11/23 - Super Quickie

As promised.

L1:  Ummm... Topical letter is topical? Far be it from me to go insisting that a LW report abuse, but really this one seems to be dragging the bottom of the barrel for reasons to avoid doing so.

L3:  One thousand dollars for a sense of loss over an item that had been sitting unregarded for forty years? We need not even say anything about the markup. It really is a bit too ridiculous to justify giving this letter serious consideration. On a smaller scale in reverse, it reminds me a bit of Mansfield Park when William Price leaves Mansfield. Mrs Norris, who, having begun her career of conjugal felicity on very little less than a thousand a year, had found herself forced to "economize" in widowhood after having always had a close and grasping relationship with cash and other goods (her portion in the great expense of raising her sister Price's daughter having been confined to the writing of the letters while it was her sister Bertram who dispatched money and provided Fanny with bed and board and her appropriation of the green baize curtain after the abandoned theatricals spring to mind), congratulates herself on having given William "something considerable," which pleases Lady Bertram. It is open to interpretation how genuine Lady Bertram is being when she proclaims herself pleased by her sister's "considerable" gift, having herself given William only ten pounds (Sir Thomas said ten pounds would be sufficient). Mrs Norris, appropriately, reddens.

L4:  Oh, good grief, how on earth did any child ever survive without his hands being sanitized seventeen times an hour for hundreds of years? And what on earth is the Prudecutor doing invoking Oscar Wilde, of all people? Does she hold that Mr Wilde was indulging in something in his writing that strikes her as the equivalent of spitting on a slide? Does she think he was so in love with his own wit that he would automatically find even his most juvenile output to be the wittiest thing ever written? I am absolutely convinced that there is a definite insult intended, and I would protest at considerable length had I time.

L2:  Well, LW2, who died and made you Cleopatra? or Quinn Morgendorffer? Is it possible that all your husband's intellectual energy is so completely taken up in being such a good husband to you in so many ways that, when the hour of leisure arrives, he has nothing left for anything more intellectually challenging than forms of entertainment so well suited to simpletons? That a wife and mother should have enough intellectual wherewithal left over to be ready, able and willing to discuss geopolitics at the dinner table suggests an inequality in the proportion of effort the participants contribute to the marriage. At the very least, LW2 appears to accept all that H2 does as her/his due (as evidenced by feeling cheated out of stimulating intellectual conversation) without listing anything by way of reciprocation. And what on earth H2's childhood has to do with L2's problem?

Now for the Prudecutor. Why is the probability that LW2 can't do any better than H2 on the open market supposed to convince her that a relationship she finds intolerable ought not to be chucked? But, mainly, what on earth is up with the assumption that ALL EGGHEADS ARE TERRIBLE IN BED??? There was just a lovely thread on Savage Love with discussion of false dichotomies, including comments concerning the idea that one could be strong intellectually or emotionally but not both. This is too bad, as the Prudecutor was actually in much better form in her conclusions than usual. Sadly, such a bloomer wipes out a lot of credit.

As for the situation, I have been in a situation similar to that of LW2's in that most of the things I'd particularly enjoy discussing in great detail might be of interest to perhaps seven people out of every severy billion. Had I ever had LW2's requirement of someone who would share all my dearest interests, I'd never have Retired From Romance as I'd never have started. But LW2 manifests a distinct incapacity to take interest in other pursuits, which signals to me a distinct intellectual failing on her part. In fact, I shall build on this and diagnose that this is why she married someone in the first place who did not provide her with her usual strongest turn-on. I surmise that LW2 wasn't up to her intellectual companions. Because she could not keep up with them, she married someone who could never make her feel inferiour. And now here are all her chickens, back home and roosting away.

Moral:  "You mean you can't take less," said the Hatter: "it's very easy to take more than nothing."