Fashionable Mask Quotes

If what's always distinguished bad writing--flat characters, a narrative world that's clichéd and not recognizably human, etc.--is also a description of today's world, then bad writing becomes an ingenious mimesis of a bad world. If readers simply believe the world is stupid and shallow and mean, then [Bret] Ellis can write a mean shallow stupid novel that becomes a mordant deadpan commentary on the badness of everything. Look man, we'd probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what's human and magical that still live and glow despite the times' darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it. Postmodern irony and cynicism's become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what's wrong, because they'll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony's gone from liberating to enslaving. There's some great essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of the prisoner who's come to love his cage… The postmodern founders' patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years. We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we’ve hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naïveté. Sentiment equals naïveté on this continent. You burn with hunger for food that does not exist. A U. S. of modern A. where the State is not a team or a code, but a sort of sloppy intersection of desires and fears, where the only public consensus a boy must surrender to is the acknowledged primacy of straight-line pursuing this flat and short-sighted idea of personal happiness.

I had a vague memory of being that ridiculous at one time. Let he who hath never worn parachute pants cast the first stone.

It’s of some interest that the lively arts of the millenial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool. It’s maybe the vestiges of the Romantic glorification of Weltschmerz, which means world-weariness or hip ennui. Maybe it’s the fact that most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip - and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It’s more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we’ve hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naivete. Sentiment equals naïveté on this continent... ...Hal, who’s empty but not dumb, theorizes privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human (at least as he conceptualizes it) is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naive and goo-prone and generally pathetic, is to be in some basic interior way forever infantile, some sort of not-quite-right-looking infant dragging itself anaclitically around the map, with big wet eyes and froggy-soft skin, huge skull, gooey drool. One of the really American things about Hal, probably, is the way he despises what it is he’s really lonely for: this hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and need, that pules and writhes just under the hip empty mask, anhedonia.

Just then Patch ambled through the front door. I did a double take to make it was really him. I hadn't expected him to come. We'd never resolved our fight, and I'd pridefully refused to take the first step, forcing myself to lock my cell phone in a drawer every time I was tempted to call him and apologize, despite my increasing distress that he might never call either. My pride immediately turned to relief at the sight of him. I hated fighting. I hated not having him close. If he was ready to mend this, so was I.A smile flickered across my face at the sight of his costume; black jeans, black t-shirt, black face mask. The latter concealed all but his cool, assessing gaze. "There's my date," I said. "Fashionably late.

And this, too, affords no small occasion for anxieties - if you are bent on assuming a pose and never reveal yourself to anyone frankly, in the fashion of many who live a false life that is all made up for show; for it is torturous to be constantly watching oneself and be fearful of being caught out of our usual role. And we are never free from concern if we think that every time anyone looks at us he is always taking-our measure; for many things happen that strip off our pretence against our will, and, though all this attention to self is successful, yet the life of those who live under a mask cannot be happy and without anxiety. But how much pleasure there is in simplicity that is pure, in itself unadorned, and veils no part of its character!{PlainDealer+} Yet even such a life as this does run some risk of scorn, if everything lies open to everybody; for there are those who disdain whatever has become too familiar. But neither does virtue run any risk of being despised when she is brought close to the eyes, and it is better to be scorned by reason of simplicity than tortured by perpetual pretence.

You ask me how I became a madman. It happened thus: One day, long before many gods were born, I woke from a deep sleep and found all my masks were stolen, the seven masks I have fashioned and worn in seven lives, I ran maskless through the crowded streets shouting, "Thieves, thieves, the cursed thieves." Men and women laughed at me and some ran to their houses in fear of me. And when I reached the market place, a youth standing on a house-top cried, "He is a madman." I looked up to behold him; the sun kissed my own naked face for the first time. For the first time the sun kissed my own naked face and my soul was inflamed with love for the sun, and I wanted my masks no more. And as if in a trance I cried, "Blessed, blessed are the thieves who stole my masks." Thus I became a madman.

Maybe it's the fact the most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip - and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It's more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendant horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we've hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it's stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naivete.

It's of some interest that the lively arts of the millennial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool. It's maybe the vestiges of the Romantic glorification of Weltschmerz, which means world-weariness or hip ennui. Maybe it's the fact that most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip—and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It's more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we’ve hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, to be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naïveté. Sentiment equals naïveté on this continent.

Within our core self is an indelible blueprint of unrivaled individuality—the singular being that each of us exists to express. In this three-dimensional movie called “Life” there are no stand-ins, body doubles, or understudies—no one can fill in for us by proxy! Realization of this truth alone eliminates the need to imitate, conform, limit, or betray our loyalty to the originality of Self. Imagine the relief of removing your carefully crafted masks fashioned by societal forms of conditioning and instead responding to what comes into your experience directly from your Authentic Self. One of the first principles to honor in your relationship with yourself is to respect and trust your own inner voice. This form of trust is the way of the heart, the epitome of well-being.

On Halloween I like to scare up business the old fashioned way: with flyers, business cards, and electroshock therapy while wearing spooky masks.

Know that...there's plenty of food and of course popcorn on the dining-room table. Just...help yourself. If that runs out just let me know. Don't panic. And there's coffee, both caff and decaf, and soft drinks and juice in the kitchen, and plenty of ice in the freezer so...let me know if you have any questions with that.' And lastly, since I have you all here in one place, I have something to share with you. Along the garden ways just now...I too heard the flowers speak. They told me that our family garden has all but turned to sand. I want you to know I've watered and nurtured this square of earth for nearly twenty years, and waited on my knees each spring for these gentle bulbs to rise, reborn. But want does not bring such breath to life. Only love does. The plain, old-fashioned kind. In our family garden my husband is of the genus Narcissus , which includes daffodils and jonquils and a host of other ornamental flowers. There is, in such a genus of man, a pervasive and well-known pattern of grandiosity and egocentrism that feeds off this very kind of evening, this type of glitzy generosity. People of this ilk are very exciting to be around. I have never met anyone with as many friends as my husband. He made two last night at Carvel. I'm not kidding. Where are you two? Hi. Hi, again. Welcome. My husband is a good man, isn't he? He is. But in keeping with his genus, he is also absurdly preoccupied with his own importance, and in staying loyal to this, he can be boastful and unkind and condescending and has an insatiable hunger to be seen as infallible. Underlying all of the constant campaigning needed to uphold this position is a profound vulnerability that lies at the very core of his psyche. Such is the narcissist who must mask his fears of inadequacy by ensuring that he is perceived to be a unique and brilliant stone. In his offspring he finds the grave limits he cannot admit in himself. And he will stop at nothing to make certain that his child continually tries to correct these flaws. In actuality, the child may be exceedingly intelligent, but has so fully developed feelings of ineptitude that he is incapable of believing in his own possibilities. The child's innate sense of self is in great jeopardy when this level of false labeling is accepted. In the end the narcissist must compensate for this core vulnerability he carries and as a result an overestimation of his own importance arises. So it feeds itself, cyclically. And, when in the course of life they realize that their views are not shared or thier expectations are not met, the most common reaction is to become enraged. The rage covers the fear associated with the vulnerable self, but it is nearly impossible for others to see this, and as a result, the very recognition they so crave is most often out of reach. It's been eighteen years that I've lived in service to this mindset. And it's been devastating for me to realize that my efforts to rise to these standards and demands and preposterous requests for perfection have ultimately done nothing but disappoint my husband. Put a person like this with four developing children and you're gonna need more than love poems and ice sculpture to stay afloat. Trust me. So. So, we're done here.

Amit likens fashion to a mask, and style to beauty of countenance. Style, he feels, belongs to the literary elite, who live by their own wishes. And fashion is for the ordinary lot, who make it their business to please other people. . . . You may view a professional dancing girl beneath the awning of a public marquee; but for the first glimpse of the bride’s face during the shubhodrishti ritual, a veil of Benarasi fabric is required. The marquee belongs to fashion, the Benarasi veil--which reveals the special one’s countenance shaded by a special hue--to style.

What do I see? I see a man who has higher and thicker walls than I will ever have. I see a terrifying beast enveloped and hidden by a cleverly fashioned mask. I see tears that will never fall. I see blood and death. I see a heart that devours itself. I see the promise of a pain and deceit. I see a lot of things, Baltsaros. Many of them frightening,” Jon said. Baltsaros showed no surprise over Jon’s words. Instead, he leaned towards him, intrigued. “And you’re not afraid,” he said.

...he knew of the innermost danger of all artists, he knew the utter loneliness of the man destined to be an artist, he knew the inherent loneliness which drove such a one into the still deeper loneliness of art and into the beauty that cannot be articulated, and he knew that for the most part such men were shattered by this immolation, that it made them blind, blind to the world, blind to the divine quality in the world and in the fellow-man, that--intoxicated by their loneliness--they were able to see only their own god-likeness, which they imagined to be unique, and consequently this self-idolatry and its greed for recognition came more and more to be the sole content of their work--, a betrayal of the divine as well as of art, because in this fashion the work of art became a work of un-art, an unchaste covering for artistic vanity, so spurious that even the artist's self-complacent nakedness which it exposed became a mask; and even though such unchaste self-gratification, such dalliance with beauty, such concern with effects, even though such an un-art might, despite its brief unrenewable grant, its inextensible boundaries, find an easier way to the populace than real art ever found, it was only a specious way, a way out of the loneliness, but not, however, an affiliation with the human community, which was the aim of real art in its aspiration toward humanity, no, it was the affiliation with the mob, it was a participation in its treacherous non-community, which was incapable of the pledge, which neither created nor mastered any reality, and which was unwilling to do so, preferring only to drowse on, forgetting reality, having forfeited it as had un-art and literarity, this was the most profound danger for every artist; oh how painfully, how very painfully he knew this.

...The CDC has also said that it’s virtually impossible to tell a murder victim killed by a shot to the head or spinal column from an infected individual put down legally in the same fashion. What is your answer to critics of the relaxed gun control laws who hold that gun-related violence has actually increased, but has been masked by the postmortem amplification of the Kellis-Amberlee virus?

