"Men, Women and Other Anticlimaxes"

[fiefoe]

Character sketches, including a self-portrait:

• They like to think of themselves as people who lived for significant details.
• She is obviously unemployed,... in any other job but that of dramatizing herself. There is a pun implicit (in her painter's canvas pants): woman as painter, ...an interior decorator of our entire culture.
• Her smiles are a history of the twentieth century.
• It's impossible to lure her into an intimate statement about men or women. <...> In walking, she detours around her sexuality.
  
• How innocent (my rich friend)'s face is, how boyish. His eyes gaze out on a child's garden of verses. He sees life not as a drama, but a series of anecdotes. He has bought off necessity, he owns improvisation. <...>It is an appropriate symbol, this boat, a boy's toy and a man's independence.
• "I've got too much to say to live alone."
• He always asked permission before walking into my personality.
  

• I usually dance as if I considered it as form of parody, though I could not say what I think I'm parodying, or why.
• I know my spontaneity by heart.
• "You assume the attitude of an amused tourist, someone from a superior culture."
• Bach is my kind of composer. His emotions are so cosmic, so far beyond my reach, that I feel safe with him.
  

__ exurbia - a benign exile from the city
__ the mystery of human variability
__ exasperated by prettiness; wild surmise
__ play it straight; locks us in
__ The connotations teem.
__ gliding into ... an unbroken stream of rationalization
__ a tension between the hideous and the hilarious
entelechy: the condition of a thing whose essence is fully realized; actuality.
manque: Unfulfilled in the realization of one's ambitions or capabilities

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