© Roger M Tagg 2012
Welcome to FROLIO – a new attempt to merge philosophy and the "semantic web" . This website is under continuing development.
Daniel Harris is a New York based essay specialist who, prior to this book, wrote the well-regarded 'The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture'.
| Chapter | Page | Highlight |
|---|---|---|
| Intro | ix | "My life is suspended above an abyss of ignorance ... I live quite happily hemmed in on all sides by an impenetrable wall of technological riddles." |
| x | "The same ignorance, I would argue, pertains to the aesthetic features of our daily environments ... we have developed a kind of collective aesthetic unconsciousness." | |
| xi | DH's aim is "to recover the repressed aesthetic data of our lives". | |
| xiii | The book "delves into the ways in which the ostensibly purposeless appearance of consumerist debris affects us psychologically ..." | |
| xv | "It is this moment of engagement, of seduction [RT: i.e. the gut reaction to our perception of an item of popular culture?], the very instant that our neurons begin to fire, that I attempt to recreate in my evocation of the false sensuality of the marketplace." | |
| xvi | "While I make no secret of my dislike of consumerism ... I have made valiant attempts to rise above both snobbery and censoriousness." | |
| xvii | Consumerism's aesthetics "remain surprisingly unsensual even as they intoxicate us with their sumptuousness". | |
| xviii | "The uncontained commercial hedonism of the present, had it fulfilled its initial promise, would have represented the culmination of Enlightenment secularism, of the belief in pleasure, in maximizing happiness, in the necessity of enjoying the physical world and using reason to better our life here on Earth, rather than wiling away our time in thankless abstinence in hopes of reaping our just rewards in Heaven." | |
| "And yet despite (all the sumptuousness), consumerism is as indifferent to the body as the most traditional forms of religion, and its vision of a material paradise is as inaccessible as the Christian view of Kingdom Come, an otherworldly mirage that appeals to our imagination, not the senses." | ||
| xix | "The aesthetics of consumerism are ascetic and cerebral, incorporeal illusions designed to stir up dissatisfaction, to provide restless longings that cannot be fulfilled." | |
| xix-xx | "Anti-consumerist diatribes also single out corporations as the source of all that is crude, manipulative and mercenary in our society, while they whitewash the consumer as a helpless victim roped to the railroad tracks, mercilessly exploited by money-grubbing financiers who plot our subjection from the boardrooms of glass towers." | |
| xx | "If there is a conspiracy, we ourselves are its tacticians as well as its beneficiaries ... If there is kitsch in our daily lives, it is because there is kitsch in our minds. It is we who are to blame, not Madison Avenue." | |
| xxi | "The public's nostalgia provides one of the most fertile grounds for advertising." | |
| xxii | "The aesthetics of consumerism also shore up the consumer's sense of selfhood and individuality ..." - partly to position the marketers as respectful of the consumer's distrust of advertising. | |
| xxiii | "Consumerism has created the perfect disguise for conformity: rebelliousness." We labour "under the extraordinary misconception that shopping is a profoundly self-creative act the distinguishes us from the mindless herd." | |
| 1 - | 2 | "Everywhere we turn we see cuteness." An example is "greeting cards with kitty cats in raincoats". |
| Cute -ness | 3 | "Cuteness ... must be no means be mistaken for the physically appealing. ... Medieval or renaissance images of the Christ child, those obese monstrosities whose muscularity always strikes the modern viewer as bafflingly inaccurate, make an interesting comparison." |
| 4 | "Far from being an accident of bad craftsmanship, the element of the grotesque in cuteness is perfectly deliberate ... The grotesque is cute because the grotesque is pitiable, and pity is the primary emotion of this seductive and manipulative aesthetic that arouses our sympathies..." An example is Cabbage Patch Kids. | |
| 5 | "Cuteness ... is not something we find in our children but something we do to them." | |
| 11 | The "distasteful subtext of our plush toys" is that babies, "far from being clean and dry, are squalling factories of drool and snot" - and worse! | |
| 14 | "We teach our children the nature and value of cuteness almost from the dawn of consciousness ..." | |
| 15 | "Cuteness is every parent's portable utopia ... we use it to allay fears of our failures as parents ..." | |
| 16 | "Cuteness saturates the visual landscape of consumerism with utopian images that cause feelings of inadequacy among parents, who inevitably measure the rowdy and selfish behavior of their own children by exacting ideals of tractability, cuddliness and quiescence." | |