When you’re a girl, you never let on that you are proud, or that you know you’re better at history, or biology, or French, than the girl who sits beside you and is eighteen months older. Instead you gush about how good she is at putting on nail polish or at talking to boys, and you roll your eyes at the vaunted difficulty of the history/​biology/​French test and say, “Oh my God, it’s going to be such a disaster! I’m so scared!” and you put yourself down whenever you can so that people won’t feel threatened by you, so they’ll like you, because you wouldn’t want them to know that in your heart, you are proud, and maybe even haughty, and are riven by thoughts the revelation of which would show everyone how deeply Not Nice you are. You learn a whole other polite way of speaking to the people who mustn’t see you clearly, and you know—you get told by others—that they think you’re really sweet, and you feel a thrill of triumph: “Yes, I’m good at history/​biology/​French, and I’m good at this, too.” It doesn’t ever occur to you, as you fashion your mask so carefully, that it will grow into your skin and graft itself, come to seem irremovable.

Dear Logan, Someday I'm going to write a book: How Not to Die in Alaska - A Girl's Guide to Fashionable Survival. I bet you don't know that a Kirby grip can make an excellent fishing hook. You may think you can use just any kind of mud for mud masks, but trust me, you CAN'T! In a pinch, nothing starts a fire like nail polish remover. And don't even get me started on the lifesaving properties of a good pair of tights. So I know a lot, in other words. I just don't know why I'm still writing you these letters.

Fashion can be a mask to cover imaginative poverty, and is often the antithesis of individual taste, but it can also become a weapon to establish a distinct personality.

Confidence is the beauty, kindness is the charm, style is the uniqueness and fashion is the mask.

It doesn't ever occur to you, as you fashion your mask so carefully, that it will grow into your skin and graft itself, come to seem irremovable.

Behind me, Lane and Blythe donned their respirator masks, making jokes about “epidemic fashion.

How much time, after this realization sank in and spread among consumers (mostly via phone, interestingly), would any micro-econometrist expect to need to pass before high-tech visual videophony was mostly abandoned, then, a return to good old telephoning not only dictated by common consumer sense but actually after a while culturally approved as a kind of chic integrity, not Ludditism but a kind of retrograde transcendence of sci-fi-ish high-tech for its own sake, a transcendence of the vanity and the slavery to high-tech fashion that people view as so unattractive in one another. In other words a return to aural-only telephony became, at the closed curve’s end, a kind of status-symbol of anti-vanity, such that only callers utterly lacking in self-awareness continued to use videophony and Tableaux, to say nothing of masks, and these tacky facsimile-using people became ironic cultural symbols of tacky vain slavery to corporate PR and high-tech novelty, became the Subsidized Era’s tacky equivalents of people with leisure suits, black velvet paintings, sweater-vests for their poodles, electric zirconium jewelry, NoCoat Lin-guaScrapers, and c.

But a century from now, your mortal associates will be rotting in the earth, whereas, barring amputation or radical shifts in fashion, you will still be putting your pants on one leg at a time.

It’s of some interest that the lively arts of the millennial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool. It’s maybe the vestiges of the Romantic glorification of Weltschmerz, which means world-weariness or hip ennui. Maybe it’s the fact that most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip — and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It’s more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we’ve hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naïveté. Sentiment equals naïveté on this continent (at least since the Reconfiguration). One of the things sophisticated viewers have always liked about J. O. Incandenza’s The American Century as Seen Through a Brick is its unsubtle thesis that naïveté is the last true terrible sin in the theology of millennial America. And since sin is the sort of thing that can be talked about only figuratively, it’s natural that Himself’s dark little cartridge was mostly about a myth, viz. that queerly persistent U.S. myth that cynicism and naïveté are mutually exclusive. Hal, who’s empty but not dumb, theorizes privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human (at least as he conceptualizes it) is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic, is to be in some basic interior way forever infantile, some sort of not-quite-right-looking infant dragging itself anaclitically around the map, with big wet eyes and froggy-soft skin, huge skull, gooey drool. One of the really American things about Hal, probably, is the way he despises what it is he’s really lonely for: this hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and need, that pules and writhes just under the hip empty mask, anhedonia. 281 281 - This had been one of Hal’s deepest and most pregnant abstractions, one he’d come up with once while getting secretly high in the Pump Room. That we’re all lonely for something we don’t know we’re lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that he goes around feeling like he misses somebody he’s never even met? Without the universalizing abstraction, the feeling would make no sense.

It is said that you are a New Yorker the moment you remember the way New York used to be. This miraculous place lives to obliterate its history. It is history as fashion. Trend. Moments. Moments lost and... overwritten. You have to hunt the past in NY. Not like Prague. Budapest. Krakow. Paris. Istanbul. These places wear their pasts with honor over their hearts. A woman. Not a girl. New York... is youth. Always trying on new masks, new faces.

Charles had climbed on a bench and was calling out that he had something to say, creating a racket that quickly got the attention of the room. Everyone looked immensely surprised, including Tessa and Will. Sona frowned, clearly thinking Charles was very rude. She didn’t know the half of it, Cordelia thought darkly. “Let me be the first to raise a glass to the happy couple!” said Charles, doing just that. “To James Herondale and Cordelia Carstairs. I wish to add personally that James, my brother’s parabatai, has always been like a younger brother to me.” “A younger brother he accused of vandalizing greenhouses across our fair nation,” muttered Will. “As for Cordelia Carstairs—how to describe her?” Charles went on. “Especially when one has not bothered to get to know her at all,” murmured James. “She is both beautiful and fair,” said Charles, leaving Cordelia to wonder what the difference was, “as well as being brave. I am sure she will make James as happy as my lovely Grace makes me.” He smiled at Grace, who stood quietly near him, her face a mask. “That’s right. I am formally announcing my intention to wed Grace Blackthorn. You will all be invited, of course.” Cordelia glanced over at Alastair; he was expressionless, but his hands, jammed into his pockets, were fists. James had narrowed his eyes. Charles went on merrily. “And lastly, my thanks go out to the folk of the Enclave, who supported my actions as acting Consul through our recent troubles. I am young to have borne so much responsibility, but what could I say when duty called? Only this. I am honored by the trust of my mother, the love of my bride-to-be, and the belief of my people—” “Thank you, Charles!” James had appeared at Charles’s side and done something rather ingenious with his feet that caused the bench Charles had been standing on to tip over. He caught Charles around the shoulder as he slid to the floor, clapping him on the back. Cordelia doubted most people in the room had noticed anything amiss. “What an excellent speech!” Magnus Bane, looking fiendishly amused, snapped his fingers. The loops of golden ribbons dangling from the chandeliers formed the shapes of soaring herons while “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” began to play in ghostly fashion on the unmanned piano. James hustled Charles away from the bench he had clambered onto and into a crowd of well-wishers. The room, as a whole, seemed relieved. “We have raised a fine son, my darling,” Will said, kissing Tessa on the cheek.

race-day would start off in high pageantry, and then the drinking would start and the festive spirit would darken, and all the masks of fashion and breeding would fall away, until the oozing, pocked face of Elm County would lie revealed.

I peeled the shorts off my sweating skin and stepped into the skirt. It slid up my body, resting on my waist, and I pulled the zipper up towards the lord. It didn't just fit. No, it did more than that. It melded to my body, beautifully, as if it had been cut specifically for me, to mask and smooth and elevate. I would be better in this skirt. The dream was happening! I had the all-knowing smile, my hair was suddenly more luxurious, I felt thinner, more acceptable. Girls who had been mean to me in high school would see me in this skirt and think, "Is that Scaachi?" and I'd say, "YOU BET IT IS, YOU DUMB BITCH" and then punch all their boyfriends in the teeth. (I have not thought this fantasy through; just let me have this.)

Money was the blood of civilized society, its currents running through everything and everyone. Where money was insufficient, things withered. People starved, sickened and died, constructions eroded, even ideas perished. Where funds were plentiful, the same things blossomed with new life. And money was, in the end, little more than the product of collective imagination. A slip of paper or a coin had no value beyond that of the material it was fashioned of. It only took on a life of its own when people as a whole collectively agreed that certain papers and coins were worth something. Only then did people bleed and die for it. For a fantasy, a faith given form in hard, concrete numbers. Then again, much of society was built on a series of shared delusions. Clothing was little more than scraps of particular materials with particular geometries, but people clung to the idea of fashion. Style. Good and bad fashion was another belief system, one which all members of a culture were indoctrinated into. Breaking certain conventions didn’t only challenge the aesthetic sensibilities of others, but it challenged their sense of self. It reminded them, subconsciously, of the very pretendings they clung to. Only those with power could stand against society’s tides, flaunt the collective’s ‘safe’ aesthetic. When one had enough power, others couldn’t rise against them and safely say something calculated to reduce their own dissonance and remind the offending party of the unspoken rules. When one had enough power to take a life with a twitch of a finger, a thought, they earned the right to wear skin-tight clothing and call themselves Hero, or Legend. To wear a mask and name themselves something inane like ‘the Cockatoo’ and still take themselves seriously.

This is the most beautiful dress I’ve ever worn,” she admitted, her eyes filling with light. It was not pure white, but rather a grayish offset, and its wide skirts and bodice were encrusted with thousands of minuscule crystals that reminded Celaena of the surface of the sea. Swirls of silk thread on the bodice made rose-like designs that could have passed for a work by any master painter. A border of ermine lined the neck and provided slender sleeves that only covered her shoulders. Tiny diamond droplets fell from her ears, and her hair was curled and swept up onto her head, strands of pearls woven in. Her gray silk mask had been secured tightly against her face. It wasn’t fashioned after anything, but the delicate crystal and pearl whorls had been crafted by a skilled hand. “You could win the hand of a king, looking like that,” said Philippa. “Or perhaps a Crown Prince will do.

The beast plopped into the chair, the wood groaning, and, in a flash of white light, turned into a golden-haired man. I stifled a cry and pushed myself against the paneled wall beside the door, feeling for the molding of the threshold, trying to gauge the distance between me and escape. This beast was not a man, not a lesser faerie. He was one of the High Fae, one of their ruling nobility: beautiful, lethal, and merciless. He was young—or at least what I could see of his face seemed young. His nose, cheeks, and brows were covered by an exquisite golden mask embedded with emeralds shaped like whorls of leaves. Some absurd High Fae fashion, no doubt. It left only his eyes—looking the same as they had in his beast form, strong jaw, and mouth for me to see, and the latter tightened into a thin line.

