An Entire Universe of Botched Reciprocity
Laura Kipnis: “Among the cul-de-sacs of modern coupledom is that the intimacy you once craved with a beloved also requires ongoing proximity to another needy human’s most jaggedly uncensored self, which is likely to be exactly what ends up putting you off them. Their deepest selves turn out to be rigid, angry, lying, and petty; they’re a bottomless well of hurt wrapped in sarcasm. There’s such a thing as getting to know someone too well, knowledge which can, of course, be weaponized, not to mention transcribed for literary posterity.”
Ronald Hutton: “Both Jews and Christians were noted for their extraordinary dislike of the human body and their aversion to its display. The Greek gymnasium in particular disgusted them. This makes it all the more remarkable that contemporary testimony strongly suggests that converts to Judaism were baptized nude and makes it absolutely certain that Christian baptism in the early churches was very much a reception into a mystery religion. The postulant had to prepare for two years and enter into an intensive period of fasting and prayer during the final seven weeks. The actual rite was a private one among a circle of initiates in which the postulant removed all his or her clothes, was anointed in holy oil and immersed in water and then dressed anew in white. It was directed that in the case of a woman, another female should do the anointing, which had to be at several points of the body. If there was no other woman available, however, the priest had to do it. There is a cautionary tale of a Palestinian monk called Conan the Bashful who had to baptize a particularly beautiful woman and could not find a female Christian to help him. He fled in panic, only to be intercepted by John the Baptist, come down from heaven, who helpfully signed his genitals with the cross three times and so made him permanently impotent. After that, he got on just fine with his job.”
Stephen Follows (2017): “When I was a film student in the early 2000s we were told that only fools put ‘Filmmaker’ on their business card and identify it as their profession. Being a ‘filmmaker’ was not a job, no-one hired filmmakers and it just revealed the naive nature of the individual involved. […] There was no route for the lone filmmaker (unless you were rich). I distinctly remember a tutor telling my fellow film student Chris that ‘If you want to put a sign on your bedroom door which reads Filmmaker then that’s fine but it’s not a job’. Fifteen years later and it’s possible that a significant proportion of the highest paid filmmakers under 25 years-old are creating their content out of their bedrooms, by themselves. And they are doing this without the need to raise large sums of money up front and without the need for permission from any film industry gatekeepers. The role of ‘Filmmaker’ is no longer a delusion of keen film students – it’s a career option.”
