Oh Yeah? Caveat Totebagger!
posted by Lillet Langtry @ 10:14 AM
7 comments
Totebaggery
Being a catalogue of instances of the totebaggery that threatens the very fabric of our everyday life
Being a catalogue of instances of the totebaggery that threatens the very fabric of our everyday life
7 Comments:
What? I don't even warrant a detailed comment?
Nope!
OK...you only need a 145 IQ for mensa? I thought they were picky. I have always disliked mensa...they are a bunch of snooty bastards with inferiority complexes and way too many psychosis under that "I'm brilliant so I can be an insufferable ass" veneer.
Anyway? Am I a "totebagger"?
You guy-y-y-y-eees!
Hitting Leonard Lopate, the Sunday Times, Mensa, and Owen Flanagan is one thing. It's a good thing! Each holds in some way a position of some social influence (ok, well, poor Owen wishes). They represent, in every sense of "represent," the people who mindlessly buy into their shtick and memorize obvious middlebrow cues from them. And those blissfully smug idiot followers have no idea how impoverished rather than, as they smirkingly believe, enriched their lives are from taking those cues.
But Andrew Purvis and Aurora Robson, for chrissakes?
By not distinguishing between totebaggers who are obviously the lamentable victims and mere reflectors of the totebaggery of their betters, on the one hand, and totebaggers who are serious and threatening and influential factors of totebaggery, whose totebaggery is a widespread source of mimicry, on the other, you risk appearing . . . well, cruel.
Uh, not that there's anything wrong with that.
But is it seemly to pad the account of a Grand Safari with itemized descriptions of rodents brained by the stock of your elephant gun as you went crunching past?
Of course, Lillet, to be fair to you, all you've done is point at Purvis. That gesture, by itself, can't be that great a crime. I think the over-the-top quality might have entered in via the two periods stuck between the three words.
And, ok, that seems like caviling.
So, well, never mind. Twist in the wind, Andrew Purvis, you . . . totebagger!
Well now, Ms. Robson is a special case, but I can't tell you why. Suffice it to say -- it's personal.
I have nothing personal against Mr. Purvis -- except that my reaction to his "Running On Entry" was that it was pretty totebaggy, and, well, it was pretty totebaggy. C'est tout.
Memorizing middle brow cues -- even pretentiousness -- has its uses, as a kind of antithesis in the dialectic of personal growth. When I was a young girl, growing up in Kansas -- listening to Kansas -- I thought that the General Foods International Coffees ads were the height of sophistication. In some way, they resonated with the part of my young girl psyche that longed to know more about the world. In a 13 year old, this is kind of sweet. In a 40-year old business traveller, explaining self-satisfiedly to his partner on line at the Starbucks that the caramel latte is really "the bomb" is, well, ewwwwww.
But we shall redirect our attentions to more public examples, for now.
oh, don't listen to me!
what are you doing up at 6:37 AM?
i do like hearing stories about your youth in kansas.
I found the problem, and it had been staring me in the face all along. It's the acronym. You see, I contracted TB (the lung thing) when I was two or three, and somehow my writing got confused here more than three decades later.
Oh well, I'll probably take it in the totebag each week. For now, I'll peer in on my companions.
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