The idea of you lynching anybody! It’s amusing. The idea of you thinking you had pluck enough to lynch a man! Because you’re brave enough to tar and feather poor friendless cast-out women that come along here, did that make you think you had grit enough to lay your hands on a man? Why, a man’s safe in the hands of ten thousand of your kind—as long as it’s day-time and you’re not behind him. “Do I know you? I know you clear through. I was born and raised in the South, and I’ve lived in the North; so I know the average all around. The average man’s a coward. In the North he lets anybody walk over him that wants to, and goes home and prays for a humble spirit to bear it. In the South one man, all by himself, has stopped a stage full of men, in the day-time, and robbed the lot. Your newspapers call you a brave people so much that you think you are braver than any other people—whereas you’re just as brave, and no braver. Why don’t your juries hang murderers? Because they’re afraid the man’s friends will shoot them in the back, in the dark—and it’s just what they would do. “So they always acquit; and then a man goes in the night, with a hundred masked cowards at his back, and lynches the rascal. Your mistake is, that you didn’t bring a man with you; that’s one mistake, and the other is that you didn’t come in the dark, and fetch your masks. You brought part of a man—Buck Harkness, there—and if you hadn’t had him to start you, you’d a taken it out in blowing. “You didn’t want to come. The average man don’t like trouble and danger. You don’t like trouble and danger. But if only half a man—like Buck Harkness, there—shouts ‘Lynch him, lynch him!’ you’re afraid to back down—afraid you’ll be found out to be what you are—cowards—and so you raise a yell, and hang yourselves onto that half-a-man’s coat tail, and come raging up here, swearing what big things you’re going to do. The pitifulest thing out is a mob; that’s what an army is—a mob; they don’t fight with courage that’s born in them, but with courage that’s borrowed from their mass, and from their officers. But a mob without any man at the head of it, is beneath pitifulness. Now the thing for you to do, is to droop your tails and go home and crawl in a hole. If any real lynching’s going to be done, it will be done in the dark, Southern fashion; and when they come they’ll bring their masks, and fetch a man along. Now leave—and take your half-a-man with you...

Comic book writers often suggest that women don’t have the same dedication to the noble cause, because their need for love is often of equal or greater importance than their quest for justice. Superheroines want to fight crime, but want to settle down as well. If Mr. Right popped the question, a heroine could easily retire that mask and cape and settle down to life as a wife and mother. The implication is that no matter how powerful a woman is, she needs the love of a man to complete her.

It's of some interest that the lively arts of the millenial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool. It's maybe the vestiges of the Romantic glorification of Weltschmerz, which means world-weariness or hip ennui. Maybe it's the fact that most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip -- and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer pressure. It's more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great tanscendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we've hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the sahpe of whatever it wears. And then it's stuck there, the weary cynicism that save us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naïveté. Sentiment equals naïveté on this continent (at least since the Reconfiguration). One of the things sophisticated viewers have always liked about J. O. Incandenza's The American Century as Seen Through a Brick is its unsubtle thesis that naïveté is the last true terrible sin in the theology of millennial America. And since sin is the sort of thing that can be talked about only figuratively, it's natural that Himself's dark little cartridge was mostly about a myth, viz. that queerly persistent U.S. myth that cynicism and naïveté are mutually exclusive. Hal, who's empty but not dumb, theorizes privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human (at least as he conceptualizes it) is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic, is to be in some basic interior way forever infantile, some sort of not-quite-right-looking infant dragging itself anaclitically around the map, with big wet eyes and froggy-soft skin, huge skull, gooey drool. One of the really American things about Hal, probably, is thie way he despises what it is he's really lonely for: this hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and need, that pules and writhes just under the hip empty mask, anhedonia.

You ask me how I became a madman. It happened thus: One day, long before many gods were born, I woke from a deep sleep and found all my masks were stolen – the seven masks I have fashioned and worn in seven lives, – I ran maskless through the crowded streets shouting, 'Thieves, thieves, the cursed thieves.' Men and women laughed at me and some ran to their houses in fear of me. And when I reached the market place, a youth standing on a house-top cried, 'He is a madman.' I looked up to behold him; the sun kissed my own naked face for the first time. For the first time the sun kissed my own naked face and my soul was inflamed with love for the sun, and I wanted my masks no more. And as if in a trance I cried, 'Blessed, blessed are the thieves who stole my masks.' Thus I became a madman. And I have found both freedom and safety in my madness; the freedom of loneliness and the safety from being understood, for those who understand us enslave something in us. But let me not be too proud of my safety. Even a Thief in a jail is safe from another thief.

He did not steal, he merely used. And every one of us at times does the same: one man with regard to government timber, and another with regard to a sum belonging to his employer, while a third defrauds his children for the sake of an actress, and a fourth robs his peasantry for the sake of smart furniture or a carriage. What can one do when one is surrounded on every side with roguery, and everywhere there are insanely expensive restaurants, masked balls, and dances to the music of gipsy bands? To abstain when every one else is indulging in these things, and fashion commands, is difficult indeed.

It begins with light which seeps into those ready vessels, marigold and dandelion, rises with the sap to richen forsynthia and veiled acacia. The heads of girls bending over bowls of lemons are silkened with that corn- silk color or helmeted with sun, and all that maiden hair is braided with the burn of wheatfields rippling in a wind. Gold is hammered out of yellow orchards and out of August noons, enough to feed the fur of lions or gild a tree of orioles. Enough to ransom princes of the sun god's lineage and fashion for the boy king's somber journey, a treasure house of toys, a bright death mask." - Gold

A ghost curled like a blue snail inside her chest, and it was so tiny! It burned through the lace of her old-fashioned dress like a second heart. A musical staff wound in a thorny crown around the Spiritist's forehead, so that notes ran down her cheeks in a loose mask of song. Her eyelids were blacked out---and I saw this again and again in nightmares about my sister. Her eyelids had the polish of acorns. But her ears: that was the truly scary part. Great fantails of indigo and violet lights spiraled into her earlobes in an ethereal funnel---what the book called the Inverted Borealis. The caption read: 'A ghost sings its way deeply inside the Spiritist.

This was no coincidence. The best short stories and the most successful jokes have a lot in common. Each form relies on suggestion and economy. Characters have to be drawn in a few deft strokes. There's generally a setup, a reveal, a reversal, and a release. The structure is delicate. If one element fails, the edifice crumbles. In a novel you might get away with a loose line or two, a saggy paragraph, even a limp chapter. But in the joke and in the short story, the beginning and end are precisely anchored tent poles, and what lies between must pull so taut it twangs. I'm not sure if there is any pattern to these selections. I did not spend a lot of time with those that seemed afraid to tell stories, that handled plot as if it were a hair in the soup, unwelcome and embarrassing. I also tended not to revisit stories that seemed bleak without having earned it, where the emotional notes were false, or where the writing was tricked out or primped up with fashionable devices stressing form over content. I do know that the easiest and the first choices were the stories to which I had a physical response. I read Jennifer Egan's "Out of Body" clenched from head to toe by tension as her suicidal, drug-addled protagonist moves through the Manhattan night toward an unforgivable betrayal. I shed tears over two stories of childhood shadowed by unbearable memory: "The Hare's Mask," by Mark Slouka, with its piercing ending, and Claire Keegan's Irishinflected tale of neglect and rescue, "Foster." Elizabeth McCracken's "Property" also moved me, with its sudden perception shift along the wavering sightlines of loss and grief. Nathan Englander's "Free Fruit for Young Widows" opened with a gasp-inducing act of unexpected violence and evolved into an ethical Rubik's cube. A couple of stories made me laugh: Tom Bissell's "A Bridge Under Water," even as it foreshadows the dissolution of a marriage and probes what religion does for us, and to us; and Richard Powers's "To the Measures Fall," a deftly comic meditation on the uses of literature in the course of a life, and a lifetime. Some stories didn't call forth such a strong immediate response but had instead a lingering resonance. Of these, many dealt with love and its costs, leaving behind indelible images. In Megan Mayhew Bergman's "Housewifely Arts," a bereaved daughter drives miles to visit her dead mother's parrot because she yearns to hear the bird mimic her mother's voice. In Allegra Goodman's "La Vita Nuova," a jilted fiancée lets her art class paint all over her wedding dress. In Ehud Havazelet's spare and tender story, "Gurov in Manhattan," an ailing man and his aging dog must confront life's necessary losses. A complicated, only partly welcome romance blossoms between a Korean woman and her demented

When Alice was younger, her father had fashioned a rough mask from evergreen needles and lake grass glued to a rotten shell of pine bark, shed like a skin. He secured it to the end of their canoe with heavy yellow cord, telling Alice their ancient Dutch relatives believed water fairies lived in the figureheads of ships, protecting the vessels and their sailors from all manner of ills- storms, narrow and treacherous passageways, fevers, and bad luck. Kaboutermannekes he called them. If the ship ran aground, or even worse, if it sank, the Kaboutermannekes would guide the seafarers' souls to the Land of the Dead. Without a water fairy to guide him, a sailor's soul would be lost at sea forever.

A well-known skin specialist patronized by many famous beauties charges seventy-five dollars for a twenty-minute consultation and eight dollars for a cake of sea-mud soap. I get more satisfaction and just as much benefit out of applying a purée of apples and sour cream! [...] Of course, all masques should COVER THE NECK too. [...] Masques should only be used ones or twice a week. [...] While the masque is working, place pads soaked in witch hazel or boric acid over your eyelids and put on your favorite music. [...] A masque really works only when you're lying down. Twenty minutes is the right length of time. Then wash the masque off gently with warm water and follow with a brisk splash of cold water to close the pores. [...] For a luxurious once-a-week treatment give your face a herbal steaming first by putting parsley, dill, or any other favorite herb into a pan of boiling water. (Mint is refreshing too.) Hold a towel over your head to keep the steam rising onto your face. The pores will open so that the masque can do a better job. [...] Here are a few "kitchen masques" that work: MAYONNAISE. [...] Since I'm never sure what they put into those jars at the supermarket, I make my own with whole eggs, olive or peanut oil, and lemon juice (Omit the salt and pepper!). Stir this until it's well blended, or whip up a batch in an electric blender. PUREED VEGETABLES - cucumbers, lemons, or lettuce thickened with a little baby powder. PUREED FRUITS - cantaloupe, bananas, or strawberries mixed to a paste with milk or sour cream or honey. A FAMOUS OLD-FASHIONED MIXTURE of oatmeal, warm water, and a little honey blended to a paste.

keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It’s more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we’ve hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naïveté. Sentiment equals naïveté on this continent (at least since the Reconfiguration).

