers often want to see published reviews before they make an offer.

Is the publisher really so passive that they need to “hope” an audio publisher makes an offer? Perhaps my publishers is too understaffed to do it itself? . But if so, what can I do to make it happen?

As for published reviews, I’d like to see more. There were positive pre-publication reviews in Publisher’s Weekly and Library Jo…

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They are in the late 20s, verging on 30. As our fireside chats unfolded, glasses filled, the dreaded question arrived: “What do you think of ‘poly,’ Mrs. Bright?”

Actually, they don’t call me Mrs. Bright.

But I am trying to convey, they treat me as an éminence grise— a boomer receptacle of mid-century sexual liberation.

What do I think of poly.

At first I spit out my punch. And then . . . It’s time for the reckoning.

The truth is much older and ruder than the sex-positive self-help books imply.

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He emailed me, asking for my free counsel on how to write a lesbian sex scene in his novel, “Since I am not a lesbian.”

You don’t say.

I kindly replied with my professional appointment info.

The advice-seeker decided to chastise me, shame me, but I think he could have done a little more research.

“I am 66,” he said, (younger than me) “And on a fixed income! You could just answer a few questions and read my manuscript by email!”

That’ll teach me.

Shall we go to the classroom? I have a few notes below, but I go into greater detail in the 30 minute video, below.

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I’ve loved reading your answers! You tunas have good taste.

Care to cast your answers? Here you go, it’s a five minute frolic:

• Susie’s Interview Questions, À la Colbert.

My answers are: here.

Let’s begin, my little French dips:

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I thought we could play the getting-to-know-you game that Stephen enjoyed with his guests.

Ready?

I’ll do mine, and then I’ll set up the questions for you.

I’ll report all results in a few days! The poll will be open for only a few days, so hop to it!

LATE SPOILER: Here are the survey answers.

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She is missed.

I imagined saying, if she was here today, “Rachel, are you going to do a tarot deck of Etruscan Deities? Their goddesses throw their weight around . . . Everything we thought was “Roman” and “Italian” turns out to be Etruscan to the core!”

And she would say, I’m sure: “I’m already in the middle of it!”

Rachel was a pioneer Sci-Fi author and comix habituée. A Tarot Card Renaissance legend. —Very much a 70s old-school dyke and trans underground scout member.

I recorded Rachel’s novels, Temporary Agency and Godmother Night, when I was a young producer at Audible. Later, we took on her neo-jungian Tarot interpretation bible, Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom. I know many of you have a copy.

To celebrate the “78” debut, we decided, let’s do an interview1 . I’m so glad we did. Cancer overtook her daily life not too long after, and in hindsight, it was a miracle we were able to finish the production.

What a conversationalist Rachel was. You could spend hours, laughing and letting the lightbulbs go off.

Among other things we talked about:

• How old were you when you discovered Tarot? What was going on in your life at the time?

• What is the difference between Tarot for divination, versus those seeking wisdom, or meditation, or a prompt for therapeutical inquiry . . .

• Decks Gone Wild . . . Does it need to stop?

• Will I meet my soulmate in six months? (Go ahead, I dare you to ask her)

• How Rachel “took over” Doom Patrol

• The notion of innocence, in the instance of the Card of the Fool and the Number Zero

• The nature of Free Will? — and “rarely using it”

I’m one of the people who loved Tarot as a kid, pretending to read my friend’s fortunes. When I grew up, it occurred to me the deck was the best set of writers’ prompts ever assembled. They make you peek around another corner. —Which we could all use more of.

In Case You Missed It

We rubbed our hands with anticipation— there’s so much to linger upon, to talk late into the night!

Becca fell ill on her travel day— this morning. “I think I got the flu from my son on his birthday.”

She feared infecting me— so we scrapped our rendezvous. We know the influenza, the mystery bug, could keep us imprisoned in bed for weeks. At our age, a so-called “cold” is a Trojan Horse.

Maybe the young feel such danger these days as well. We live in the new Dark Age of measles at the opera and hantavirus on a bird boat.