| 19 | Nowadays we are getting some reaction to all this, in the form of the "anti-cute", e.g. The Simpsons, or Gremlins. | |
| 2 - Quaint | 25 | "Quaintness reproduces the past selectively, editing out its discomfort, inconvenience, misery, stench and filth and concentrating instead on its carnal pleasures, its 'warm and homey feelings'." |
| -ness | 30-1 | "Quaintness is an aesthetic of clutter, of manic busyness ... of 'stuff'." |
| 39 | "Quaintness sets up a dialogue between non-consumerized and consumerized objects." | |
| The primitive belief that our possessions have souls has never disappeared from our culture, and in fact has been reawakened in the twentieth century by consumerism and the tyranny of the new, which have given rise to a new folk religion whose purpose is to restore to our possessions their inner lives." | ||
| 41 | "Most dwellings are now just temporary encampments set up by professional vagabonds who flee from one residence to the next, rarely occupying a house for more than 7 years. ... The dynastic legacy of the old homestead, handed down from one generation to the next, is largely a thing of the past, a casualty of the unstable lives of roving yuppies ..." | |
| 42 | "Quaintness is consumerism's answer to the extinction of the old homestead ..." | |
| 48 | "If cuteness is the aesthetic of childhood, quaintness is the aesthetic of old age." | |
| 49 | "Quaintness in advertising shows consumerism correcting itself ..." | |
| 50 | "Manufacturers have learned to play upon our contempt for consumerism, to convince us that we are free-spirited rebels and that they themselves, far from being profiteering multinational cartels, are dusty trading posts on Main Street, a bustling cobblestone thoroughfare lined with cigar store Indians, picket fences and apothecary signs. | |
| 3 - | 52 | "Stylish unflappability" is one type of coolness. |
| Cool -ness | 53 | Another is "a hyper-masculine folk religion that fetishes poise and impassivity...". "Its hilarious mannerisms, its swaggering gait and hostile stares, constitute a pragmatic form of aesthetic self-defense, a disguise that fends off aggression through a flamboyant charade of toughness and authority, a truculent insularity that provides psychological camouflage for the ghetto dweller, projecting fearlessness and tranquility amidst danger." |
| "Where the ghetto goes, the suburbs follow." | ||
| 54 | "Suburban coolness, in short, is 'mean street' behavior without mean streets ..." | |
| "The chic of poverty is central to advertising." | ||
| 58 | "... Coolness toys with the fiction of grinding poverty ... (but) its masquerade of destitution involves an act of bad faith ..." - they still have their cellphones and CD players. | |
| 62 | "The basic credo of coolness is nihilism ... a philosophy of affected gloom that suggests that all that matters is the present; getting high, hanging out. ... This pretence of anaesthetized cynicism inevitably leads to its opposite, to frenzied epicureanism, a carpe diem tendency to equate meaning with pleasure, with the instant gratification of desire." | |
| 64 | "Coolness represents the final collapse of the romantic movement's adoration of the child." | |
| 65-6 | Coolness "simply brings parental fears to life, providing a grotesque embodiment of a distinctly middle-class projection of freakiness of what lies beyond the pale of respectable society, where grungy cokeheads with communicable diseases deflower nubile daughters, and the truant sons of upstanding citizens jeopardize their futures by scuffling with the law." | |
| 70 | "One telling indication of the self-contradictory nature of coolness is that, while adolescents persist in believing that they are a bad and sinister and unfit for respectable society, the coolest advertisements featuring the hippest kids giving us the dirtiest looks are often selling the cleanest things." DH quotes Calvin Klein underpants, new jeans, clean sneakers etc. | |
| 72 | "... The wholesale co-optation of youth culture by the record industry, which has supplied an entire generation with a new opium of the people, with pop music, a type of commercial communication that has supplanted all other forms of social intercourse, such as conversation." | |
| 75 | "Manufacturers have recognized that the urgent need to create a pack identity in youth culture can easily be used to consolidate corporate identity." | |
| 75-6 | "In a fragmented society in which major institutions like the church and the community no longer play the same role of bringing people together, owning identical possessions becomes one of the chief ways in which we experience community ..." | |