The Coach’s head was oblong with tiny slits that served as eyes, which drifted in tides slowly inward, as though the face itself were the sea or, in fact, a soup of macromolecules through which objects might drift, leaving in their wake, ripples of nothingness. The eyes—they floated adrift like land masses before locking in symmetrically at seemingly prescribed positions off-center, while managing to be so closely drawn into the very middle of the face section that it might have seemed unnecessary for there to have been two eyes when, quite likely, one would easily have sufficed. These aimless, floating eyes were not the Coach’s only distinctive feature—for, in fact, connected to the interior of each eyelid by a web-like layer of rubbery pink tissue was a kind of snout which, unlike the eyes, remained fixed in its position among the tides of the face, arcing narrowly inward at the edges of its sharp extremities into a serrated beak-like projection that hooked downward at its tip, in a fashion similar to that of a falcon’s beak. This snout—or beak, rather—was, in fact, so long and came to such a fine point that as the eyes swirled through the soup of macromolecules that comprised the man’s face, it almost appeared—due to the seeming thinness of the pink tissue—that the eyes functioned as kinds of optical tether balls that moved synchronously across the face like mirror images of one another. 'I wore my lizard mask as I entered the tram, last evening, and people found me fearless,' the Coach remarked, enunciating each word carefully through the hollow clack-clacking sound of his beak, as its edges clapped together. 'I might have exchanged it for that of an ox and then thought better. A lizard goes best with scales, don’t you think?' Bunnu nodded as he quietly wondered how the Coach could manage to fit that phallic monstrosity of a beak into any kind of mask, unless, in fact, this disguise of which he spoke, had been specially designed for his face and divided into sections in such a way that they could be readily attached to different areas—as though one were assembling a new face—in overlapping layers, so as to veil, or perhaps even amplify certain distinguishable features. All the same, in doing so, one could only imagine this lizard mask to be enormous to the extent that it would be disproportionate with the rest of the Coach’s body. But then, there were ways to mask space, as well—to bend light, perhaps, to create the illusion that something was perceptibly larger or smaller, wider or narrower, rounder or more linear than it was in actuality. That is to say, any form of prosthesis designed for the purposes of affecting remedial space might, for example, have had the capability of creating the appearance of a gap of void in occupied space. An ornament hangs from the chin, let’s say, as an accessory meant to contour smoothly inward what might otherwise appear to be hanging jowls. This surely wouldn’t be the exact use that the Coach would have for such a device—as he had no jowls to speak of—though he could certainly see the benefit of the accessory’s ingenuity. This being said, the lizard mask might have appeared natural rather than disproportionate given the right set of circumstances. Whatever the case, there was no way of even knowing if the Coach wasn’t, in fact, already wearing a mask, at this very moment, rendering Bunnu’s initial appraisal of his character—as determined by a rudimentary physiognomic analysis of his features—a matter now subject to doubt. And thus, any conjecture that could be made with respect to the dimensions or components of a lizard mask—not to speak of the motives of its wearer—seemed not only impractical, but also irrelevant at this point in time.

Of the veil or unveiling, which is the most alienating, the most humiliating, the most insulting? The immense hypocrisy of all those who denounce the veil, but are quite at ease with universal pornography. In any event, the question goes far beyond the veil and the female condition. At issue is a culture of obscenity that cannot but tear away all veils - according to the imperative of transparency. At issue is the profound jealousy of a ragged culture at all the ceremonial cultures - those cultures whose signs enwrap them, whereas our culture is laid bare by its signs themselves. This is merely the beginning of a general de-signification, in which all distinctive marks will become anathema, suspect of masking or even, quite simply, signifying something, and hence potentially terroristic. At the end of the process all that will be left will be lightweight, inoffensive signs - advertising signs or marks of the disembodied fanaticism of fashion. That, no doubt, is where the story of the veil will end.

We look amazing," I repeated, as if I could make up for our brother's rudeness. And we did look amazing. Käthe and I were dressed as an angel and a demon, but to my surprise, my sister had chosen to be the devil. She looked majestic in her gown of black velvet, her golden curls draped with black silk and lace, cleverly twisted together and pinned to resemble horns growing from her head. She had rouged her lips a bright red, and her blue eyes looked imperious from behind her black mask. For a moment, the image of moldering gowns on dress forms rose up in my mind, a polished bronze mirror reflecting an endless line of faded Goblin Queens. I swallowed. The dress my sister had made for me was nearly innocent in its simplicity. Yards and yards of fine white muslin had made a floating, ethereal gown, while Käthe had somehow fashioned a brocade cape into the shape of folded angel wings, which grew from my shoulder blades and cascaded to the floor. She had braided gold into a crown about my head for a halo, and I carried a lyre to complete the picture.

Minstrelsy had virtually nothing to do with the way black people really were; it was a purely white construction. Black performers who wanted to work in minstrelsy were run off the stage or forced to blacken their black faces. The form worked literally as, and only as, a black façade for whites: whites in blackface. The black mask permitted whites to say illegal, unorthodox, seditious, and sexually illicit things in public. In short, it was a kind of public pornography, the main theme of which was sexual rebellion, sexual license, poverty, and criminality. In short, all of the fears and ambivalences whites had that were otherwise hidden from public discourse could be articulated through the mouth of a black who was understood to be already outside the law and therefore serviceable. In this fashion, the black mask permitted freedom of speech and created a place for public, national dialogue. For whites that is. On the other hand, the mask hid more ligence, and most importantly, it hid the true causes of social conflict by transferring that conflict to a black population.

It's a lovely mask," Sara said, toying with the narrow black silk ribbons before tying it in place. Monique had artfully fashioned it out of black silk and lace, and glinting blue sapphires that matched her gown. "I'm not nervous at all." It was true. She felt as if some reckless stranger had replaced her usual cautious self. The midnight-blue gown molded to her figure, cut so low that her breasts seemed ready to spill from the meager bodice. A broad satin sash fastened with a gold buckle emphasized her small waist. The mask covered the upper half of her face but revealed her lips, which Monique and Lily had insisted on darkening with the faintest hint of rouge. Laboriously they had arranged her hair in a cluster of curls on top of her head, allowing a few ringlets to dangle teasingly against her cheeks and neck. A perfume that reminded Sara of roses blended with some deeper foresty scent had been applied sparingly to her bosom and throat. "A triumph," Monique had declared, gloating over the transformation. "Beautiful, worldly, but still fresh and young... ah, chérie, you will make many conquests tonight!" "Stunning," Lily had said, beaming with delight. "What a stir she'll cause.

She went alone to the vast room where the second-hand clothes were kept. Later, she thought it the happiest hour of her life. There were silks and brocades by the yard, and pile upon pile of hats, wigs, cloaks, and masks. After two years in wretched rags, even the linen shifts felt as soft as thistledown. She whirled from one delight to another- clutching lace, burying her nose in furs, holding flashy paste jewels next to her new-bleached skin. Catching her reflected eye in the mirror she laughed out loud, her red mouth wide and knowing. She put aside a few carefully-chosen costumes and elbow-length mittens. Then, finally, she chose a few costumes of a particular nature: shiny satin, ebony black. Lastly, she gathered the garments she would wear for her journey: a grass-green woolen gown and a lace cap and apron. The effect was somewhat grand for a domestic servant. Her auburn locks were pinned tightly, her figure flattered by a frilled muslin kerchief, crisscrossed in an 'X' over her breast. Pulling out a few auburn tendrils from her cap, she adjusted her bodice to show a little more flesh. Then she grew very still, and smiled slowly into the empty space before her. "How do you do, sir," she said with a graceful curtsy. "Now, what pretty dish might you care for tonight?

I wanted to be Feinberg's student, but I didn't know how to go about it. Since it was premature for formal arrangements and since I was naturally reticent and shy, I simply began to greet him very politely whenever our paths crossed. Graduate school was a small community. In corridors and elevators and on campus, I was soon running into Feinberg several times a day, always giving him a polite hello and a nice smile. He would reciprocate similarly with a sort of nervous curling of the lips. As time passed, this limbo of flirtatious foreplay continued unabated. I could never find the courage to broach the question of being his student; I supposed I must have hoped it would just happen wordlessly. Every time I saw him I smiled; every time I smiled he bared his lips back at me with greater awkwardness. Our facial manipulations bore increasingly less resemblance to anything like a real smile; each of our reciprocated gestures was a caricature, a Greek theatrical mask signaling friendliness. One day, on about the fifth intersection of our paths on that particular day, I could stand it no longer. I saw him heading towards me down one of the long dark, old-fashioned Pupin corridors, and immediately turned towards the nearest stairwell and went up one floor to avoid him. Having succeeded at this once, I was compelled to do it repeatedly. Soon I was moving upstairs or downstairs to another floor as soon as I saw him approaching, like the protagonist in some ghastly version of the video game Lode Runner.

We shall smell it. Just as a sharp axe can split a log into tiny splinters, our nose will fragment every detail of this perfume, Amor and Psyche. And then it will be only too apparent that this ostensibly magical sent was created by the most ordinary, familiar methods. We, Baldini, perfumer, shall catch Pélissier, the vinegar man, at his tricks. We shall rip the mask from his ugly face and show the innovator just what the old craft is capable of. We'll scrupulously imitate his mixture, his fashionable perfume. It will be born anew in our hands, so perfectly copied that the humbug himself won't be able to tell it from his own. No! That's not enough! We shall improve it! We'll show up his mistakes and rinse them away and then rub his nose in it. You're a bungler, Pélissier! An old stinker is what you are! An upstart in the craft of perfumery, and nothing more. And now to work, Baldini! Sharpen your nose and smell without sentimentality! Dissect the scent by the rules of the art! You must have the formula by this evening! And he made a dive for his desk, grabbing paper, ink and a fresh handkerchief, laid it all out properly, and began his analysis. The procedure was this: to dip the handkerchief in perfume, pass it rapidly under his nose, and extract from the fleeting cloud of scent one or another of its ingredients without being significantly distracted by the complex blending of its other parts; then, holding the handkerchief at the end of his outstretched arm, to jot down the name of the ingredient he had discovered, and repeat the process at once, letting the handkerchief flit by his nose, snatching at the next fragment of sent, and so on...

