"I invented Edna because I hated her.... I poured out my hatred of the standards of the little people of their generation."

Wrote Barry Humphries, quoted in "Barry Humphries (Dame Edna to You, Possums) Is Dead at 89/Bewigged, bejeweled and bejowled, Mr. Humphries’s creation was one of the longest-lived characters ever channeled by a single performer" (NYT).

Dame Edna emerged when the young Mr. Humphries, under the sway of Dadaism, was performing with a repertory company based at the University of Melbourne.... On long bus tours, he entertained his colleagues with the character of Mrs. Norm Everage — born Edna May Beazley in Wagga Wagga, Australia, sometime in the 1930s — an ordinary housewife who had found sudden acclaim after winning a nationwide competition, the Lovely Mother Quest. 

Unthinkable as it seems, Edna was dowdy then, given to mousy brown hair and pillbox hats. But she was already in full command of the arsenal of bourgeois bigotries that would be a hallmark of her later self...

I loved Dame Edna. (Click my "Dame Edna" tag.) But not everyone appreciated this sort of humor: 

"To take aim at J.K. Rowling, Dave Chappelle or even Dr. Seuss shows real censorious ambition. But to cancel [Norman] Mailer at this moment would be an act of superfluity..."

"... like canceling Booth Tarkington or James Whitcomb Riley — a pointless kick to a fundamentally anachronistic character.... [Mailer's] reputational decline is so overdetermined, his persona so intensely out of step with our own era — the brawling macho solipsist who stabbed his own wife with a penknife — as to make him a comically easy and therefore pointless target for cancellation.... You want to impress me? You want to flex some cultural muscle? Let’s see you cancel Joan Didion.... In the recent obituaries you could see it enfolded into a larger narrative of her career, in which the conservative aspect of her writing... was something she gradually questioned and then transcended.... This narrative, in which Didion (to quote Hilton Als of The New Yorker) inherited a mythology and then 'began to see the cracks, and to wonder what those cracks meant,' is part of her protection against contemporary cancellation...."

From "Joan Didion, Conservative" by Ross Douthat (NYT).

For background on the current talk of cancelling Norman Mailer, see "Michael Wolff on Random House's Cancellation of Norman Mailer/Exclusive: The author's 'White Negro' essay helps sink a book set for 2023."

I remember when Norman Mailer was cancelled in 1971. Cancellation — and feminism — was so much more exciting and alive back then (not this dreary business we've got going today):

These days, Germaine Greer is cancelled.

The New Yorker introduces a crossword puzzle.

David Remnick describes it like this:

Five constructors will take turns crafting the puzzles; they are crossword experts whose answers and clues exhibit the same qualities we aim for in all of our writing: wit, intelligence, a wide-ranging interest in the world, and a love of language....

The great Richard Wilbur, who died last fall, once published a poem in The New Yorker about doing a crossword—“a ghostly grille / Through which, as often, we begin to see / The confluence of the Oka and the Aare”—on a train. “It is a rite / Of finitude,” he wrote, “a picture in whose frame / Roc, oast, and Inca decompose at once / Into the ABCs of every day.” Even if you find that you have to look up a few words (oast: “a usually conical kiln used for drying hops, malt, or tobacco”), we hope that the ritual provides you with some pleasurable procrastination.

Oh! He's giving us the go-ahead to look up words. Well, I did the puzzle, and I didn't look anything up to complete it, though I'd have to look up 42 down to know what it referred to. I'm not doing any spoilers here, but having looked it up, I see why I couldn't read what I had.

It's only a weekly puzzle, so there won't be the kind of predictable changing levels of difficulty that you see in a week of NYT puzzles. But it took me about as long as my average for a NYT Friday puzzle, so I'm going to say it's at what we NYT puzzle-solvers call the Friday level. Friday is my favorite level of NYT difficulty, so I'm happy with the New Yorker puzzle so far.

It was nicely literary in a few places: "'Champion Literary Phallocrat,' per Foster Wallace" (which took me a few crosses to see was not Mailer, though DFW names Mailer as one of the "famous phallocrats of his generation" in the "Champion Literary Phallocrat" essay). And "1928 Virginia Wolf 'biography'" (which I got right on first guess, though I doubted myself for a while).

