I walked out of The 40-Year-Old Virgin pleased but also unblemished. The film is unremittingly sweet-natured about its scatology, not unlike Anchorman or Farrelly brothers’ goofiness. (This isn’t really a post about verdicts, but: I’d recommend it, but the film is never as delirious as Ferrell or Farrelly can get, and far from the exuberant heights of Parker & Stone or The Aristocrats.) But I’m curious about unpacking a little of the alleged return of the hard “R,” or the (now decades–or is it centuries?–old) “return” to the irreverently bawdy.
But rather than the neat either/or that pops up in so many reviews (is crude, or is compassionate, and on rare occasions like Carell’s movie is both) I was wondering if we could get at a bit broader range of options for examining the games obscenity lets us play. I’ll start.
One way in might be to start to define the kinds and types of obscene, outrageous comedies we know. Within a 24-hour stretch, I saw Aristocrats and Virgin, so some quick quasi-categorical thoughts:
–Obscenity is the perfect test case for comedy as an inclusive genre. It lends itself to both sides of the argument, which go something like this: comedy needs a target, someone not in on–or actively the butt of–the joke to work; its dynamic depends on exclusion, and creates as by-product the ‘group’ who gets it. Those people at the art theater who laugh at the right places. (In some ways, the “Aristocrats” suggests not just a silly mockery by combining pretensions to elite status with the basest vilest bodily functions, it creates a kind of aristocracy in those who a) can tell the joke well and b) accept the joke’s furthest reaches to offend without flinching. Like a game of bloody knuckles: flinch and you’re out of the club.) Even more troubling, exclusion can be a kind of Bergsonian criticism of the different, the marginalized–an aggressive act of authority, a laughing at which depends on disempowerment. Blah blah.
But even as I can recognize this clubbiness, these power games, I’m like so many of us an acolyte of the prophet Kincaid. I prefer to see the Aristocrats–the film, and the joke, and the family at the heart (yes, heart) of the joke–as wonderfully, generously inclusive. Everything can go in the joke, and everyone–yes, even the child-fucking fecophiliac–can be an aristocrat. All that’s asked is that you laugh along, join in the game. And even if laughing involves joining, it’s the easiest club in the world to get into.
Obscenity matters, then, because its spirit and form is so ruthlessly, rigorously dedicated to testing the limits of our inclusivity, and ruthlessly, riotously cajoling us into rejecting all limits.
–Thought two is a little tougher. As I noted in the earlier post, I got a little frustrated at howAristocrats to some degree sidestepped really digging at our safe spots. How ‘ruthlessly inclusive’ is it to laugh at piss and shit jokes? Not very. The race stuff–damned interesting, and … aside from two, three really troubling jokes (one using the punchline “Nigger Cunts,” which provoked an audible silence in our theater), avoided. Only a couple people really played with how uncomfortable the joke could be. (Sarah Silverman is, as I see it, a god.) Jeff noted this to me, after the film, and our coitus: the film almost played it a little safe, being obscene about matters that don’t necessarily seem taboo to the kinds of people who are likely to see the film.
The same could be said about Virgin, all the way through. It’s a perfect (and I mean this as both compliment and slight qualification) example of the sentimental excremental. While this makes the film’s pleasure in a dozens-like game of “I Know You’re Gay ‘Cause” sweetly dismissive of Red-State homophobia, it also doesn’t really challenge the way my favorite kinds of obscenity does.
Happiness has come up here before; I’d emphasize again that I think that film could be read as one cruel example of exclusive laughing-at after another, OR it could be a very risky, high-wire game of how inclusive can you be. When the pedophiliac father tries to drug his family’s tunafish snacks, so that he can “seduce” (rape) his boy’s little friend, there’s a weird bit of sitcommy farcical play–the father’s interrupted by his nattering wife, he spills the narcotics, … a kind of momentum builds up where we’re encouraged to root for him, to see these interruptions as frustrations of desire, and comedy–we might argue–is built on the gameful tease where obstacles seem to block desire, but desire vehemently fights on anyway (and, usually, wins out at text’s end).
Another tough-minded example is In the Company of Men. But I’ll let others talk. Or let this stand as another of my insular posts.
It is a odd to have this discussion take place in two separate threads. Mike deserves a response to his attempt to broaden the discussion of obscenity beyond ‘Aristocrats’ but I’ll stick to that particular movie. Just two comments.