The blonde was staring at herself in the mirror, taking on a thoughtful, reflective tone. “Well, it isn’t easy. And his mood changes in an instant. But he collects different girls for different flavors – so one girl doesn’t have to be everybody and everything.” “Oh.” I splashed water on my face and stared for a moment at the mask in the mirror. “You’re just his type, totally. With all the tattoos, you are utterly monstrous, if you don’t mind my saying so. Punk-Goth gone mad.” She swung around to take a close, direct look. “I never saw the point of tattoos, mind you, just fad and fashion. But,” she focused on me, stared, grinned, and rolled her eyes. “My God, darling, you really are perfect! How could you do that to yourself?” She licked her lips. “I think you will be a success. As I said, Sergei loves tattoos. He’s totally into the weird and the monstrous. He adores freaks – and kid, you are about as freakish as they come.” “You think so.” I turned my mask towards her and gave her an extra big smile – I was even more grotesque, Martine told me, when I smiled. “Oh, Gwen, how totally utterly horrible!” she declared and then kissed me to console me for having become a monster. As I grinned at Sergei’s girl, the metal rings in my ears clanked against each other. I could feel the large ring nose, warm, smooth steel, against my curled upper lip. “Yes, you look like a masterpiece of self-loathing.” “It’s called body art,” I said, “It’s a statement.” “A statement?” “Absolutely,” I hiccupped. Everything was fuzzy; I forced myself to focus. “Whatever it is, you’ll be a big success. Sergei collects waifs who suffer from extreme self-hatred. Self-destructive and self-hating girls are one of his hobbies. You can do so much with them.

It was true what Doc had said, that Christmas succeeds Christmas rather than the days it follows. That had become apparent to Smoky in the last few days. Not because of the repeated ritual, the tree sledded home, the antique ornaments lovingly brought out, the Druid greenery hung on the lintels. It was only since last Christmas that all that had become imbued for him with dense emotion, an emotion having nothing to do with Yuletide, a day which for him as a child had nothing like the fascination of Hallowe'en, when he went masked and recognizable (pirate, clown) in the burnt and smoky night. Yet he saw that it was an emotion that would cover him now, as with snow, each time the season came. She was the cause, not he to whom he wrote. "Any," he began again, "my desires this year are a little clouded. I would like one of those instruments you use to sharpen the blades of an old-fashioned lawn mower. I would like the missing volume of Gibbon (Vol. II) which somebody's apparently taken out to use as a doorstop or something and lost." He thought of listing publisher and date, but a feeling of futility and silence came over him, drifting deep. "Santa," he wrote, "I would like to be one person only, not a whole crowd of them, half of them always trying to turn their backs and run whenever somebody" - Sophie, he meant, Alice, Cloud, Doc, Mother; Alice most of all - "looks at me. I want to be brave and honest and shoulder my burdens. I don't want to leave myself out while a bunch of slyboots figments do my living for me." He stopped, seeing he was growing unintelligible. He hesitated over the complimentary close; he thought of using "Yours as ever," but thought that might sound ironic or sneering, and at last wrote only "Yours &c.," as his father always had, which then seemed ambiguous and cool; what the hell anyway; and he signed it: Evan. S. Barnable.

May I ask you a question? If you have to hold your breath too long, what is it that makes you desperate to breathe again?” “I’m running out of oxygen, I guess.” “That’s the interesting fact. It isn’t the absence of oxygen. It’s the presence of carbon dioxide. Kind of the same thing, but not exactly. The point is, you could suck up any kind of gas, and as long as it wasn’t carbon dioxide, your brain would be happy. You could have a chest full of nitrogen, no oxygen at all, about to kill you stone dead, and your lungs would say, hey man, we’re cool, no carbon dioxide here, no need for us to start pumping again until we see some. Which they never will, because you’ll never breathe again. Because you’ll never need to. Because you have no carbon dioxide. And so on. So those folks started sniffing nitrogen, but you have to go to the welding shop and the cylinders are too heavy to lift, so then they tried helium from the balloon store, but you needed masks and tubes, and the whole thing still looks weird, so in the end most folks won’t be satisfied with anything less than the old-fashioned bottle of pills and the glass of scotch. Exactly like it used to be. Except it can’t be anymore. Those pills were most likely either Nembutal or Seconal, and both of those substances are tightly controlled now. There’s no way to get them. Except illegally, of course, way down where no one can see you. There are sources. The holy grail. Most of the offers are scams, naturally. Powdered Nembutal from China, and so on. Dissolve in water or fruit juice. Maybe eight or nine hundred bucks for a lethal dose. Some poor desperate soul takes the cash to MoneyGram and sends it off, and then waits at home, anxious and tormented, and never sees any powdered Nembutal from China, because there never was any. The powder in the on-line photograph was talc, and the prescription bottle was for something else entirely. Which I felt was a new low, in the end. They’re preying on the last hopes of suicidal people.

Only twice in literary history has there been a great period of tragedy, in the Athens of Pericles and in Elizabethan England. What these two periods had in common, two thousand years and more apart in time, that they expressed themselves in the same fashion, may give us some hint of the nature of tragedy, for far from being periods of darkness and defeat, each was a time when life was seen exalted, a time of thrilling and unfathomable possibilities. They held their heads high, those men who conquered at Marathon and Salamis, and those who fought Spain and saw the Great Armada sink. The world was a place of wonder; mankind was beauteous; life was lived on the crest of the wave. More than all, the poignant joy of heroism had stirred men’s hearts. Not stuff for tragedy, would you say? But on the crest of the wave one must feel either tragically or joyously; one cannot feel tamely. The temper of mind that sees tragedy in life has not for its opposite the temper that sees joy. The opposite pole to the tragic view of life is the sordid view. When humanity is seen as devoid of dignity and significance, trivial, mean, and sunk in dreary hopelessness, then the spirit of tragedy departs. “Sometime let gorgeous tragedy in sceptred pall come sweeping by.” At the opposite pole stands Gorki with The Lower Depths. Other poets may, the tragedian must, seek for the significance of life. An error strangely common is that this significance for tragic purposes depends, in some sort, upon outward circumstance, on pomp and feast and revelry, With mask, and antique pageantry— Nothing of all that touches tragedy. The surface of life is comedy’s concern; tragedy is indifferent to it. We do not, to be sure, go to Main Street or to Zenith for tragedy, but the reason has nothing to do with their dull familiarity. There is no reason inherent in the house itself why Babbitt’s home in Zenith should not be the scene of a tragedy quite as well as the Castle of Elsinore. The only reason it is not is Babbitt himself. “That singular swing toward elevation” which Schopenhauer discerned in tragedy, does not take any of its impetus from outside things. The

Desire is… " Desire is the glow of bathing lunatics. Starlight is the liquid used to power a whispering machine. Humming is the music of a forest moving in unison with your eyes. * A slip of the tongue and the hummingbird’s empty throne make the acquaintance of the word frenzy, which in turn adopts the phrase: “I am closest to you when we are furthest apart,” and together they follow the anxious doorway that leads far out of the city, where travelers always meet, alone and abandoned with only their mysteries to guide them… and when the sun bleeds out of the dampness of the earth, like pale limbs entwined and exhausted, they all pause in their own fashion to reflect not upon themselves but on the white wolves in the garden shivering like mist, in the mirror hiding your face. * The nature of movement is an image lost between the objects of an eclipse fervently scratched into the face of a sleeping woman when she approaches the liquid state of a circle, wandering aimlessly in search of lucidity and those moments of inarticulate suspicion… when the riddle is only half solved and the alphabet is still adding letters according to the human motors that have not yet arrived, as a species, scintillating in the grass, burning time. Not far from your name there is always a question mark, followed by silent paws… * It is not without the mask of the Enchanter’s dance of unreason, that joy follows the torment of seductive shapes, and sudden appearances in the whisper of long corridors. Tribal veils rising out of fingerprints on invisible entrances in the middle of the landscape, assume the form of her shoulders and the intimacy of her bones making dust, taking flight. * The axis of revolt and the nobility of a springtime stripped of its flowers, expertly balanced with a murmur of the heart on the anvil of chance. Your voice arcing between the two points of day and night, where the oracle of water spinning rapidly above, that is your city of numerology, mixes with the flux of a long voyage more stone-like and absurdly graceful then either milkweed or deadly nightshade, when it acclimatizes the elements of transparency in the host of purity. * The dream birds of a lost language are growing underground in the bed of sorcery. It is all revealed in the arms of your obsession, Arachne, (crawling to kiss) pale Ariadne, (kneeling to feed) in a pool of light that exceeds the dimensions of the loveliest crime. She turns into your evidence, gaining speed and recognition, becoming a brightness never solved, and a clarity that makes crystals. * The early morning hours share their nakedness with those who bare fruit and corset fireflies in long slender bath-like caresses. “Your serum, Sir Moor’s Head, follows the grand figures of the sea, ignites them, throws them like vessels out of fire, raising the sand upwards into oddly repetitive enchantments. Drown me in flight, daughter of wonder…