I liked seeing Camille Paglia ("Group that embodied 'a new kind of feminism,' per Camille Paglia”). And Germaine Greer is in there too ("'A ludicrous invention,' per Germaine Greer").

Anyway, nice start for the New Yorker crossword!

Will The Reckoning be the end of high heels?

Bonnie Wertheim wonders (in the NYT).

The whole beginning of this piece is about a lady in Palo Alto who objected to the emoji her phone suggested when she typed "shoe":

“It was the first time I noticed and stopped in my virtual tracks and stared at the stiletto heel that auto-populated,” [Florie] Hutchinson said. “It was the emoji that broke the camel’s back.”

I didn't know the word "auto-populate" or that there was something called the Unicode Consortium’s emoji subcommittee that you could write to about your objections to emojis. The Palo Alto woman recommended "a ballet flat, a shoe that reads as female but not seductive or sexualized." She was especially concerned about children seeing the stiletto shoe:

“My daughters are already being confronted by these gender-stereotypical norms, totally subconsciously,” Ms. Hutchinson said, “while all of us are having this very vocal conversation about gender biases.”

Anyway, let's scroll past the history of high heels — men wore them too* — and look at the end. Does it say that The Reckoning will cause high heels to become unwearable? They've always been hard to wear, because they are uncomfortable and hobbling, but they may become impossible to wear because they say something that — like sexy remarks in the workplace — you won't want to say anymore.

But that's not where the NYT article goes:

Last year, in The New Yorker, the writer Mary Karr called for the uninvention of high heels. It seems more likely that they will be reinvented. Two companies led by women have developed ergonomic high heels whose insoles are designed to promote stability and even weight distribution, and prevent heel-related hospital visits....

I clicked through both to the Mary Karr article and the supposedly "ergonomic" high heels. I didn't see any reason to believe "ergonomic" high heels are anything but somewhat less bad high heels, so let me try to end this with a bit from Mary Karr's piece:

Oh, womenfolk, as we once burned our bras could we not torch the footwear crucifying us?... Our feet and spines will unknot, and high heels will fade from consciousness along with foot-binding and rib removal to shrink your waist. The species may stop reproducing, but who the hell cares.

No question mark. Who the hell cares.

By the way, "The species may stop reproducing" makes me notice that no one says "Fuck-me shoes" anymore, or so it seems to me, but "Fuck-me shoes" has its own Wikipedia page. Excerpt:

Prominent feminist Germaine Greer brought what had been an "obscure" term to more mainstream notoriety when she used it in 1995. Greer used the term in referring to British journalist Suzanne Moore's alleged "hair bird's-nested all over the place, fuck-me shoes and three fat inches of cleavage." Greer made the remark in response to a column Moore had written about Greer in The Guardian, where Moore had mistakenly repeated an incorrect rumor that Greer had a hysterectomy as a voluntary decision to have herself sterilized....

Tripping into that female-on-female aggression makes me assume that the weapon, the stiletto,** will be kept as an option for a long time to come.

___________________________

* Would Prince be alive today if he hadn't worn high heels?

** The arm that is the foot.

"What remains enthralling, though, are Millett’s close readings, her exposés of the naked emperors of the literary left."

"'After receiving his servant’s congratulations on his dazzling performance, Rojack proceeds calmly to the next floor and throws his wife’s body out of the window,' is Millett’s deadpan description of the aftermath of the hero’s sodomization of a maid in Mailer’s An American Dream. Millett then observes, 'The reader is given to understand that by murdering one woman and buggering another, Rojack became a "man."'"

Writes Judith Shulevitz in "Kate Millett: ‘Sexual Politics’ & Family Values" (New York Review of Books):

For a glorious moment, this very bookish literary critic was the face of American feminism. The New York Times called her the “high priestess.” After “Prisoner of Sex” became the talk of the town—and the revered Harper’s editor Willie Morris was fired for publishing it—Mailer organized a riotous debate known as “Town Bloody Hall,” which was filmed by Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker and is now streamable. It was a circus, and it was Millett who set it in motion, even though she refused to show up. Mailer aimed a torrent of insults at the feminists who did agree to take the stage or appear in the audience, among them Greer, Diana Trilling, Susan Sontag, Betty Friedan, and Cynthia Ozick. They rolled their eyes and gave as good as they got—much better, in most cases—and the crowd roared with delight. Try to imagine a public clash of ideas being so joyously gladiatorial today.