First, I don’t see it as tame or pulling punches. I’m not sure there is a greater taboo today in the United States than sex with children, and most versions of the joke involve sex with children. The moments of silence or squirming in the movie theater when I watched the film were when Gilbert Gottfried described having an entire forearm up a young girl, and when the guy in the public restroom (I don’t know who he is) talked at length about a young girl performing oral sex on her father. There may be some audience for whom this is tame, but the Aristocrats has made $1.6m playing on 80-something screens, so it’s a sizable elite.
The absence of references to race tells us that the comedic profession, like most others, is racially segregated, not that the documentary makers shied away from racial material for fear of giving offense. Shouting “nigger†in a crowded movie theater hasn’t been daring since 1977 (it may still be daring on a college campus, but that says more about college campuses than it does about the general culture).
Second, while the initial attraction of the documentary may be its promise of shock value (and that is certainly part of the reason I went), the enduring appeal is almost anthropological. It is watching how comedy is produced. It is listening to the way members of a (no doubt self-selected, white, male, maybe Jewish) community talk to each other.
This joke is the fish story of comedians, and it allows comedians to measure themselves against each other, to borrow from the past while continually elaborating on a common theme (sort of like most discussions in the hotel bar at an academic convention, but funnier). In that sense it is, as Mike says, a form of exclusivity, a language insiders tell each other to be part of the club. But above all, as a viewer, it was watching the craft of comedy that was fascinating; if the documentary was simply one long obscene joke, I’m not sure it would have the appeal that it does.
I was going to start another thread about whether we needed two threads for this, but … nah. I thought maybe–by opening up to issues of obscenity–even those who haven’t yet seen (or won’t be seeing) Aristocrats might join in. And perhaps they might.
Chris’ response is damn good. I’ll note–as did Jeff–I liked the movie, found it as funny as it was smart. But the search for ‘holes’ or hanging chads (or any kind of thing that didn’t seem as fully explored or examined in the doc) is mostly a way to examine what issues surround, pop up in, permeate the film and our thinking about it. I.e., just trying to get a conversation running.
Your first point, Chris, is well-taken: yeah, the film definitely takes chances. I picked up a friend at the airport yesterday, and as I drove him home we talked about the movie. I said roughly what I’ve said here–very funny, smart, but maybe it didn’t take enough chances. And my friend snorted and said, “Mike, only you could think that pedophilia and shit-eating was playing it safe.”
The movie does not only play with that perhaps most taboo of American anxieties–pedophilia–most of the comics don’t tiptoe in, don’t set it up or wince or seem nervous–they dive right in, as if anything goes. And when comics do frame the joke in a manner that highlights our discomfort with pedophilia–like Silverman, or Richter and Stanhope telling the joke to their toddlers at the end–they hit exactly that note of uncomfortable laughter I was discussing.
I’m not as sold about your defense of its sidestepping race. Sure, the comic profession is segregated. Just as certainly, the documentary a) seeks out “other” voices in a couple instances, in a manner that makes those non-white, even the non-male, comics seem very ‘other’. C’mon, you’re telling me that Bernie Mac, Cedric, Hughley, Chappelle, Lopez, deGeneres — and here I’m just naming very mainstream figures — couldn’t be considered? Instead, there’s a tendency to reach back into the long history of stand-up with Diller, Storch, McCann. I liked the history… but I also would have liked to push on the point the seemingly-angry Rock made, about how this history has so marginalized certain kinds of difference, even as the joke so ostensibly violates and ignores our social boundaries. I’m curious about those boundaries the joke-tellers tend to leave in place, or leave invisible.
I do NOT think the filmmakers shied away; I think they had other foci or they just didn’t see the issue as crucial in the way I do.
Your second point–anthropology. That’s pretty interesting, and I like that way of examining. But comedy–and the way many of these comics perform, and some of them examine their comedy–is also explicitly sociological and psychological in its dynamic. A joke, particularly one like “The Aristocrats,” won’t work without some complex understanding of social mores, the audience, of psychological mechanisms, etc. In short, a documentary about telling a joke is like a little textbook on the nature of discourse, the work/labor of the discoursers, and the psycho-social implications of audience reception.
Or, to pull it out of acad-wanking talk, a joke is meant much more viscerally than other genres some kind of explicit audience engagement–in the form of a laugh, and with this joke also in the form of social discomfort. To only look at anthropology would be to set aside a rich body of complications we could really enjoy…
Or, even more briefly put, why the hell do I laugh when I laugh? Or not laugh when I don’t? How does obscenity work on US (and not just “in America” or as a tool of the trade)?