Or, in your case, as wide. Wait. Did you just say Gandalf?” “He is the founder of our order, and the first of the Five Warlocks. He comes from afar across the Western Ocean, from Easter Island, or perhaps from Japan.” “No, I think he comes from the mind of a story writer. An old-fashioned Roman Catholic from the days just before First Space Age. Unless I am confusing him with the guy who wrote about Talking Animal Land? With the Cowardly Lion who gets killed by a Wicked White Witch? I never read the text, I watched the comic.” “Oh, you err so! The Witches, we have preserved this lore since the time of the Fall of the Giants, whom we overthrew and destroyed. The tale is this: C. S. Lewis and Arthur C. Clarke were led by the Indian Maiden Sacagawea to the Pacific Ocean and back, stealing the land from the Red Man and selling them blankets impregnated with smallpox. It was called the Lewis and Clarke Expedition. When they reached the Pacific, they set out in the Dawn Treader to find the sea route to India, where the sacred river Alph runs through caverns measureless to man down to a sunless sea. They came to the Last Island, called Ramandu or Selidor, where the World Serpent guards the gateway to the Land of the Dead, and there they found Gandalf, returned alive from the underworld, and stripped of all his powers. He came again to mortal lands in North America to teach the Simon Families. The Chronicle is a symbolic retelling of their journey. It is one of our Holy Books.” “Your Holy Books were written for children by Englishmen.” “The gods wear many masks! If the Continuum chooses the lips of a White Man to be the lips through which the Continuum speaks, who are we to question? Tolkien was not Roman. He was of a race called the hobbits, Homo floresiensis, discovered on an isle in Indonesia, and he would have lived in happiness, had not the White Man killed him with DDT. So there were no Roman Catholics involved. May the Earth curse their memory forever! May they be forgotten forever!” “Hm. Earth is big. Maybe it can do both. You know about Rome? It perished in the Ecpyrosis, somewhat before your time.” “How could we not? The Pope in Rome created the Giants, whom the Witches rose up against and overthrew. Theirs was the masculine religion, aggressive, intolerant, and forbidding abortion. Ours is the feminine religion, peaceful and life-affirming and all-loving, and we offer the firstborn child to perish on our sacred fires. The First Coven was organized to destroy them like rats! When Rome was burned, we danced, and their one god was cast down and fled weeping on his pierced feet, and our many gods rose up. My ancestors hunted the Christians like stoats, and when we caught them, we burned them slowly, as they once did of us in Salem. What ill you do is returned to you tenfold!” “Hm. Are you willing to work with a Giant? I saw one in the pit, and saw the jumbo-sized coffin they pried him out from. What if he is a baptized Christian? Most of them were, since they were created by my pet pope and raised by nuns.” “All Christians must perish! Such is our code.” “Your code is miscoded.” “What of the Unforgettable Hate?” “Forget about it.

When we are sold perfume, we are accustomed to also being sold the idea of a life we will never have. Coty's Chypre enabled Guerlain to create Mitsouko; Coty's Emeraude of 1921 was the bedrock on which Shalimar was built and Coty's L'Origan become the godmother of L'heure bleue, also by Guerlain. Some people dedicate themselves to making life beautiful. With instinctual good taste, magpie tendencies and a flair for color, they weave painfully exquisite tableaux, defining the look of an era. Paul Poiret was one such person. After his success, he went bust in 1929 and had to sell his leftover clothing stock as rags. Swept out of the picture by a new generation of designers, his style too ornate and Aladdinesque, Poiret ended his days as a street painter and died in poverty. It was Poiret who saw that symbolic nomenclature could turn us into frenzied followers, transforming our desire to own a perfume into desperation. The beauty industry has always been brilliant at turning insecurities into commercial opportunities. Readers could buy the cologne to relax during times of anxiety or revive themselves from strain. Particularly in the 1930s, releases came thick and fast, intended to give the impression of bounty, the provision of beauty to all women in the nation. Giving perfumes as a gift even came under the Soviet definition of kulturnost or "cultured behavior", including to aunts and teachers on International Women's Day. Mitsouko is a heartening scent to war when alone or rather, when not wanting to feel lonely. Using fragrance as part of a considered daily ritual, the territorial marking of our possessions and because it offers us a retrospective sense of naughtiness. You can never tell who is going to be a Nr. 5 wearer. No. 5 has the precision of well-cut clothes and that special appeal which comes from a clean, bare room free of the knick-knacks that would otherwise give away its age. Its versatility may well be connected to its abstraction. Gardenia perfumes are not usually the more esoteric or intellectual on the shelves but exist for those times when we demand simply to smell gorgeous. You can depend on the perfume industry to make light of the world's woes. No matter how bad things get, few obstacles can block the shimmer and glitz of a new fragrance. Perfume became so fashionable as a means of reinvention and recovery that the neurology department at Columbia University experimented with the administration of jasmine and tuberose perfumes, in conjunction with symphony music, to treat anxiety, hysteria and nightmares. Scent enthusiasts cared less for the nuances of a composition and more for the impact a scent would have in society. In Ancient Rome, the Stoics were concerned about the use of fragrance by women as a mask for seducing men or as a vehicle of deception. The Roman satirist Juvenal talked of women buying scent with adultery in mind and such fears were still around in the 1940s and they are here with us today. Similarly, in crime fiction, fragrance is often the thing that gives the perpetrator away. Specifically in film noir, scent gets associated with misdemeanors. With Opium, the drugs tag was simply the bait. What YSL was really marketing, with some genius, was perfume as me time: a daily opportunity to get languid and to care sod-all about anything or anyone else.

The Old Issue October 9, 1899 “HERE is nothing new nor aught unproven,” say the Trumpets, “Many feet have worn it and the road is old indeed. “It is the King—the King we schooled aforetime !” (Trumpets in the marshes—in the eyot at Runnymede!) “Here is neither haste, nor hate, nor anger,” peal the Trumpets, “Pardon for his penitence or pity for his fall. “It is the King!”—inexorable Trumpets— (Trumpets round the scaffold at the dawning by Whitehall!) “He hath veiled the Crown and hid the Sceptre,” warn the Trumpets, “He hath changed the fashion of the lies that cloak his will. “Hard die the Kings—ah hard—dooms hard!” declare the Trumpets, Trumpets at the gang-plank where the brawling troop-decks fill! Ancient and Unteachable, abide—abide the Trumpets! Once again the Trumpets, for the shuddering ground-swell brings Clamour over ocean of the harsh, pursuing Trumpets— Trumpets of the Vanguard that have sworn no truce with Kings! All we have of freedom, all we use or know— This our fathers bought for us long and long ago. Ancient Right unnoticed as the breath we draw— Leave to live by no man’s leave, underneath the Law. Lance and torch and tumult, steel and grey-goose wing Wrenched it, inch and ell and all, slowly from the King. Till our fathers ’stablished, after bloody years, How our King is one with us, first among his peers. So they bought us freedom—not at little cost Wherefore must we watch the King, lest our gain be lost, Over all things certain, this is sure indeed, Suffer not the old King: for we know the breed. Give no ear to bondsmen bidding us endure. Whining “He is weak and far”; crying “Time shall cure.”, (Time himself is witness, till the battle joins, Deeper strikes the rottenness in the people’s loins.) Give no heed to bondsmen masking war with peace. Suffer not the old King here or overseas. They that beg us barter—wait his yielding mood— Pledge the years we hold in trust—pawn our brother’s blood— Howso’ great their clamour, whatsoe’er their claim, Suffer not the old King under any name! Here is naught unproven—here is naught to learn. It is written what shall fall if the King return. He shall mark our goings, question whence we came, Set his guards about us, as in Freedom’s name. He shall take a tribute, toll of all our ware; He shall change our gold for arms—arms we may not bear. He shall break his judges if they cross his word; He shall rule above the Law calling on the Lord. He shall peep and mutter; and the night shall bring Watchers ’neath our window, lest we mock the King— Hate and all division; hosts of hurrying spies; Money poured in secret, carrion breeding flies. Strangers of his counsel, hirelings of his pay, These shall deal our Justice: sell—deny—delay. We shall drink dishonour, we shall eat abuse For the Land we look to—for the Tongue we use. We shall take our station, dirt beneath his feet, While his hired captains jeer us in the street. Cruel in the shadow, crafty in the sun, Far beyond his borders shall his teachings run. Sloven, sullen, savage, secret, uncontrolled, Laying on a new land evil of the old— Long-forgotten bondage, dwarfing heart and brain— All our fathers died to loose he shall bind again. Here is naught at venture, random nor untrue— Swings the wheel full-circle, brims the cup anew. Here is naught unproven, here is nothing hid: Step for step and word for word—so the old Kings did! Step by step, and word by word: who is ruled may read. Suffer not the old Kings: for we know the breed— All the right they promise—all the wrong they bring. Stewards of the Judgment, suffer not this King!

No one really believes in the gods of the New Age; they are deities not of the celestial hierarchy above but of the ornamental etagere in the corner, and their only "divine" office is to give symbolic expression to the dreamier sides of their votaries' personalities. They are purchased gods, gods as accessories, and hence are merely masks by means of which the one true god-the will-at once conceals and reveals itself. It

When you’re a girl, you never let on that you are proud, or that you know you’re better at history, or biology, or French, than the girl who sits beside you and is eighteen months older. Instead you gush about how good she is at putting on nail polish or at talking to boys, and you roll your eyes at the vaunted difficulty of the history/biology/French test and say, ‘Oh my God, it’s going to be such a disaster! I’m so scared!’ and you put yourself down whenever you can so that people won’t feel threatened by you, so they’ll like you, because you wouldn’t want them to know that in your heart, you are proud, and maybe even haughty, and are riven by thoughts the revelation of which would show everyone how deeply Not Nice you are. You learn a whole other polite way of speaking to the people who mustn’t see you clearly, and you know—you get told by others—that they think you’re really sweet, and you feel a thrill of triumph: ‘Yes, I’m good at history/biology/French, and I’m good at this, too.’ It doesn’t ever occur to you, as you fashion your mask so carefully, that it will grow into your skin and graft itself, come to seem irremovable.