Here it is:



ADDED: The word "bugger" (for anal sex) is rare these days. Did you know the word is related to "Bulgarian"? From the Online Etymology Dictionary:

bugger (n.) "sodomite," 1550s, earlier "heretic" (mid-14c.), from Medieval Latin Bulgarus "a Bulgarian" (see Bulgaria), so called from bigoted notions of the sex lives of Eastern Orthodox Christians or of the sect of heretics that was prominent there 11c. Compare Old French bougre "Bulgarian," also "heretic; sodomite."

bugger (v.) "to commit buggery with," 1590s, from bugger (n.)...

The earliest use of "bugger" to express "annoyance, hatred, dismissal, etc.," is, according to the OED, in the diary John Adams, in 1779: "Dr. W[inship] told me of Tuckers rough tarry Speech, about me at the Navy Board.—I did not say much to him at first, but damn and buger my Eyes, I found him after a while as sociable as any Marble-head man."

AND: Here's a William Safire column (from 1995) on the word "bugger," written after some Congressman said "We're here to nail the little bugger down" (and the "little bugger" was Bill Clinton). How disrespectful was it?

"What they are saying is that because I don’t think surgery will turn a man into a woman I should not be allowed to speak anywhere."

Said Germaine Greer.

Addressing claims that she had been hurtful towards transgender women, Greer added: “People are being hurtful to me all the time. Try being an old woman. For goodness sake, people get hurt all the time. I’m not about to walk on eggshells.”...

Asked about the petition [to stop her from speaking at Cardiff University, she said]: “I don’t really know what I think of it. It strikes me as a bit of a put-up job really because I am not even going to talk about the issue that they are on about."

The link goes to The Guardian, where the article is illustrated by a photo of Greer, in fully wrinkled old-lady form, next to a photo of Caitlyn Jenner that's been photoshopped beyond recognition to the point of looking like a 30-year-old. 

More here: "I don’t expect people to agree with me. On the other hand, I don’t expect them to throw things at me.... I just don’t think that surgery turns a man into a woman. A perfectly permissable view. I mean, an un-man is not necessarily a woman. We don’t really know what women are and I think that a lot of women are female impersonators, because our notion of who we are is not authentic, and so I am not surprised men are better at impersonating women than women are. Not a surprise, but it’s not something I welcome."

I'm especially interested in the propositions: 1. "We don’t really know what women are," and 2. "a lot of women are female impersonators." And, by the way, once you have this level of skepticism, the opinion about transgender people becomes almost meaningless. Greer doesn't seem ready to concede even that women are women.

AND: Elsewhere in The Guardian today, there's "From Twiggy to Germaine Greer: eight classic images of powerful women/The Design Museum’s new exhibition, Women Fashion Power, about the way influential women wear clothes opens on Wednesday. Here, from Twiggy in a trouser suit to the high-shine shoulderpads of Dynasty, eight women write about the most eye-catching looks in the show." The photo of Greer shows her at the age of about 36. The text is fully celebratory:

"In her 1970 book The Female Eunuch, Germaine Greer dreamt of creating a communal collective of well-heeled young mothers..."

"... at a farmhouse in Italy 'where our children would be born. Their fathers and other people would also visit as often as they could... The house and garden would be worked by a local family...'. Charming. In an issue of Shrew magazine in 1973, a contributor asked 'Are Fathers Really Necessary?' and concluded 'they are more trouble than they are worth and likely to abuse children sexually.' That sort of contempt towards men and marginalisation of fathers rings down the decades of the last half century and it finds non-stop expression and repetition everywhere you look in our mainstream culture – from children’s stories and TV soap operas to mass market advertising, newspaper columns, Woman’s Hour and the rest."