Woolf wrote an essay called “On Being Ill,” when she was 42. It was 1925, and she was recovering in bed. I’d like to share an excerpt of it with you today, with my special love for those of you, who at the moment, are in the middle of something rather nasty. I’m going to poetically refigure some of her phrasing, because it is so beautiful, you have to take a pause to drink it in.

Or, listen to my voiceover tape, above. Better than ASMR.

Feel Better. ;-) Your friends love you.

“Considering how common illness is,

How tremendous the spiritual change that it brings,

How astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed,

What wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view,

What precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals,

What ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness,

How we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads1

and wake thinking to find ourselves in the presence of the angels and the harpers when we have a tooth out and come to the surface in the dentist’s armchair and confuse his “Rinse the mouth— rinse the mouth”

With the greeting of the Deity stooping from the floor of heaven to welcome us—

When we think of this, as we are so frequently forced to think of it,

If becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.

Novels, one would have thought, would have been devoted to influenza; epic poems to typhoid; odes to pneumonia; lyrics to toothache.

But no; with a few exceptions Thomas De Quincey attempted something of the sort in The Opium Eater;2 there must be a volume or two about disease scattered through the pages of Marcel Proust3— literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind;

That the body is a sheet of plain glass

Through which the soul looks straight and clear, and, save for one or two passions such as desire and greed, is null, and negligible and non-existent.

On the contrary, the very opposite is true.

All day, all night the body intervenes; blunts or sharpens, colors or discolors, turns to wax in the warmth of June, hardens to tallow in the murk of February.

The creature within can only gaze through the pane— smudged or rosy; it cannot separate off from the body like the sheath of a knife or the pod of a pea for a single instant;

It must go through the whole unending procession of changes, heat and cold, comfort and discomfort, hunger and satisfaction, health and illness

Until there comes the inevitable catastrophe; the body smashes itself to smithereens, and the soul, it is said, escapes.

But of all this daily drama of the body there is no record. People write always of the doings of the mind; the thoughts that come to it; its noble plans; how the mind has civilised the universe.

They show it ignoring the body in the philosopher’s turret; or kicking the body, like an old leather football, across leagues of snow and desert in the pursuit of conquest or discovery.

Those great wars which the body wages with the mind a slave to it, in the solitude of the bedroom against the assault of fever or the oncoming of melancholia, are neglected.

Nor is the reason far to seek. To look these things squarely in the face would need the courage of a lion tamer; a robust philosophy; a reason rooted in the bowels of the earth.

Short of these, this monster, the body, this miracle, its pain, will soon make us taper into mysticism, or rise, with rapid beats of the wings, into the raptures of transcendentalism.4

The public would say that a novel devoted to influenza lacked plot; they would complain that there was no love in it— wrongly however, for illness often takes on the disguise of love, and plays the same odd tricks.

It invests certain faces with divinity, sets us to wait, hour after hour, with pricked ears for the creaking of a stair,

And wreathes the faces of the absent (plain enough in health) with a new significance,

While the mind concocts a thousand legends and romances about them for which it has neither time nor taste in health.5

Finally, to hinder the description of illness in literature, there is the poverty of the language. English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache.

It has all grown one way.

The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor, and language at once runs dry. There is nothing ready-made for him.

He is forced to coin words himself, and, taking his pain in one hand,

And a lump of pure sound in the other, as perhaps the people of Babel did in the beginning6,

So to crush them together that a brand new word in the end drops out.

Probably it will be something laughable.

For who of English birth can take liberties with the language?

“To us it is a sacred thing and therefore doomed to die, unless the Americans, whose genius is so much happier in the making of new words than in the disposition of the old, will come to our help and set the springs aflow.

Yet it is not only a new language that we need, more primitive, more sensual, more obscene, but a new hierarchy of the passions;

Love must be deposed in favour of a temperature of 104 degrees;

Jealousy give place to the pangs of sciatica;

Sleeplessness play the part of villain,

And the hero become a white liquid with a sweet taste— that mighty Prince with the moths’ eyes and the feathered feet, one of whose names is Chloral.