| 4 - The Roman -tic | 84 | "The Hollywood kiss embodies a central paradox of the way consumerism and its cultural industries represent romance, which is portrayed as both a gregarious activity and a reclusive one, at once communal and covert, a stage show put on for the benefit of others and an anxious struggle to regain the privacy we have lost as our love lives have been commercialized, transformed into occasions for the public display of our assets and purchasing power." |
| 85 | Dating (a completely novel concept) arose in the early 1900s, because dwellings contained only "one or two multipurpose rooms, had no parlor in which to woo, and therefore (couples) sought refuge in the public sector ..." | |
| 86 | "No longer was flirtation insulated from consumerism, (or) taking place in a room without a cash register ..." | |
| 87 | In the 19th century, it was "the porch swing and the hay ride" [RT: and sleigh ride?]. Now it's dinner at a restaurant with champagne (and cigarettes). | |
| 88-9 | Advertisements and films often show couples in mock fights. | |
| 90-2 | Sometimes the flirtation 'business' takes place in a 'nature' background. | |
| 93-4 | A genre of 'threatening' adverts imply that a wife can only keep her husband's attention by buying their product. Or that romance won't happen if you don't use their toothpaste. | |
| 95 | "By the 1960s ... an increasingly educated consumer (had become) fully aware of the false promises of advertisements ... that marital satisfaction could be purchased - as well as ruinous divorces averted - for pennies." | |
| 97 | 'Fun' ads are another type, as in "blondes have more fun ... so switch to 'Bewitch'." | |
| 99 | "This lovable triteness (i.e. mawkishness, unoriginality, e.g. in Valentine cards) suggests a basic failure of imagination, an inability to be original in the face of a disarmingly intense experience that infantilizes us, turning us into tongue-tied Romeos who express their feelings through culturally sanctioned formulae whose corniness provides a peculiar testament to the strength of our inarticulate passion." | |
| 100 | "Manufacturers have profited immensely from the topos of romantic ineloquence by pretending to come to our rescue as the ghost writers of the billet doux ..." | |
| 101 | "Pop psychology thus helps to create an atmosphere of compulsory demonstrativenesss ..." | |
| 103 | "No longer do we seduce each other through lugubrious displays of downcast solemnity, but rather through the deliriously batty antics of stand-up comedians ... (with the) madcap vivacity of a presumably adorable nuttiness." | |
| 5 - | 109 | "In a society intolerant of unconventional behavior, we have devised a symbolic method of achieving the illusion of rebelliousness by practicing controlled nonconformity." |
| Zani -ness | 111 | "Zaniness is an extremely invasive aesthetic, having spread into our conversations, which are now scripted like Cheers or Married with Children, programs whose frenetic rhythms have affected our speech, transforming our encounters with our friends and co-workers into rapid-fire exchanges of repartee." |
| 113 | "... The 'human potential' movement ... has taught us that the failure to cultivate a 'positive' attitude cause everything from cancer to demotions, from unpopularity to divorce." | |
| "Because humor has been converted into a crucial part of our culture's psychological hygiene, we now produce and consume vast amounts of unnecessary laughter with the same spirit of self-punishing discipline with which we undertake austere regimens of dieting and exercise." | ||
| 121 | "Zaniness came to embody our dazed reaction to modernity ... our failure to keep abreast of the technological advances occurring around us." | |
| 124 | "While zaniness may appear to be impulsive and exuberant, it in fact constitutes the most tribal, conformist and unspontaneous form of contemporary humor." | |
| 125 | "... Its impetus stems from the pleasure of conforming to the mindless glee of the obedient crowd, whose laughter becomes the more uproarious the more it fears the ostracism that would result from being the sole dissenters in the audience ..." | |
| 6 - The Futur- | 128 | "Manufacturers exploit our naive confusion of aesthetics with utility, instilling awe through gratuitous variations of form, that deceive us into believing that (he quotes various silly shapes and sounds) enhance performance and efficiency." |
| istic | 129 | "The futuristic creates its imagery through willful disobedience, an almost batty, aesthetic misbehavior, rather than through a genuine spirit of inventiveness ..." |
| 130 | "The fake aesthetics of utilitarianism play upon the consumers' ignorance ..." | |
| 135-9 | These pages contain a rambling rant about the aesthetics of science fiction. | |
| 143 | In the 1930s and 1940s, "our culture's obsession with speed ... led industrial designers to create an aesthetic that suggested acceleration ... by eliminating all external obstructions that caused 'drag' " - so everything had to be streamlined. | |