From a UK Telegraph article headed "Is Gillian Wearing's family sculpture offensive to fathers?/A sculpture depicting a 'real Birmingham family' has caused controversy due to its absence of men. Why are fathers increasingly marginalised in mainstream culture, asks Neil Lyndon." I ran across that searching for the Germaine Greer quote about female artists that's paraphrased in an article blogged in the previous post.

Why interpret a sculpture of 2 women (one pregnant) with 2 children as an expression of hostility toward fathers? The sculpture only seems to say this, too, is a family. It promotes inclusion of gay people, not the exclusion of men. To see an exclusion-of-men message is, ironically, similar to an argument I have heard from gay-rights proponents: The pervasive images of heterosexual couples in our culture send a message of marginalization toward gay people, telling them that they are less-than-ideal or outsiders.

"If an Ohio punk has the right to have her genitalia operated on, why has not the Somali woman the same right?"

Asked Germaine Greer, in her book "The Whole Woman," and now, unsurprisingly, she's being attacked for defending female genital mutilation. I'm not reading the whole "Whole Woman" book, and I don't know how much it defends the other culture's genital cuttings as opposed to challenging us to judge the culture we don't know with the same degree of harshness or sympathy that we use in judging the culture we do know.

Are her critics really answering the question asked above? I'm seeing things like:

The MPs' report... says that Ms Greer takes "no account of the purposes of female genital mutilation, nor the lack of choice for those young girls on whom it is inflicted.  Equating the forcible clitoridectomy of an eight-year-old girl with the voluntary body-piercing of an American teenager is absurd"....

Because the operation is often carried out in non-sterile conditions, sometimes using kitchen knives or pieces of glass, there is a risk that the child or woman could die of infections such a septicaemia.

But the quoted question refers to "the same right" and to "the Somali woman." Again, I have not read the whole book and don't know everything Greer may have said, but going on only the quoted question above, I see her talking about voluntary surgery, performed within high-quality medical facilities, on adult women. That is what the same right would look like.

"It’s hard to grasp now just how intoxicating it was as a young girl to hear Gloria Steinem tell us we could be anything we wanted to be."

"Or to read, during freshman year at my surprisingly progressive all-girls Catholic school, Betty Friedan’s 'The Feminine Mystique,' eight years after it was published, saying we could find meaning outside the home."

All this seemed possible because the pill had just become widely available, and for the first time women had control over whether and when they had a child. (I will never forget finding that oddly shaped, Pez-like dispenser in my mother’s bedroom right after the birth of my youngest sister; my mother called her “That’s It” for weeks before giving her a name.)

From a long WaPo article by Elsa Walsh titled "Why women should embrace a ‘good enough’ life." The quoted part describes the author's mindset, which later changed. I chose to quote that because: 1. Her mother sounds so cold, calling an infant "That's It." (A child called "It"!) and 2. The author makes her college age self sound like a nitwit. She says she was 15 when Roe v. Wade came out, so I figure she was born in 1958. I was born in 1951, and I always thought the Gloria Steinem presentation of women's liberation was a women's magazine pep talk. Friedan's book begins as a rant about the bullshit in women's magazines. If you had a brain at the time, you didn't take this stuff at face value. I don't accept Walsh's assertion that oh, if you were only there back then in the 1970s, you'd have been thoroughly intoxicated.

There were other feminist writers back then, and there were plenty of readers interested in feminism who didn't like Steinem and who didn't bother going all the way back to Freidan. When I went to college (circa 1970), the new books young women get excited about where "Sexual Politics" and "The Female Eunuch," and the older book we went back to was "The Second Sex." These books had some critical edge and were not simply cheerleading women about having a conventional middle-class life modernized with the addition of a great career and planned, delayed reproduction.

Walsh is working off a false premise about what life was like back then. She has a book to promote, and I can understand the urge to write a book that acts like it's discovered something new. But, really, the problem with the idea that you can't really "have it all" has been well-known all along.

Weird outrage over a woman getting fired for selling Girl Scout cookies at work.

And she worked in a retail store — using its retail space to sell a product and take cash that did not go into the cash register. I do not get the FoxDC presentation of this story: "Imagine being fired for selling Girl Scout Cookies at work. It happened to a woman...." Well, of course! I can't imagine thinking she doesn't deserve to be fired for this.

