From “T Beauty” magazine, the New York Times fashion supplement, April 13th, 2008.
If you click this picture it will get BIGGER! But, in case you still can’t read it, here’s the text:
The New York-based writer Lynn Phillips is a self-loather and proud of it. “I have an allergy to people telling me to cheer up,” she says. Phillips, who was once a writer on the cult 70′s television show “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,” has even written a book called “Self-Loathing for Beginners” (Santa Monica Press) that covers the basics for thoughtful cynics and all those who “respond better to gloomier encouragement.” (Chapter 1 has a section called “Self-Love—Friend or Foe?”) Phillips was kind enough to present the first annual self-loathing awards for this issue (And the Winner Is…” Page 26*); naturally, she turned her weary wit to some of the fashion industry’s worst culprits. She cites a history of people saying good things about dark moods, such as the psychologist William James and the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (center), whom she calls a master of the genre: “He even relocated humanity in the universe so we realized how pathetic and small we are.”
*NOTE: The article to which this squib refers was actually on p. 28, not p 26.
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According to the New York Times, a Swedish company, Kasthall, is displaying a “Negative Text Rug” which proclaims “I feel like everyone is walking all over me. I feel so low. Like someone is standing on me. I feel as if I am flat on the floor.” The words, written in white cursive script on a dark ground, were created with a “pneumatic yarn gun” (whatever that may be) and the rug is displayed in Kasthall’s New York showroom hanging on the wall, (making every word it utters a lie). The rug’s pimps are asking $6,091 for it, far more than it thinks it is worth, which is what makes it so valuable to the self-loather in us.
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Bartleby & Co. by Enrique Vila Matas and translated by Jonathan Dunne, is a small masterpiece of literary self-effacement. It is presented as a series of 86 footnotes to an otherwise unwritten book devoted to writers who stop writing (Robert Walser who went mad, or Rimbaud who wandered off after his spectacular debut) and writers who never actually write at all (like Socrates—who leaves the penmanship to Plato—or Paranoid Pérez, a character created by Antonio de la Mota Ruiz, who never gets to author a book because any time he has an idea for one, another character in the story writes it first).
Vila Matas lauds writers whose humility forbids them to attempt the impossible feat of writing accurately, writers who—properly conscious of the vanity of literature and the irrelevance of acclaim—beg to be forgotten, writers who, like Melville’s Bartleby, “would prefer not to.” This most amusing and inspired meander through the history of creative self-negation is a must for the serious self-loather who wishes to go for a higher degree.
Filed under: 3. It is what it is. | Comment (0)
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