Art of Learning

Florilegium

Do you know that almost everything I know today I learned when I was listening to myself talking about things that I didn’t understand.
- Gracie Allen

Virtuous Life

Gallimaufry

Distilled are much as possible:

Menal Clarity Reason

  • Clarity
  • Empathy
  • Curiosity

Employed in developing:

Self Cultivation Reason

  • Individuation
  • Reason
  • Self Cultivation
  • Strength

My assumption is that these will push a person to reasonableness and prompt kindness.

Solipsism

Gallimaufry

Solipsism: the belief that the cosmos is such a poor thing that the only explanation is that it was created by someone with one’s own limited powers and abilities.

Le Page Efféminé

Ambiguously Gendered

The few old really pleasing images of feminine or androgynous males have mostly been from French publications. I thought I’d found another.

But when I really looked at this drawing I realized that he’s being put in bondage. The hetero sissyfication fetish.

I won’t complain about the pleasures of others. But ‘forced feminization’ isn’t the kind of self-affirming, very queer kind of male femininity that delights me.

Le Page Efféminé Sissy Boy Garçons

I’ll keep my eyes focused on the waist up.

Perfumed Dandies

Ambiguously Gendered

Were I, mutatis mutandis, a 19th century Frenchman would he be the object of my desire?

Perfumed 19Th Century French Dandy

No need for me to be French. I could be a Brit who had a perverse passion for French guys.

While dandies were often assailed as effeminate that was probably unfair and an effect of the muscular Christianity popular at least among the Anglophone world.

Sadly most of the world was in the closet, which is why back then gay men hired their lovers.

Christmas angel boy

Ambiguously Gendered, Gallimaufry

My annual Christmas card:

Shirtless prettyboy angel

The Patty Duke Show Season I

I’ve watched only the first disc of The Patty Duke Show Season I.

The lack of twin humor was a real surprise. No mistaken identity plots, sequences of the girls pretending a doorway is a mirror.

Patty seems an unusually undisciplined, heedless teenage girl and perhaps the worst student among teen girls of that period of sitcoms. This is offset by Kathy being studious, respectful, verging on dowdy.

Kathy’s exceptional restraint allows for greater excess than the audience might otherwise have tolerated in those willfully naïve, socially restrictive times.

I haven’t found The Patty Duke Show that rewarding a venture into nostalgia. Not sure when or if I’ll send for the other DVDs.

Scorchy

Movies

Movies I’d Like to See

The James Bond series of films prompted a tremendous amount of imitation. Mostly the movies lacked the mysterious ingredients that kept us from laughing out loud at the implausibilities of the original.

Surely Scorchy in which Connie Stevens stars as a some sort of undercover narcotics agent bent on saving the world from Caesar Danova must be a laugh riot. At the time of writing is available only on old VHS tapes and fairly expensive. Hopefully one of the bargain basement reissuers of lowbrow movies on DVD will correct this situation.

Connie Stevens dea narcotics spy scorchy

Critical Honor

Literary Scraps

I have no superstitions about critical honor. I lean toward men I like and away from men I dislike. The calm, Judicial judgment makes me laugh. It is a symptom of delusions of infallibility. I am often wrong. My prejudices are innumerable and often idiotic. My aim is not to determine facts, but to function freely and pleasantly.

- H.L. Mencken, an “Ethical Note” in Letters of H.L. Mencken

Infatuated Fancies

Literary Scraps

The common error which makes it difficult to believe all the world to be wholly ours, is to be shunned as a rock of shipwreck or a dangerous quicksand. For the poison which they drank hath infatuated their fancies and now they know not, either will they understand, they walk on in darkness. All the foundation of the earth are out of course. It is safety not to be with them. And a great part of happiness to be freed from their seducing and enslaving errors.

- Thomas Traherne, Centuries of Meditations

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Queer Pop Culture

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