Quite aside from the obvious conflict with the business interests of her employer, why are adults taking over the cookie-selling that is supposed to be part of the scouts "girl-led, entrepreneurial program" (to quote Girl Scout COO Colleen Cibula)?

The fired woman's troop leader — as FoxDC puts it — is "worried" that the firing "will scare away other potential cookie moms — and end up ultimately hurting  the scouts themselves." Cookie moms?!

"A cookie mom is a self-less person. She doesn't profit from any of this in any way. She's doing it out of the goodness of her heart... I don't think anyone should be terminated for doing such a charitable thing."

Even if it is conceived of as a charity rather than an entrepreneurial program, retail workers aren't free to solicit donations for their favorite charities!

Have people lost their minds? If Girls Scouts is a good charity, it ought to be teaching the girls admirable lessons. It's bad enough that they're guilt-tripping people into eating more cookies (or buying cookies that they don't eat), but making mothers, especially working mothers, feel that they are supposed to do the work for their girls is ridiculous. Something is very wrong here.

From the comments at the link:

EVERYONE sells girl scow [sic] cookies at work! Its not safe to go door to door, and after you exhaust all your family, friends and neighbors that only leaves your co workers!

It's not safe to go door to door? Was it ever a good idea to send little girls out to be door-to-door salespersons? The cookie-selling program seems entirely unprincipled. We shouldn't even be eating cookies in the first place.

***

"Scow" was an interesting Freudian slip for "scout." One definition for "scow" in the OED is: "Orkney and Shetland. ‘A big gaunt woman’... slang (chiefly U.S.). A disparaging term for a woman."

1866   T. Edmondston Etymol. Gloss. Shetland & Orkney Dial. 99   ‘A great scow of a woman’—a tall, thin, bony woman....
1960   H. Wentworth & S. B. Flexner Dict. Amer. Slang 449/2   Scow,..a large, ugly, and/or unpleasant woman.
1970   R. Lowell Notebk. 143   Often the Dutch were sacks, their women a sack, Obstinate, undefeated hull of the old scow.
1970   G. Greer Female Eunuch 265   More familiar terms in current usage refer to women as receptacles for refuse..as..scow.

"Forty-one years after Germaine Greer issued her infamous directive, the ladies seem to have complied."

What Greer said, leading off this NYRB review of Naomi Wolf's presumably idiotic book "Vagina: A New Biography" was: "Lady, love your cunt."

To be sure, not every iteration of vagina pride represents an unambiguous advancement for the feminist cause. It is a matter of dispute whether Eve Ensler’s twee flights of fancy about vaginas that smell like “snowflakes” are really good for the sisterhood. And whatever Greer was hoping for when she enjoined women to “boast of…their venery,” it is safe to say that it was not “vajazzling,” the modern trend of affixing crystals to the shaven pudendum.

One might reasonably argue that the occasional outburst of snowflakery is a tolerable price to pay for liberation. But Naomi Wolf would counsel against such complacency. In her new “biography” of the vagina, she warns that her subject is in danger of being trivialized by its cultural ubiquity. The vagina, properly understood, is, “part of the female soul” and the medium for the “meaning of life itself.” In order to free female sexuality from patriarchal calumny, pornographic distortion, and some of the damaging myths of second-wave feminism, it is essential, she argues, that women reclaim the “magic” of the vagina and restore it to its rightful place at “the center of the universe.”

"His maleness resounds from every monomaniacal sentence," said Germaine Greer about Malcolm Gladwell (Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, etc.).

"There is no answer to everything, and only a deluded male would spend his life trying to find it." Oh, so she's dissing men when she asks why women don't write large!

Women, she said, are too sensible to try to write such broad-sweep theses. "They are more interested in understanding than explaining, in describing rather than accounting for."

In praise of detail work. Which Greer is not doing.

"Something weird and cultish in the sycophantish cathexis onto Hillary of the many nerds, geeks and vengeful viragos who run her campaign..."