| 147 | Teenage video game players "are actually aesthetes in disguise" ... (who) "are also captivated by the sensual qualities of their games" - e.g. "stunning graphics". | |
| 148 | 'Quake' players "metamorphose from mild-mannered office workers into 'badass, bomb-lobbing bullies who love ... to spill blood and roll heads' ". | |
| "The aesthetic of the control panel ..." | ||
| 150 | "Science fiction is suffused with what might be called machine envy, the desire to become our appliances ..." | |
| "... We triumph over our humiliated sense of redundancy in an automated world. We do not open doors in futuristic dwellings and spacecraft, they spring open of their own volition with a pneumatic whoosh ..." - and (p 151) they often fail to work in films, so we have to blast them open. | ||
| 7 - Delici- | 154 | "The rhetoric with which advertisers make love to our tastebuds often has nothing whatsoever to do with how our (various advertised foods) really taste, but constitutes a highly fictional fantasy about how processed foods should taste in a utopian world in which imaginary farmers, rising at the crack of dawn, harvest everything from their own fields ... " |
| ousness | 155 | [RT: Predictable] "repetition of the word 'freshness' in advertisements", even for stuff in cans. |
| 156 | Freshness is "a cultural fetish in an era in which the interval between the packaging of a product and its actual consumption has been prolonged for months or even years by the miracles of refrigeration, chemical preservatives, freeze-drying, irradiation, the dehydration of vegetables and even Tupperware." | |
| 157-8 | "Chunkiness" has become a desirable feature, an attempt to strike a contrast with over "blenderized" products. An example is florets of broccoli. | |
| 160 | Futurism (as in Quaker Puffed Wheat's 'shot from guns') is now 'out'. | |
| 162 | Del Monte's 'the can that makes Summer last all year long' ... "is now the object of shame". | |
| 163 | 'Texture', however, is 'in'. | |
| 165 | "Food manufacturers take the metaphor of folk art at face value in their efforts to portray themselves as the uncompromising enemies of mass production" - not unlike the 'playfulness' of some computer software. | |
| 166 | Ads often suggest that "every bite ... is the outcome of calculated premeditation" - that includes, on p 165, 'careful selection'. | |
| "... The bustling assembly line becomes a cozy country kitchen presided over, not by a line of sullen butchers who pluck fistfuls of feathers off the carcasses of dead chickens and splatter their entrails on the floor, but by a traditional housewife in a tidy apron ..." | ||
| Ads use "a recurrent set of words that invest a level of grammatical comparison beyond the superlative" - e.g. "super supreme". | ||
| 167 | "Food manufacturers impersonate committed consumer protectionists. They set themselves up as the Real McCoy in a system overwhelmed by frauds who squabble over market share ..." | |
| 168 | Food advertisers stress 'deliciousness' just because "taste is the most indescribable of all sensory experiences". | |
| 169 | "To help us visualize deliciousness, food advertisers adopt the same techniques as pornographers", e.g. by "shoving our noses flush against Mars Bars that break hypnotically in slow motion ...". They often (e.g. p 170) add some "dirty talk", like "oh, that feels good" or "M-m-mm!". | |
| 171 | "One curious thing is missing from (food) advertisements that describe eating as a gastronomic orgy" - that's any mention about their food product's ability to satisfy hunger. | |
| 172 | Maybe mentioning hunger brings down the tone, e.g. if it emphasizes "its unglamorous utility as fodder for growling stomachs that can't tell the difference between pâté de foie gras and Spam." | |
| The "attempt to re-characterize it (the food) as an aesthetic need rather than a biological one leads food advertisers to describe their products as if they were priceless jewels and invaluable art works ..." | ||
| 175 | "The death of real cooking stimulates the aesthetic of deliciousness, which is now centered not in our mouths but in our imaginations ..." | |
| 178 | "... The beautiful and the delicious are often incompatible, despite consumerism's mistaken, if expedient, attempt to conflate the two." | |
| 8 - The Natural | 180 | "Nearly 1500 years after St Augustine and the Neo-Platonists portrayed the body as a contaminated vessel unsuited for communion with the divine, Western culture still believes that there is an inverse relation between sensuality and saintliness ..." |
| 181 | This implies "Judeo-Christian distrust of the senses, preference for the disincarnate, for 'guiltless' puddings that 'soothe' and 'nurture' rather than 'tantalize' ". | |
| "We continue to fear that such temptations will lead us into perdition ... (or) to its contemporary equivalent, the hospital ward where the wages of sin are embolisms, sarcomas and myocardial infarctions." | ||