Moreover, it is important to recognize that notions of self-fashioning were circulating in Renaissance Europe not only among members of the rising middle class but also in writings addressed to monarchs. Consider, for example, Machiavelli’s Prince or the various Mirrors for Princes of the early modern period, which advocate that monarchs carefully manipulate their image in order to solidify their authority and to mask the exercise of coercive power, for, as Machiavelli writes, the vulgar are always taken by what a thing seems to be and by what comes of it; and in the world there are only the vulgar, for the few find a place there only when the many have no ground to rest on (2002) (for more on Putin and Machiavelli,

An hour later we were pulling into the hospital parking lot. Sparkly and shiny from my hair and makeup job, I had to stop and bend over six times between the car and the front door of the hospital. I literally couldn’t take a step until each contraction ended. Within an hour after checking in, I was writhing on a hospital bed in all-encompassing pain and wishing once again that I’d gone ahead and moved to Chicago. It had become my default response when things got rough in my life: morning sickness? I should have moved to Chicago. Cow manure in my yard? Chicago would have been a better choice. Contractions less than a minute apart? Windy City, come and get me. Finally, I reached my breaking point. It’s an indescribable feeling, the throes of hard labor--that mind-numbing total body cramp whose origin you can’t even begin to wrap your head around. After trying to be strong and tough in front of Marlboro Man, I finally gave up and gripped the bedsheet and clenched my teeth. I groaned and moaned and pushed the nurse button and whimpered to Marlboro Man, “I can’t do this anymore.” When the nurse came into the room moments later, I begged her to put me out of my misery. My salvation arrived five minutes later in the form of an eight-inch needle, and when the medicine hit I nearly began to cry. The relief was indescribably sweet. I was so blissfully pain-free, I fell asleep. And when I woke up confused and disoriented an hour later, a nurse named Heidi was telling me it was time to push. Almost immediately, Dr. Oliver entered the room, fully scrubbed and wearing a mask. “Are you ready, Mama?” Marlboro Man asked, standing near my shoulders as the nurse draped my legs and adjusted the fetal monitor, which was strapped around my middle. I felt like I’d woken up in the middle of a party. But the weirdest party ever--one where the hostess was putting my feet in stirrups. I ordered Marlboro Man to remain north of my belly button as nurses scurried into place. I’d made it clear beforehand: I didn’t want him down there. I wanted him to continue to get to know me the old-fashioned way--and besides, that’s what we were paying the doctor for. “Go ahead and push once for me,” Dr. Oliver said. I did, but only hard enough to ensure that nothing accidental or embarrassing would slip out. I could think of no greater humiliation. “Okay, that’s not going to work at all,” Dr. Oliver scolded. I pushed again. “Ree,” Dr. Oliver said, looking up at me through the space between my legs. “You can do way better than that.” He’d watched me grow up in the ballet company in our town. He’d watched me contort and leap and spin in everything from The Nutcracker to Swan Lake to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He knew I had the fortitude to will a baby from my loins. That’s when Marlboro Man grabbed my hand, as if to impart to me, his sweaty and slightly weary wife, a measure of his strength and endurance. “Come on, honey,” he said. “You can do it.” A few tense moments later, our baby was born. Except it wasn’t a baby boy. It was a seven-pound, twenty-one-inch baby girl. It was the most important moment of my life. And more ways than one, it was a pivotal moment for Marlboro Man.

While the secret identity was a precious commodity for most male heroes, some were confident enough to share theirs with a special someone. Heroes like Dr. Fate, The Flash, and Sandman revealed their heroic identities to their girlfriends, who then became their assistants, or “helpmates.” Hawkman and his girlfriend Shiera were the reincarnations of an ancient Egyptian prince and princess. Shiera’s eagerness to help her winged boyfriend often got her into trouble. “I hope this will teach you to stay out of affairs that aren’t your concern,” Hawkman snaps after he has rescued his sweetheart from yet another scrape. But by 1941, Hawkman needs help, and Shiera is a prime candidate. Hawkman’s costume consisted of tights, mask, and wings that were attached to his bare chest by crisscrossing straps. After quickly making some modifications that would not violate any obscenity laws, Hawkman presents Shiera with a feminized version of his costume, now complete with discreet bikini top. “. . . you mean I’m going to pose as you . . . oboy! This is going to be fun . . .” gushes Shiera, as she slips on the green and red costume. Thus was Hawkgirl born, joining another club for 1940s heroines: the Partners.

Hamilton seldom published under his own name and drew on a bewildering array of pseudonyms. Such pen names were sometimes transparent masks through which the public readily identified prominent politicians. The fashion of allowing anonymous attacks permitted extraordinary bile to seep into political discourse, and savage remarks that might not otherwise have surfaced appeared regularly in the press.

In order to construct a flawless imitation, the first step was to gather as much video data as possible with a web crawler. His ideal targets were fashionable Yoruba girls, with their brightly colored V-neck buba and iro that wrapped around their waists, hair bundled up in gele. Preferably, their videos were taken in their bedrooms with bright, stable lighting, their expressions vivid and exaggerated, so that AI could extract as many still-frame images as possible. The object data set was paired with another set of Amaka’s own face under different lighting, from multiple angles and with alternative expressions, automatically generated by his smartstream. Then, he uploaded both data sets to the cloud and got to work with a hyper-generative adversarial network. A few hours or days later, the result was a DeepMask model. By applying this “mask,” woven from algorithms, to videos, he could become the girl he had created from bits, and to the naked eye, his fake was indistinguishable from the real thing. If his Internet speed allowed, he could also swap faces in real time to spice up the fun. Of course, more fun meant more work. For real-time deception to work, he had to simultaneously translate English or Igbo into Yoruba, and use transVoice to imitate the voice of a Yoruba girl and a lip sync open-source toolkit to generate corresponding lip movement. If the person on the other end of the chat had paid for a high-quality anti-fake detector, however, the app might automatically detect anomalies in the video, marking them with red translucent square warnings

How to start a war? Nurture your own latent hungers for power. Forget that only madmen pursue power for its own sake. Let such madmen gain power—even you. Let such madmen act behind their conventional masks of sanity. Whether their masks be fashioned from the delusions of defense or the theological aura of law, war will come. —Gowachin aphorism

Sorry, I just had to think of something I read about the last few years before the Fall. There was a worldwide plague that could only get so bad because people were so trump back then. Simple cloth masks in front of their faces could have saved most of them, but they refused them for fashion or convenience." Kyara shook her head. "A legend, nothing more. No one can really be that stubborn.

What, then, is the end of study? For one thing, as the fate of Navarre’s Academe makes plain, it is not “philosophy” in the sense of a cloistered cultivation of the intellect and pursuit of truth for its own sake in a spot secluded from the world and from women. Nor is it “love” in its romantic sense sheltered from life’s suffering and reality--“love” with all its ritual and manners, its form and style, its fads and foibles, its “wit” and raprtee, its masks and costumes, its rhyming and sonneteering, its language of ‘Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise, Three-pil’d hyperboles, spruce affectation, Figures pedantical.’ These things are but summer flies that blow their worshipers full of ostentation, as they did Boyet--Boyet who picked up wit as pigeons do peas, Boyet the ladies’ man, forerunner of Osric, who kissed his hand away in courtesy. Neither is the end of education erudition, the barren learning that transformed the pendant Holofernes into a walking dictionary of synonyms, nor slavery to authority and the past, the bondage that never let the sycophatic curate Nathaniel utter an idea or opinion without backing it up with an “as the Father saith.” Nor, at the other extreme, is it subservience to fashion and the present, such as made the swashbuckling Don Adriano de Armado a mint of fire-new phrases emitting a “smoke of rhetoric.

Preposterous as love is, all the more so is hating someone with such passion like love masked in such a dark fashion - Haunting Secrets -

Propaganda that tied Jews to unhealthy and unnatural sexuality made it easier for Christians to blame them for the spread of disease. For instance, according to Sennett, when Venice suffered a syphilis epidemic, the city relied on its Jewish doctors to treat the disease, but at the same time blamed them for its spread: in 1520, the Venetian surgeon and scientist Paracelsus attacked the city’s Jewish doctors who “purge [syphilitics], smear them, wash them, and perform all manner of impious deception.” Jewish doctors who treated victims of disease—syphilis, leprosy, and especially plague—often wore distinctive clothing designed to protect the doctor from the vapors thought to spread the disease—a precursor of the iconic bird-beaked plague doctor’s mask that developed in the seventeenth century. Because many doctors in Venice were Jewish—especially those called upon to treat the victims of communicable diseases—this strange costume and its associations with disease and death became associated with Jews. The resulting aversion culminated in 1516 in the physical segregation of Venetian Jews in the district after which isolated ethnic neighborhoods have been named ever since, the industrial ward named for the Italian verb “to pour,” or gettare: the ghetto.

Nothing about Vader seemed natural—not his towering height, his deep voice, his antiquated diction—yet despite those qualities and the mask and respirator, Tarkin believed him to be more man than machine. Although he had clearly twisted the powers of the Force to his own dark purposes, Vader’s innate strength was undeniable. His contained rage was genuine, as well, and not simply the result of some murderous cyberprogram. But the quality that made him most human was the fierce dedication he demonstrated to the Emperor. It was that genuflecting obedience, the steadfast devotion to execute whatever task the Emperor assigned, that had given rise to so many rumors about Vader: that he was a counterpart to the Confederacy’s General Grievous the Emperor had been holding in reserve; that he was an augmented human or near-human who had been trained or had trained himself in the ancient dark arts of the Sith; that he was nothing more than a monster fashioned in some clandestine laboratory. Many believed that the Emperor’s willingness to grant so much authority to such a being heralded the shape of things to come, for it was beyond dispute that Vader was the Empire’s first terror weapon.