It's Camille Paglia (who admits she's "leaning" toward Obama). She's got her sights set on Hillary Clinton, and it's going to get ugly, with the hurling of dangerous words like viragos and cathexis and — my personal favorite — "sycophantish":

Aside from the stylish Huma [Abedin], there's definitely something weird and cultish in the sycophantish cathexis onto Hillary of the many nerds, geeks and vengeful viragos who run her campaign -- sometimes to her detriment, as with the recent ham-handed playing of the clichéd gender card. I suspect the latter dumb move, which has backfired badly, came from Ann Lewis (Barney Frank's sister), a fanatical Hillary true believer who has been spouting beatific feminist bromides about her for the past 15 years.... Hillary seems to have acolytes rather than friends...

Paglia goes on to lavish compliments on Dianne Feinstein — she's "shrewd" and "steady" — why can't she be the first woman President? Feinstein speaks with "silky ease" and has "true gravitas." Paglia also strokes Nancy Pelosi, who has a "relaxed, resonant realism" and speaks in a "low purr." Pelosi purrs but Hillary's got that "tight-wound, self-righteous attack voice" and that "flat, practical, real-life voice."

But there are no big conclusions here about Hillary. Just an expression of that vague irritation we all feel. (Don't we?) But I wonder if this is the reaction we would have to any woman who got realistically close to the presidency. And I'll bet that's the sort of thing Ann Lewis says behind the scenes, but that doesn't make it wrong.

Paglia lights into Ellen DeGeneres for her "cringe-making on-air meltdown over a dog":

Following Rosie O'Donnell's professional collapse amid lunatic rants and operatic kvetching, this has been a terrible year for Hollywood lesbians' public image. It's as if when the butch mask drops, there's nothing inside but a boiling candy kettle of infantile rage and self-pity.

Butch up, girls, says Camille. But don't forget to keep that voice at a low purr.

She's got this on global warming:

This facile attribution of climate change to human agency is an act of hubris. Good stewardship of the environment is an ethical imperative for every nation. But breast-beating hysteria merely betrays impious tunnel vision. Thousands of factors, minute and grand, are at work in cyclic climate change, whose long-term outcomes we cannot possibly predict. Nature should inspire us with awe, not pity.

That's a nice twist. Our arrogance lies not in thinking we can indulge ourselves in our carbon-spewing ways — as we're commonly told — but in thinking we move Nature. It's impious to think of ourselves that way.

On Norman Mailer:

I didn't care about his novels -- I don't care about any novels published after World War II (Tennessee Williams is my main man) -- but I was impressed by Mailer's visionary and sometimes hallucinatory first-person journalism. And I was directly inspired by his eclectic "Advertisements for Myself" (1959), which I took as a blueprint after my first books were attacked by the feminist establishment in the 1990s.

I will immediately go read "Advertisements for Myself"!

Mailer's "The Prisoner of Sex" (the original 1971 Harper's essay, not the book) was an important statement about men's sexual fears and desires. His jousting with Germaine Greer at the notorious Town Hall debate in New York that same year was a pivotal moment in the sex wars. I loved Greer and still do. And I also thought Jill Johnston (who disrupted the debate with lesbo stunts) was a cutting-edge thinker: I was devouring her Village Voice columns, which had evolved from dance reportage into provocative cultural commentary.

Ah, yes, I remember. How we hated Norman Mailer in those days. From this distance, I rather admire him for making himself as a vortex for feminist hate. He got into the center of things the only way he could.

[O]ne of the lousiest things Mailer ever wrote was his flimsy cover-story screed on her for Esquire in 1994. It was obvious Mailer knew absolutely nothing about Madonna and was just blowing smoke.

Because he neglected to read Paglia's musings on the subject, no doubt.

Guess what -- Esquire's original proposal was for me to interview Madonna. Mailer was the sub!

Ha ha. What a transcendent brag! I especially like the use of the word "sub," with its insinuation of phallic gigantism. Paglia has the bigger... writing talent.

Next, Paglia has a reference to my favorite movie:

Penthouse magazine had similarly tried to bring Madonna and me together, as had HBO, which proposed filming a "My Dinner with André" scenario of the two of us chatting in a restaurant.