| 182 | "That which is sensually unappealing has moral authority because the eyes and the tongue have been replaced by the conscience as the primary sensory organ of natural foods ..." | |
| 185 | 'While the natural foods movement portrays itself as the archenemy of processed foods, in fact it represents the very summit of the industrialization of the kitchen ..." | |
| 186 | "Although health foods fanatics are convinced they are going back to the garden ... they are in fact food futurists whose plates are piled, not with steaming piles of freshly-picked squash and string beans, but with copious helpings of space-age pellets." | |
| 191 | 'The so-called bowel management industry relies on the imagery of B-grade Hollywood horror flicks to depict the chimeras that feed on our intestines ..." | |
| 192 | "... The mythology that lies behind vegetarianism: that by consuming leaves, grass and flowers one is somehow casting off one's mundane self and absorbing the life, beauty and even the soul of the natural world." | |
| 193 | Such 'food animism' is not unlike Catholics' transubstantiation, dining "on the flesh and blood of their savior to know Him more personally ..." | |
| 194 | Here DH switches to "The Aesthetic of Nature Photography and the Use of Landscapes in Advertising". | |
| 195 | 'Happy families' pictures of animals with their young are popular in some ads. | |
| 197 | "Close-ups ... have promoted a 'peaceable kingdom' view of nature, a utopia that exists only on film ..." This often appears in travel adverts. | |
| 199 | "Nature photography, like food photography, is in many ways pornography ... (it) hinders our ability to enjoy our immediate surroundings, which pale in comparison with distant worlds populated by outlandish species of armadillos, aardvarks and orangutans." | |
| 202 | "The aesthetic of car advertisements is often based on dramatic contrasts between the alligators and grizzly bears that lie beyond the windows, napping at the radial tires and pawing at the hood, and the serene interiors (of our 'drawing room on wheels') in which motorists relax to the classical music from their surround-sound stereo systems ..." | |
| "The more destructive a product is to either the environment or our own bodies, the more prominently images of nature figure in the way it is advertised, as can be seen in ubiquitous billboards and subway posters for cigarettes, alcohol and cars, all of which feature picturesque waterfalls and mist-enshrouded groves of giant sequoias." | ||
| 203 | It's often an attempt to "naturalize the machine" - especially cars. | |
| 207 | "The terror we once expressed at the prospect of disasters like bubonic plagues and climate changes is now directed towards our own tools, especially towards the computer, the sinister muse of the latest animistic religion." | |
| 208 | "Images in advertisements of people soaking in bath tubs full of organic sea salts, lying in canoes, their fingers dabbling in the waters of peaceful holiday resorts, and smoking the 'best cigarette of the day', their feet propped up on the porch of a log cabin, are full of the distress and unease caused by tensions in the workplace. A Baconian scream rips through the peace of Madison Avenue's quiet clearings." | |
| Man used to take shelter from nature in man-made huts; now we take shelter from a man-made world in "a simulacrum of nature, a New Age health spa that we have created in the opposite image of the high-pressure corporate world." | ||
| 9 - Glam -ourous | 210 | "When women freeze their features with botulism injections, they are not only attempting to reverse the ravages of time but also to re-create, in flesh and blood, conventions derived from advertising and photography ..." |
| -ness | "Glowering accusingly at the reader, this alabaster work (the model's face) intimidates her (the female reader) into buying products that cosmetic companies offer us as a form of facial blackmail, the talismans she is led to believe will overcome her insecurity ..." | |
| 216-7 | The aesthetics of 'exclusion' and 'inclusion' - 'haughty' model versus 'sympathetic', 'sisterly' model. | |
| 219 | "The beguiling sweet and sisterly smiles ... do not, however, represent a genuine improvement in the coercive nature of facial politics ...: - i.e., now women can't so easily dismiss beautiful other women. | |
| 221 | "With recent emphasis on the orgasmic face, glamour has acquired an invasive new dimension ... (the model seems to be ) living more intensively than we do ..." | |
| 222 | "The whole purpose of the fashion industry has been to compel the reader to imitate the model." | |
| 223 | 'Next supermodel' competitions, and "using faces of exceptional beauty ... (and) rarity ... would seem to call into question the whole mimetic function of fashion ... (by offering) an irreplaceable object that cannot be reproduced." [RT: i.e., we'll never look like her.] | |