I just don’t buy the “members only†take on comedy (or the conflation of comedy and joke-telling, for that matter). Let me put in my two cents worth and see who bites (how’s that for a mixed metaphor?). Be warned! Some viewers may perceive the following as acad-wanking talk!
Take an example, from “Beavis and Butthead†(not really from “Beavis and Butthead,†I’m just making it up). The teacher says to the class, “it’s important to be a responsible member of society†and Butthead utters, “heh heh…member.†Beavis laughs, the class laughs, the teacher gets angry, so on and so on. The passive understanding that “the teacher is excluded†is only an abstract aspect of the actual whole of actively responsive understanding. The teacher takes an active, responsive attitude towards the utterance. He excludes himself. But why? Because the classroom is a sphere of language, a speech genre, and the teacher fails or refuses to see that speech genres are subject to free creative reformulation.
In language, there are no truly included and excluded, only varieties of responses. That’s not to say there is no exclusion. For instance, Mike didn’t invite me to his wedding (but that’s because he’s an asshole).
Here’s Bakhtin:
“Many people who have an excellent command of a language often feel quite helpless in certain spheres of communication precisely because they do not have a practical command of the generic forms used in the given spheres. Frequently a person who has an excellent command of speech in some areas of cultural communication, who is able to read a scholarly paper or engage in a scholarly discussion, who speaks very well on social questions, is silent or very awkward in social conversation. Here it is not a matter of an impoverished vocabulary or of style, taken abstractly: this is entirely a matter of the inability to command a repertoire of genres of social conversation, the lack of a sufficient supply of those ideas about the whole of the utterance that help to cast one’s speech quickly and naturally in certain compositional and stylistic forms, the inability to grasp a word promptly, to begin and end correctly…The better command of genres, the more freely we employ them, the more fully and clearly we reveal our own individuality in them, the more flexibly and precisely we reflect the unrepeatable situation of communication—in a word, the more perfectly we implement our free speech plan.â€
Again, this is not to say that people don’t try to exclude others with jokes. But why not instead say that this is more a matter of Power pressing into service the dynamics of joke-telling?
Arbitrarily, I’m all for academic wanking on this and most all internet sites with an average readership of 15 to 100, but if any of us (myself included) end up on a DVD commentary track in the not too distant future . . .
Speaking of “Group discussion on what’s funny” = why on earth was the footage of the Onion staff used? They didn’t say a single funny thing – except the blackface/feces on face bit – but that was after hearing them TRY to come up with something funny in four different segments.
My brief take – in that I care little about the discussion Reynolds has fostered – is that I wish more people had just TOLD the joke as opposed to trying to analyze it. Chuck McCann was very funny. The other old guy – I’m ashamed to say I dont know who it is, whose version included Daisy, the 800 lb gorilla from the Belgian Congo, was VERY funny (Who was that?). Martin Mull told a good one – as I knew he would. The woman who fearlessly DID tell it on stage was quite good. Sarah Silvermann – of course. (I have an MP3 of her on Conan doing racist jokes. It’s fantastic.)
But I didn’t like all the back-and-forth interruptions. It seemed like the comedians were often put on the spot, and then would go into a pretty awful telling of it. Saget could have been funny if he’d gone for it instead of saying “Why am I doing this?!” and if they wouldn’t have kept cutting back and forth so much – same with Gilbert’s footage from the roast. And what’s up with NOT showing Gilbert’s telling of his funny – but stolen from Howard Stern* – Sept. 11 joke?! THAT, my friends, is a wimpy decision on Penn/provenza’s part. I hate to go into the funny/not-funny bit, but two more:
Stanhope/Richter telling to their children was funny.
Jake Johannsen – one of my favorite comics: Not funny.
And Chris Rock’s comment about vaudeville and the chitlin circuit of course brought to my mind one of my favorite comedies of any year, Spike Lee’s Bamboozled; a great examination of race, comedy, audience psychology, what’s OK to laugh at, and so on.
————–
* After an Air Florida jet leaving Wash. Nat’l airport crashed into the 14th St. Bridge in Jan 82, killing scores, Stern called their ticket office on air the next morning. He asked what the fare was for a one-way ticket from Washington National Airport to the 14th Street Bridge.
Am I the first person to use footnotes on the blog? Can I have another degree?