The thought may seem remarkable, but perhaps not so much so as it would at first. First of all, there was never anything unusual about the Baron's sex life, even if it may tickle one's curiosity when presented in so balanced a fashion, and there is certainly nothing unique about the case. On the contrary, I would like to intimate that I have never, especially in artistic circles, met an individual who could be called psychically monosexual through and through. Our manliness-with all due respect-does not preclude a certain amount of femininity, thank God; it would be a great pity if it were otherwise. This 'second phase', then, which is so prevalent in the Baron's psychosexual makeup, this balanced perception of the feminine side of his nature, only seems special when studied in a superficial way. It should rather be seen as something entirely natural and normal. For if within an utterly male body with clearly defined male sexual feelings a soul is contained - I use the word in an abstract sense in order to get my point across more easily and directly - a soul, I say, which is animated by feminine feelings, generally speaking these feelings won't be strong enough to vanquish the natural restraints that stand in the way of an outspoken male-male bonding. The instinct remains focused on the female, and even when it finds itself in a feminine position vis-a-vis the soul, the apparent ambivalent result is only seeming. The masculine yearning for the female body basically remains, even when it finds itself flooded by feminine feelings, and the ostensible homosexuality is merely a mask. I do not consider Baron von Friedel's case to be anything more than an exceptionally clear-cut textbook case describing a phenomenon I have, for my part, seen often enough, if hardly ever in such pronounced form. "The Death Of Baron Jesus Maria Von Friedel

Wall Street and corporate American know there is no deal considered beneath the Clintons. If they will, as reported, wheel and deal off the human tragedy of the Haitian disaster, then they will indeed do anything. If they are willing to defame and destroy women abused by Bill Clinton, they will not only do that, but proclaim themselves feminists. They have created a huge shakedown conglomerate in the Clinton Foundation in Machiavellian fashion: the philanthropy brilliantly masks the cynical tapping of such funds for personal aggrandizement. Quid pro quos go through the foundation to “help” the helpless while providing the family the moral veneer to moonlight and rake in huge fees from foundation donors, who do not give such largess for nothing. Hitting up corporate finaglers for $70 million in tag-along private jet travel would be burdensome; but creating a tax-free “philanthropy” to provide such corporate one-percent travel for the three Clintons (whether to lecture on global warming or the unfair tax policies of the one-percent) is brilliant in the Medieval sense.

Talkative represents the man or woman who delights in talking about divine things but has only theoretical knowledge of such things. No actual personal heart experience correlates to the matters they love to discuss so eloquently. They are often highly esteemed by others, but those closest to them would quickly betray a life out-of-sync with their words. The mask fashioned by fluency with all subjects divine hides their real life. 2.

The game is a thread, microscopic in breadth, a hint of gossamer drawing unsuspecting souls together in simple competition to the exclusion of all else, from a mother and her infant playing peekaboo to two old men hunched over a chessboard and everything in between. The game unifies, joining father and son pitching baseballs at night after a long day at the office, pitches pounding the mitt or skipping past, one time even knocking the coffee cup handle clean off and the boy scampering off to retrieve a wild one as the dad sips and ponders. The game allows brothers to bond even when the age gap is too great for real competition, their mutual effort to fashion a bridge between disparate age and ability forming a bond of trust and respect. And finally, it is the game’s presence and past and its memory that inspires each of us to forgive time and aging and their inevitable accompanying attrition because the gray and hobbled old man before me was once lean and powerful and magnificent and some of what became of him was due to the investment he made in me and after all the batting practice he threw and grounders he hit, his shoulder aches and his knees need replacement. Even though youth masks it so you don't realize it all when you’re a kid, someday it happens to you and suddenly you realize you are him and you are left wishing you could go back and tell him what you now know and perhaps thank him for what he gave up. You imagine him back then receiving nothing in return except the knowledge that you would someday understand but he could not hasten that day or that revelation and he abided it all so graciously knowing that your realization might be too late for him. So you console yourself that in the absence of your gratitude he clung to hope and conviction and the future. Turn the page and you find yourself staring out at the new generation and you wince as his pitches bruise your palm and crack your thumb and realize that today the game is growth and achievement and tomorrow it will be love and memories. The game is a gift.

Although Diana has successfully shaken off the traditional image of the fairy-tale princess concerned exclusively with shopping and fashion it still colours the preconceptions of those she meets for the first time. She is used to being patronized. As she tells close friends: “It happens a lot. It’s interesting to see people’s reactions to me. They have one impression in mind and then, as they talk to me, I can see it changing.” At the same time her struggles within the royal family have made her realize that she must not hide behind the conventional mask of monarchy. The spontaneity, the tactile compassion and the generosity of spirit she displays in public are very genuine. It is not an act for public consumption. The Princess, who appreciates how the royal world anaesthetizes individuals from reality, is fiercely determined that her boys are prepared for the outside world in a way unknown to previous royal generations. Normally royal children are trained to hide their feelings and emotions from others, constructing a shield to deflect intrusive inquiry. Diana believes that William and Harry should be open and honest to the possibilities within themselves and the variety of approaches to understanding life. As she says: “I want to bring them up with security. I hug my children to death and get into bed with them at night. I always feed them love and affection, it’s so important.

So now you should be able to see what happened when the theory of evolution came along. The Gospel had been wide spread in America, and there were probably many who were wearing masks of pretense who were so exhausted from their daily “pious citizen” performance that they were just waiting for something like the theory of evolution to come along so that they could use it as an excuse to drop their act. To them, this would have been much better than the old fashioned golden calf, because they could follow this “ape to human” theory looking like intellectual giants instead of like rebellious sinful sellouts. They merely found them a new and improved version of a golden calf that they could better relate to. Afterall, golden calves are really just mirrors that are designed to not look like mirrors, and the theory of evolution is probably the best designed golden calf that there has been so far.

He was dressed, I saw, in the severest Spanish fashion, making him look older, more awe-inspiring, and even more princely. A great ruff brushed his firm jaw; his supple prowl had become a conscious elegance, as though he had put on majesty as a whore puts on paint, as a mask and as a weapon.

Smugness, superiority, and aloofness are masks of fear.

Aristocrats live not in traditions but in fashions.

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While ADHDers don’t appear to process information in as bottom-up a fashion as Autistics do, the high energy and anxiety associated with the neurotype can look incredibly similar to how Autistics react to overwhelming sensory information.[84] And while some masked Autistics may generally be better at staying on task, maintaining a consistent schedule, and keeping organized compared to the average ADHD, many of us are so chronically exhausted and burnt out that we experience the same struggles with daily life that people with ADHD do.

deeper lessons were confidence, poise in any context, what sociologist Shamus Rahman Khan calls ease. Old-fashioned exclusionary markers could in fact be a liability, in the same way an all-white classroom was. All the world was ours not because of what we excluded or inherited but because of our open-minded good manners and how hard we worked—which, all agreed, was very hard indeed. This superficial meritocracy masked, especially to ourselves, a profound entitlement.

The beast plopped into the chair, the wood groaning, and, in a flash of white light, turned into a golden-haired man. I stifled a cry and pushed myself against the panelled wall beside the door, feeling for the molding of the threshold, trying to gauge the distance between me and escape. The beast was not a man, not a lesser faerie. He was one of the High Fae, one of their ruling nobility: beautiful, lethal, and merciless. He was young- or at least what I could see of his face seemed young. His nose, cheeks, and brows were covered by an exquisite golden mask embedded with emeralds shaped like whorls of leaves. Some absurd High Fae fashion, no doubt. It left only his eyes- looking the same as they had in beast form, strong jaw, and mouth for me to see, and the latter tightened into a thin line. 'You should eat something,' he said. Unlike the elegance of his mask, the dark green tunic he wore was rather plain, accented only with a leather baldric across his broad chest. It was more for fighting than style, even though he bore no weapons I could detect. Not just one of the High Fae, but... a warrior, too.

The green of his eyes matched the grass between my fingers, and the amber flecks were like the shafts of sunlight that streamed through the trees. Even his mask, odd and foreign, seemed to fit into the glen- as if this place had been fashioned for him alone. I could picture him here in his beast form, curled up in the grass, dozing.

The stranger whirled with fluid grace. His mask was bronze and fashioned after a fox's features, concealing all but the lower half of his face- along with most of what looked like a wicked, slashing scar from his brow down to his jaw. It didn't hide the eye that was missing- or the carved golden orb that had replaced it and moved as though he could use it. It fixed on me. Even from across the room, I could see his remaining russet eye widen. He sniffed once, his lips curling a bit to reveal straight white teeth, and then he turned to the other faerie. 'You're joking,' he said quietly. 'That scrawny thing brought down Andras with a single ash arrow?' Bastard- an absolute bastard. A pity I didn't have the arrow now- or I could shoot him instead.

Images of white, semi clad women in colour would be very conspicuous in an otherwise unintelligible newspaper to Nanaki. It was somewhat incongruous to see little pictures, sourced from foreign news agencies, of white women in bikinis, sun tanning on a beach in Zakynthos or a procession of revellers in Sao Paulo complete with exotic costume regalia: trailing pheasant feathers for tails, operatic masks tantalisingly revealing pouty red lips, breasts protruding out of sequinned two pieces, women’s toned derrieres jutting out of glitzy g-strings vibrating animalistically to the samba, shapely legs fitting snugly into gold stilettos. Others showed women walking down the ramp in skimpy lingerie at a Missoni fashion show in Milan. At times these sights would intrigue Nanaki. For her, Urdu was unintelligible, just black marks on paper. Who reads this newspaper? And who are these pictures for? Whose reality is this?

How to start a war? Nurture your own latent hungers for power. Forget that only madmen pursue power for its own sake. Let such madmen gain power — even you. Let such madmen act behind their conventional masks of sanity. Whether their masks be fashioned from the delusions of defense or the theological aura of law, war will come. — Gowachin aphorism

Instead of a helmet, Skarssen wore a tight-fitting leather mask fashioned in the form of some hideous amalgam of wolf and daemon, lacquered and pierced with fragments of stone. His eyes shone through the mask, cold flint to match the grey of his armour, and a black-bladed axe with an edge like napped obsidian was sheathed across his back.

[F]ashion always stands, as I have pointed out, at the periphery of personality, which regards itself as a pièce de résistance for fashion, or at least can do so when called upon. It is this phase of fashion that is received by sensitive and peculiar persons, who use it as a sort of mask. [...] We have here a triumph of the soul over the actual circumstances of existence, which must be considered one of the highest and finest victories, at least as far as form is concerned, for the reason that the enemy himself is transformed into a servant, and that the very thing which the personality seemed to suppress is voluntarily seized, because the leveling suppression is here transferred to the external spheres of life in such a way that it furnishes a veil and a protection for everything spiritual and now all the more free. This corresponds exactly to the triviality of expression and conversation through which very sensitive and retiring people, especially women, often deceive one about the individual depth of the soul. [...] The impossibility of enticing her beyond the most banal and trite forms of expression, which often drives one to despair, in innumerable instances signifies nothing more than a barricade of the soul, an iron mask that conceals the real features and can furnish this service only by means of a wholly uncompromising separation of the feelings and the externals of life.

Burke.” The fashionable valet turned back to face him. “The intruder. What is her name again?” Burke’s mask twitched, and he struggled to suppress the smile on his lips. Elle. Severin