| 226 | "Bad posture and bad grooming are key components of contemporary glamour because they exhibit the contempt that this sylph-like slob feels for the dress she is wearing ... (she is) above posing ... above conforming to social expectations." | |
| 228 | "The more bland and uniform our clothing becomes, the more outrageously individual are the costumes in fashion magazines." | |
| 229 | "Arousal is not the primary purpose of glamour. The more appropriate response is admiration ..." | |
| 230 | "... The ultimate audience of glamour is the homosexual - the gay designer ..." etc. | |
| Glamour "is constantly morphing into the ridiculous ..." | ||
| 10 - Clean | 234 | Despite all the hyperboles of what your toilet bowl (etc) will smell (or look) like, cleanness is an 'absence'; but manufacturers try to find "a way of endowing an invisible state with a marketable set of properties." |
| -ness | 237 | Suds, "while playing an insignificant role in the actual process of laundering clothes or washing dishes, plays a major psychological role in reminding the consumer that, beneath a detergent's frothy effervescence, a purifying chemical reaction is indeed occurring." |
| 238 | But in our "ecologically correct ages", suds are de-emphasized in favour of "a wholesome-looking green fluid." | |
| 239 | "Cleanness is often (advertised through) a ghost story that instills alarm about an unspecified microbial menace ..." | |
| 241 | "Through the rhetoric of the cosmetics industry, consumerism grafts onto our bodies a second skin, a hypothetical membrane so soft, so easily damaged, that plain old soap has become altogether taboo ..." | |
| 242 | "This same hypochondriacal aesthetic of the disintegrating human pelt" is also applied to our toilets, basins etc. | |
| 245-6 | The ideal for clean surfaces seems to have become a mirror-like reflecting sheen. | |
| 249 | "The politics of the stain" - stains may be OK in old clothes and furniture, but absolutely not otherwise. | |
| 250 | "The rhetoric of germ warfare ..." | |
| 252 | "Advertisers now prefer to use the word 'wipe' instead of 'scrub'." | |
| 253 | "Manufacturers have created containers that place as much distance as possible between the consumer and the cleaning fluid, which was first poured, then squirted and now misted by atomizers that allow us to remain dry, thus protecting our aesthetic integrity." | |
| 256 | "Whereas the old-fashioned odalisque used bathing as a means of preparing their body to be used by men, the new corporate odalisque immerses herself in soothing sea salts and packs on mud facials as an expression of her autonomy and self-respect." | |
| 257 | "By universalizing the experience of infantile messiness and offering the consumer a kind of collective wink, advertisers defuse our paroxysms of rage ... (and) implicitly characterize themselves as saviors." | |
| 259 | "Messiness only occurs in a culture that owns too many things ..." | |
| 260 | "If cleanness provides a psychological placebo for mess, another technique for encouraging consumption in the age of bursting closets is to blame the victim" - not for buying too much, but for being "undisciplined and careless". | |
| 261 | So the implication is that we should throw out more things more often, in order to make room for yet more purchases. | |
| "Throwing things out is the reverse side of consuming, the Shiva principle of capitalism, the spirit of destruction without which there could be no creation, no production." | ||
| After -word | 265 | DH has no "program for reform", but asks "What, after all, would a world without consumerism be like? Surely not one that I myself would choose to live in. There would be no cities because cities are dependent on trade, nor money because there would be nothing to buy." |
| "To imagine a world without consumerism is to erase myself, to devolve [RT: he means go backwards] through eons of human progress back to an era in which all of our time would have been devoted to scrabbling in the dust for roots and berries, with not a second to spare for making art of reading literature, let alone for writing ungrateful diatribes attacking the very society that has made my life and its manifold comforts possible." |
A critic of Harris's earlier book, 'The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture', said "This book is a triumph of thinking over sentimentality and weak-mindedness". I'd say this applies to this book as well, aided by a prose style of seductive and voluptuous purpleness (like this attempt!).
Index to more highlights of interesting books
Some of these links may be under construction – or re-construction.
This version updated on 10th October 2012
If you have constructive suggestions or comments, please contact the author rogertag@tpg.com.au .