Mark, Gottfried’s joke was that he couldn’t get a non-stop flight to California, because they had to stop at the Empire State Building first. How is that a rip-off? C’mon!
You want stole? Milton Berle, the Thief of Bad Gags, stole my bit about the doctor with no legs. Hey, too bad Uncle Miltie didn’t live long enought to do his version of “The Aristocrats” for the documentary. I heard him tell it at a party thrown for Buddy Feyne, back in 1955. It involved the usual (anal rape, the whole magilla). To top it all off, he unzipped his trousers, dunked his enormous cock in the spinach dip, and with it drew a swastika on one of the June Taylor dancers.
Hey Michael, do you still have that Milton Berle exercise video I gave you?
The old guy doing the version with Daisy in the Belgian Congo–Larry Storch, of “F Troop” fame….
No! I remember what Larry Storch looked like in the movie… But that was him?! Doing the British accent? And saying it’s ok he’s fucking the gorilla, b/c if there are any children they’ll raise them Christian?! That was a great telling.
What out there is obscene these days (if anything)? Sure certain porn films, postmodern art, bad Bret Easton Ellis novels? But if obscenity matters, where is it? Yes, I thought the tuna sandwich sequence in Happiness was brilliant, but you had to suffer through so much dreck (PS Hoffman shooting his wad onto the wall was like a classic Jerry Bruckheimer moment–albeit in an indie film). As far as the pedophilia goes, The Aristocrats offers us up descriptions that are so far over the top that they come off has empty, rhetorical spectacle (L.I.E. is far more uncomfortable about the subject). I think the threat of pedophilia and/or incest in Aristocrats gets lost in the exuberant patina of performance. The most obscene film I can think of is John Water’s Pink Flamingos: Divine’s character giving her son a blowjob, the dog shit snack, and–the most obscene moment for me in the film–Edith Massey sitting in a baby crib wearing a bra with scrambled eggs all over her chest. Raunch and obscenity are not one in the same, yes?
John,
Yes, I still have the Berle video–but it’s lost among a pile of other celebrity exercise videos: Buddy Hackett’s Pilates, Phyllis Diller’s Butt Tightening Workout, Marty Allen’s Blast Your Abs and Jackie Mason’s Yoga for Schmendricks.
Bringing this back to the other film, The 40 Year Old Virgin; I enjoyed this film a lot. I would never believe that Katherine Keener is as NICE as she appeared in this film – I much prefer the Being John Malkovich version of her, but there are a lot of genuine laughs, in here, more than in Anchorman I think. But I realize that Anchorman is one of those films that can probably be revisited several times, and actually get funnier. I’m not sure Virgin would be able to do this.
However, the film’s real charm is the same of Freaks & Geeks though in not quite as pure a dose; the audience is able to empathize with the awfully uncomfortable predicament of the character. And that’s got to be a lot harder to do with this story than the more more typical high-school traumas dealt with in Freaks & Geeks. The
Why Seth Rogen isn’t on TV every week in a sit-com, playing the same character he always plays is a mystery. This guy could care less about being type-cast. He’s really funny doing what he does, and should have a show to just keep doing it.
I agree about Virgin–perhaps comparisons to Anchorman are unfair, or wrong-headed. The former is, as you nail it, a character study; the latter is a cartoon. I could imagine watching a weekly series with those characters, while Rod Burgundy is just fine in one showing (which we bring out and re-watch whenever drunk or sad or drunk and sad).
I’ll second your claim about Rogen. And Apatow–why the hell is he not putting out tv series like Bochco and Kelley? If people are interested, the show Undeclared which was pretty damn good finally came out this month on dvd, and it’s got the same provenance as Freaks, although more explicitly a comedy. It also has Rogen, playing Rogen; he also wrote a very funny episode.
Well, two failed TV series – neither lasting an entire season – is why Apatow isn’t putting out more TV. I kind of disagree about Undeclared. Not only was it weaker, and it’d be nearly impossible not to be, I remember that it smacked of pandering to its perceived audience in a way Freaks never did. Maybe it was, as you say, more explicitly a comedy, but he probably felt it was last shot at a series too, and wanted to be successful more than be critically acclaimed. And without the writing of Paul Feig, too.
Is summer over? Must be, b/c there’s suddenly a movie or two every week I want to see. This week, one of my favorite Le Carre novels – and actors – in Constant Gardener, and Terry Gilliam – though the trailers look awful; so what?
