“Wives are lonelier now than they ever used to be. In older, gentler times, when age still had its privileges, the old folks never harbored any guilt feelings about being a drag on the young.”
“As its title indicates, Americans View Their Mental Health is concerned with self-diagnosis, with people’s own estimates of their well-being and their troubles. Such estimates are apt to be colored by defenses and failures of insight, but the authors are right in emphasizing their relevance to the study of mental health, since it is subjective evaluations which decide what the ordinary person does about his emotional difficulties”
“This realization has placed new and complex responsibilities on parents, teachers, and community services. Many parents are now well aware how much their presence or absence, their words, their actions, indeed, their whole emotional state affect their children. This is an important gain.”
“Girls do not lag far behind boys in early adoption of smoking, but the boys appear to be consistently heavier smokers. Adolescent smoking is by no means a recent phenomenon, yet the last decade has seen a highly accelerated shift to an earlier age for beginning smoking, and young teen-agers characteristically smoke cigarettes only.”
*And of course Kenneth Cosgrove on the craft of tapping a mapple trees in Vermont!
And softly, with that marvelous swoon-like caress of his hand in pure soft desire, softly he stroked the silky white slope of her lions, down, down between her soft warm buttocks, coming near and nearer to the very quick of her. And she felt him like a flame of desire, yet tender, and she felt herself melting in the flame. She let herself go into it. She yielded with a quiver that was like death, she went all open to him.
The notorious novel by D.H. Lawrence was originally published in 1928. It was panned by critics who dismissed the work as smut. Beyond containing some naughty Anglo-Saxon slang (rhymes duck and runt), it was the themes of the work — sexual liberation, the crushing heel of marriage, and the securing one’s individuality through sexual relationships— that made European and American censors squirm.
In 1959, thirty years after his death, the novel was re-released. It was a sensation. Within a year Lady Chatterley’s Lover sold two million copies, outselling even the Bible.
Penguin was then accused of breaking obscenity laws in England by publishing the book. The prosecution argued that there was no artistic merit in distributing such morally dubious prose and that the novel was just pornography. To defend the artistic merits of the piece Dame Rebecca West, EM Forster and Richard Hoggart took the stand.
The prosecution failed to make a substantial case against the novel and at one point prosecution counsel asked the jury: “Is it a book you would wish your wife or servants to read?”
“Still, [her friends] could tell that Kay was not as sure of him as she pretended she was; sometimes he did not write for weeks, while poor Kay went on whistling in the dark.”
“A society person who is enthusiastic about modern painting or Truman Capote is already half a traitor to his class. It is middle-class people who, quite mistakenly, imagine that a lively pursuit of the latest in reading and painting will advance their status in the world.” - Mary McCarthy, author of ‘The Group’. From her essay ‘Up the Ladder.”
Hmm.
So when is Betty going to read 1963’s The Bell Jar?
Rome, you guys, it’s a theme! Remember when Rome popped up earlier in this sumptuous season?
Sally lisps adorably over this passage from The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon’s master work on the ancient society:
“The Praetorian bands, whose licentious fury was the first symptom and cause of the decline of the Roman empire…”
The Praetorian were body guards, plucked out of the Roman army, to protect the Emperor (You may know one of these men by the name of Mark Anthony). It’s a bit of a stretch to call the Sterling Cooper employees “soldiers”, but they have already taken a casualty this season (poor Guy!), and they have the ego to consider themselves shapers of the masses. Didn’t turn out so well for Rome. Let’s see how it turns out on Mad Men.
“No matter how much you know, no matter how much you think, no matter how much you plot and you connive and you plan, you’re not superior to sex. It’s a very risky game. A man wouldn’t have two-thirds of the problems he has if he didn’t venture off to get fucked. It’s sex that disorders our normally ordered lives.” — Philip Roth, The Dying Animal.
Roth and Weiner seem to have a rapport on this particular point.
"She [Merry] watched in silence, as still as the monk at the center of the flames, and afterward she would say nothing; even if he spoke to her, questioned her, she just sat transfixed before that set for minutes on end, her gaze focused somewhere else than on the flickering screen, focused inward — inward where the coherence and the certainty were supposed to be, where everything she did not know was initiating a gigantic upheaval, where nothing that registered would ever fade away…."
![“Still, [her friends] could tell that Kay was not as sure of him as she pretended she was; sometimes he did not write for weeks, while poor Kay went on whistling in the dark.”
• footnote - by Natasha Simons](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ks1wkjUopJ1qzlum5o1_400.jpg)
