Ideas are shit, but we can offer you dessert or a vacation with swimsuits and smiles

When my landlady in Paris years ago threw out all of my books because she was not willing to wait for me to return and terminate my lease, which I had merely told her I was planning to do in the near future, she informed me in her superficially friendly way that she would be happy to give me some of her books on food and travel. A book is a book, after all, and anyway, food, travel, and other luxuries that people like her enjoy after collecting their income from people like me, these things are nice and have a value she is happy to grant. While the scholarly books I had were, of course, to her, nothing but shit.

I think this still rankles me so many years later because it marks for me the attitude of so many people. Business and certain pleasures are normal, intellectual pursuits are shit. What she did and throwing those books onto the street is actually to me a way of shitting on my face. That's what she did. It still makes me angry, because of the principle involved. I think the world I live in largely operates on such principles.

And I remembered how (excessively) nice she had seemed when I met her, a niceness I could imagine, with her mediterranean smile, that she was prepared to demand from me and thus enforce. A certain kind of "lady." In America, I associate this with conservative parts of Southern California and the South with its "Southern Belle" nonsense.

I can shit on the face of some people less economically (they wind up winning on that score) but more eloquently, and so I do.