Then more Tim Burton animation, and Elijah Wood continues to try to destory his hobbit-ness with Hooligans. Watching Gary Oldman in The Firm made me remember how much I was amazed by Bill Bruford’s book Among the Thugs. Hooligans may be as close to a film version of it as we get. Plus Claire Forlani, hummana hummana.
I enjoyed this film a great deal. The ending was excellent. It’s the kind of ending that makes me slightly sick in the stomach becuse I wish I could be up there, singing “Age of the Aquarius” with them. Or, more likely, becuase I wish I had written that.
This film is never weak, never boring. Romany Malco is fantastic. Jane Lynch nails it. The dad and son at the health clinic are good (“Who are you kidding? We were at temple!”).
I especially enjoyed watching people walk out on it. The first few minutes are pretty cute, and although the film was already beginning to puzzle the out-walkers, they stuck it out. That is, until the horse fucking scene. Then, for the next several minutes, the word “pussy” was used at least 30 times. And out they walked, the out-walkers.
I think Carell’s strong suit is not obscenity (though it’s clear he can handle it better than those comics who make their names from it). But Carell is much funnier, and much more intersting, eating Crisco. And playing the baritone in his bedroom. And screaming in pain (all kinds of pain).
I suppose the out-walkers will complain the film was obscene. All that “pussy talk” made them uncomfortable. But I think the real problem was that nothing made them comfortable. There was no place to rest, no character with whom to float along safely. Obscenity wasn’t the only thing going in this film (anyway, who can sustain obscenity? Even when you compile the best boners of 2003, you find yourself tired of it and ready to pass it along to your friend), and the filmmakers know obscentiy isn’t the only game in town, the only form of danger.
Yes, the film does steer away from the obscene, the scatological. But not because it wants to play it safe. Anyway, what’s done is done. The horse-fucking bit is there, and no emerging love plot can take it away. The subtle games with pain, shame, and anxiety is what this film is aiming for. Yes, the puke on the face is great. But the film knows that one should follow a good puke gag with an even better one-liner: “I guess I had that coming.”
That’s not to say there’s a shartage of a nuaghty bits. For a complete list, check this out (and who compiled this? for what purpose? to protect or to linger?):
http://www.screenit.com/movies/2005/the_40_year_old_virgin.html
Let’s keep the obscenity discussion going. It’s good stuff…
Wow, that is a great, generous, thoroughly smart “quick take” on Virgin; thanks, John, ’cause it really helped me reconsider my initial amiable but dismissive comments.
In particular, you made me think about shame in relation to obscenity–while Carell et al. emphasize the experience of shame, communing with the audience’s discomfort, Aristocrats seems more interested in the pursuit of shamelessness, about some ability to escape the discomforts (or to admit the comforts) aroused by the joke’s excesses. (And then you can again imagine two distinct readings of that shamelessness–as comics/elites lording it over those who foolishly accept or feel shame; or comics inviting us along, to use the joke to challenge the primacy of shame and guilt in our culture, our psyches.)
Another distinction between the two films springs to mind: Virgin in many literal and figurative ways emphasizes embodiment, an embeddedness in the physical experience of “obscenity” or the grotesque or whatever; Aristocrats is at play with the (strange) authority of concepts over bodies, over physical and psychological ‘realities’… that merely talking about such matters might have material impact is both exploited and mockingly derided.
Throw it back to you, John: what’s the relationship between shame, guilt, pain and obscenity? I don’t think we need to turn to Bob Flanagan nailing his penis to a board to imagine the intersections, but how would you characterize or distinguish these respective “danger” zones in comedy?
I think you’re already onto a good answer, Mike. The relation is that shame, guilt, pain, obscenity are things we are least willing (or able) to share with others. All are private. A film that invites us to share in any or all of these is bound to produce discomfort. Wonderful discomfort!
I have no idea where to take this idea next, but let me try. I’ll start with shame. We watch films as silent, but far from passive, observers. Through the use of various techniques (editing, camera angles, etc.) a film can and will heighten our expectations and then meet them head-on, thus reassuring us that we will never be surprised or ambushed. In short, we are protected from whatever might be unfolding onscreen, no matter how ugly, painful, or sad. Take a film like Bogdanovich’s “Mask‖a very moving story of a mother and his disfigured boy. As uncomfortable as this film is at times, we are always on the right side of judgment, always protected from various unpleasant responses that might otherwise arise (and generally do in other characters who are then swiftly, and justly, punished). The problem is, the film never puts us in a position where we might be “caught.†It’s a great film, and does some pretty brave things. But it’s safe.