“But to return to the invalid . . .

“I am in bed with influenza”— but what does that convey of the great experience?

How the world has changed its shape; the tools of business grown remote; the sounds of festival become romantic like a merry-go-round heard across far fields;

And friends have changed, some putting on a strange beauty, others deformed to the squatness of toads,

While the whole landscape of life lies remote and fair, like the shore seen from a ship far out at sea,

And he is now exalted on a peak and needs no help from man or God, and now grovels supine on the floor glad of a kick from a housemaid—

The experience cannot be imparted

And, as is always the way with these dumb things, his own suffering serves but to wake memories in his friends’ minds of their influenzas,

Their aches and pains which went unwept last February, and now cry aloud, desperately, clamorously, for the divine relief of sympathy.

Sympathy we cannot have.7 Wisest Fate says no.

If her children, weighted as they already are with sorrow, were to take on them that burden too, adding in imagination other pains to their own, buildings would cease to rise;

Roads would peter out into grassy tracks;

There would be an end of music and of painting;

One great sigh alone would rise to heaven, and the only attitudes for men and women would be those of horror and despair.

As it is, there is always some little distraction

—An organ grinder at the corner of the hospital,

A shop with book or trinket to decoy one past the prison or the workhouse,

Some absurdity of cat or dog to prevent one from turning the old beggar’s hieroglyphic of misery into volumes of sordid suffering;

And thus the vast effort of sympathy which those barracks of pain and discipline, those dried symbols of sorrow, ask us to exert on their behalf, is uneasily shuffled off for another time.

Sympathy nowadays is dispensed chiefly by the laggards and failures

—Women for the most part, in whom the obsolete exists so strangely side by side with anarchy and newness,

Who, having dropped out of the race, have time to spend upon fantastic and unprofitable excursions.

C.L.,8 for example, who, sitting by the stale sickroom fire, builds up, with touches at once sober and imaginative, the nursery fender, the loaf, the lamp, barrel organs in the street, and all the simple old wives’ tales of pinafores and escapades;

Or, A.R.,9 the rash, the magnanimous, who, if you fancied a giant tortoise to solace you or a theorbo to cheer you, would ransack the markets of London and procure them somehow, wrapped in paper, before the end of the days;

The frivolous K.T.,10 who, dressed in silks and feathers, powdered and painted (which takes time too) as if for a banquet of Kings and Queens, spends her whole brightness in the gloom of the sick room, and makes the medicine bottles ring and the flames shoot up with her gossip and her mimicry. 11

But such follies have had their day; civilisation points to a different goal; and then what place will there be for the tortoise and the theorbo?

There is, let us confess it (and illness is the great confessional), a childish outspokenness in illness; things are said, truths blurted out, which the cautious respectability of health conceals.

About sympathy for example—

We can do without it.

That illusion of a world so shaped that it echoes every groan,

of human beings so tied together by common needs and fears that a twitch at one wrist jerks another,

where however strange your experience other people have had it too,

where however far you travel in your own mind someone has been there before you— is all an illusion.

We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others.

Human beings do not go hand in hand the whole stretch of the way.

There is a virgin forest in each; a snowfield where even the print of birds’ feet is unknown.

Here we go alone, and like it better so.

To always to have sympathy, always to be accompanied, always to be understood— would be intolerable.12

But in health the genial pretense must be kept up and the effort renewed— to communicate, to civilize, to share, to cultivate the desert, educate the native, to work together by day and by night to sport.

In illness this make-believe ceases.

Directly the bed is called for, or, sunk deep among pillows in one chair,

we raise our feet even an inch above the ground on another,

we cease to be soldiers in the army of the upright; we become deserters.

They march to battle.

We float with the sticks on the stream;

helter-skelter with the dead leaves on the lawn,

irresponsible and disinterested and able, perhaps for the first time for years,

to look round, to look up— to look, for example, at the sky.”

P.S. — Our friend, beloved Ka’ala, has not been feeling so hot. Music is the only thing that always makes sense. His voice is as beautiful as ever.

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