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Wish Her Safe at Home

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Stephen Benatar

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“Applying nail polish is an art. You need non-shaky hands. And a calm and Zen-like nature. I am not calm and have but a nodding acquaintance with Zen. At the best of times, I’m not great at applying nail polish, and if anyone has attempted to apply nail polish when they are in a rush, they will understand the difficulties involved. Your hands will shake. Your hands will take the nail polish beyond the boundaries of your nail and onto the surrounding skin, you will carefully loop it off your skin with a handy ear bud, only to realise you have now got it onto your fingernails, which were also pale pink to begin with, but will now have to be made post-box red—you could never live down the indignity of mottled red and pink nail polish that looks like the visage of a rabid dog, and will spend the entire evening holding your hand petulantly behind your back and refusing to extend it even when you are being introduced to folk you cannot air-kiss and must shake hands with, aka senior corporate types.”

HumorBeauty QuotesNail Polish
Book:The Reluctant Detective
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“So it was that the Red Tower put into production its new, more terrible and perplexing, line of unique novelty items. Among the objects and constructions now manufactured were several of an almost innocent nature. These included tiny, delicate cameos that were heavier than their size would suggest, far heavier, and lockets whose shiny outer surface flipped open to reveal a black reverberant abyss inside, a deep blackness roaring with echoes. Along the same lines was a series of lifelike replicas of internal organs and physiological structures, many of them evidencing an advanced stages of disease and all of them displeasingly warm and soft to the touch. There was a fake disembodied hand on which fingernails would grow several inches overnight and insistently grew back should one attempt to clip them. Numerous natural objects, mostly bulbous gourds, were designed to produce a long, deafening scream whenever they were picked up or otherwise disturbed in their vegetable stillness. Less scrutable were such things as hardened globs of lava into whose rough, igneous forms were sent a pair of rheumy eyes that perpetually shifted their gaze from side to side like a relentless pendulum. And there was also a humble piece of cement, a fragment broken away from any street or sidewalk, that left a most intractable stain, greasy and green, on whatever surface it was placed. But such fairly simple items were eventually followed, and ultimately replaced, by more articulated objects and constructions. One example of this complex type of novelty item was an ornate music box that, when opened, emitted a brief gurgling or sucking sound in emulation of a dying individual's death rattle. Another product manufactured in great quantity at the Red Tower was a pocket watch in a gold casing which opened to reveal a curious timepiece whose numerals were represented by tiny quivering insects while the circling 'hands' were reptilian tongues, slender and pink. But these examples hardly begin to hint at the range of goods that came from the factory during its novelty phase of production. I should at least mention the exotic carpets woven with intricate abstract patterns that, when focused upon for a certain length of time, composed themselves into fleeting phantasmagoric scenes of a kind which might pass through a fever-stricken or even permanently damaged brain.”

WeirdGothicNoveltiesDerangementsThe Red Tower
Book:Teatro Grottesco
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“All human progress is in a circle; or, to use a more accurate and beautiful figure, in an ascending spiral curve. While we fancy ourselves going straight forward, and attaining, at every step, an entirely new position of affairs, we do actually return to something long ago tried and abandoned, but which we now find etherealized, refined, and perfected to its ideal. The past is but a coarse and sensual prophecy of the present and the future.”

Time PassingNovelties
Book:The house of the seven gables
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“Scientists have found that its presence begins to structure the male as different from the female right from the start, from the very beginning of the fetus’s evolution in the uterus (biologically, the original form is the female). Male and female differences in identity are already largely shaped at birth, and behavioral differences between the sexes are recorded very early, before social conditioning can play an effective role. Crudely put, baby girls are more interested in people, whereas baby boys are more interested in things.”

DeathViolenceEvolutionFemaleHierarchyDominanceMaleProactive AggressionSex Differences
Book:War in Human Civilization
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