Not safe, very dangerous: P.T. Anderson and Todd Solodnz. Anderson at his best, Solondz even at his worst, try to jolt and jar us out of a smug knowingness in order to more fully implicate us in the complex narrative process of assigning guilt and innocence. These guys can be cruel. An example: when Julianne Moore picks up that nasty combo of prescriptions at the pharmacy in “Magnolia,†we are behind the counter, safe and free to judge her. The voices in the background are ours: “strong, strong stuff here…you need all this?†Her pain mounts, and the film is just begging us to punish her. She is, after all, an addict (and she played a cokehead in Anderson’s previous film, “Boogie Nights†so of course she is guilty) and we just don’t know–can’t know because the film hasn’t explained—that she needs the liquid morphine so she can soothe the pain–her’s, her husband’s, everybody’s, ours too. We can’t help but watch her become consumed with shame, and like the young pharmacist, we really load it on. But then, out of nowhere, she lashes out at us. Spitting “motherfucker…how dare you?†Anderson has deliberately put us in this position only to pull the rug out from under us. The scene shifts violently from bathos to pathos and we feel just a little sick because we got it all wrong. Yes, we are supposed to loathe T.J. Mackey. It’s a brilliant character, brilliant casting, and a brilliant performance from Cruise. Like the interviewer, we can’t wait to catch him in his ugly little lies. he’s a piece of shit and he deserves it. But, again, we don’t know why he lies, and we don’t know (yet) that his lies are good, that he’s good, that he hurts. Only later in the film is all revealed. And again, we feel a little sick and stupid, well aware of the mechanisms of judgment at work, and just how ugly the whole process can be. Anderson reminds us that we are all sadists, demanding stories and meting out punishment in the dark. And by the end of the film, we desperately want in. We want be part of the circuit of forgiveness, in spite of our implicit roles as hurtful watchers (a phrase Jim Kincaid uses in his unpublished piece on “Magnolia,” to which I owe a good deal). We want to be inside, because on the outside it’s too ugly. “Magnolia†tries to make us more aware, painfully aware of our reluctance to recognize and make use of the cognitive structure of our own compassion.
Films like “40 Year Old Virgin†and “The Aristocrats†already assume we’re inside, ready and willing to share. Folks who don’t want to be inside, who like it better outside, can just get up and leave.
You left out for me the most blatant bait-and-switch in Magnolia, Philip Seymour Hoffman–that masturbating perv!–buying the porn mags on the phone.
Interesting that both Moore’s and Hoffman’s purchases are for Jason Robards, an actor who at that point in his career screamed dignity, playing a guy stuck in a bed dying (and thus screaming dignity)– to emphasize the pain, the unfulfilled desire, the shame of dying. And then to invite us in to that more complicated empathy, and to set aside our pity (which pits us against what/who we watch as cleanly and neatly as scorn).
Nice reading. When are you going to publish on Anderson? And why hasn’t Jim published his?
The Anderson stuff is for a new book which will probably never get finished or published. Jim’s piece, which I have and can send to you, was for Harper’s (I think). It’s on the emergence of Hollywood films that address our conflicted feelings about adult/child sexuality (Cider House Rules, Happiness, Magnolia, Election, Rushmore, American Beauty, Sling Blade, etc.). From what I was told, the piece never appeared because it was deemed “too ooky” (the editor’s words). It’s a fabulous piece and I really don’t know what Jim did with it/is going to do with it.
Ah, yeah, I remember that piece. I have/read it–what sticks (ahem) is the stuff on Happiness.
I’ll just have to wait for yours.
Didn’t you get Jim to come around on his opinion of Happiness?
Well, he hated it out of the gate, and I remember nagging him about why I liked it (and therefore why he ought to). But I’m not sure I can take too much credit for his opinion on anything, while the reverse–his right (or responsibility) to claim some effect on mine–is obvious.
John, I hate Happiness but I would very much like to read that essay by Kincaid if you would be willing to send it me. How could we work that?
Reynolds has it, don’t he? Can you get it from him? If not, send me an email (I think Reynolds has my address–but I assume he has everything).
John, saw Reynolds today at Matriculation and he says he doesn’t have it. You can access my email address . Thanks.
OK that didn’t seem to work let’s try this: Go here
Didn’t work. I emailed Mike and he can get it to you. Hope his matriculation is better.
Thanks John.