Camille is the André, of course. Madonna would have to be the Wally.

But Madonna, no conversationalist, always refused.

Damn! Madonna just needed instruction on how to play the listener, like Wallace Shawn. "My Dinner with André" begins Wally's voiced-over anxiety about he is about sitting through a whole dinner with André Gregory. He resolves to get through the experience by, essentially, interviewing him. But Madonna's problem was not — I suspect — that she wasn't good enough at talking, but that she didn't fancy herself enduring a long outpouring of Paglia's thoughts about everything. To be a good Wally in a "My Dinner With André"-format movie, you have to wait while the other person has most of the lines, then finally, when the audience can't take it anymore, say "You want to know what I think of all this." And then charm us to the core with a few lines that we will remember for decades.

Hey, remember the time Camille Paglia refused to have dinner with me? I wrote a post about it called — of all things! — "My Dinner With Camille."

Two great faces, gone.

Goodbye to Betty Friedan and Al Lewis:

They kind of look alike, don't they? I remember the first time we saw Officer Leo Schnauzer on "Car 54, Where Are You?" Al Lewis looked and sounded hilarious from that first second. He didn't have a big role on the show, and we always whooped with glee when he showed up in a scene. Later, he played Grandpa on "The Munsters." But that was so long ago. He was an old man back in the 60s, it seemed, but he was only 83 when he died, so he was only in his 40s then. Thanks for all the laughs, Al.

Betty Friedan, I must say, I didn't follow. I never read "The Feminine Mystique." It was a little before my time. I could have read it as a classic, of course, but it always seemed to me to be addressed to the women of the 1950s, and I was a child in the 1950s. The women my age all read Kate Millett's "Sexual Politics" and Germaine Greer's "The Female Eunuch." (Those were the first two books I bought in hardback.) For a feminist classic, it was "The Second Sex," by Simone de Beauvoir. And then women avoided Friedan's book, for reasons described in the obit that I won't belabor. I'll just call attention to this paragraph:

"That great head, the hooded eyes, the broad features of a woman the French might describe as une jolie-laide , which refers to a magnificent kind of ugliness that can be attractive, even beautiful," wrote Washington Post reporter Megan Rosenfeld in 1995. "The head, looking sometimes like a snapping turtle and at others like a lion with a white mane, sits atop a surprisingly short body, out of which comes the voice of a foghorn in heat. She is always carefully dressed in a New Yorky, nouveau-Bohemian style, with lots of interesting jewelry and spunky little shoes."

Yes, a truly "magnificent kind of ugliness." The world needs more grand faces like that.

What if you had to choose between saving the rain forest and escaping from a fascist prison?

It happened to Germaine Greer! The "fascist prison" was the reality show "Big Brother," which she decided to participate in -- not to get attention but to raise money to save the rain forest -- and can you believe the experience of filming the show turned out to be quite a bit more annoying that she'd thought it would be? I hate fascism, too. You know like when Sylvester Stallone's mother, aka Brigitte Nielsen's ex-mother-in-law, shows up unexpectedly.

Greer said that in contrast to her housemates, who entered the program to raise their profile and further their careers, she had nothing to gain.

"I was a little naive. I didn't realize agendas.

"I had no idea who would be in here, and it's wrong for me to present myself in the same context as they are," she said.

Yeah, who are these people?

Paglia on Zappa.

Camille Paglia reviews a new book about Frank Zappa in the NYT Book Review. True to Paglia form, she emphasizes Zappa's Italian background. The book, by Barry Miles, is just called "Zappa," but Paglia titles her review "Freak Out!" after Zappa's first album. I can't hear that title without guilt, because a friend of my brother's loaned me the album, an expensive double album, 35 years ago, and I've never given it back. For the last 30 years or so, I haven't remembered the person's name or had any idea how to reach her. So it's really just a permanent burden of guilt. But here's some Paglia on Zappa (and Miles, whom she doesn't seem to like very much):

Miles, who knew Zappa, often seems ambivalent about him. There is a gap between the ''juvenile and prurient'' Zappa he describes and the one we see in the book's sensational photographs, which show a man of burning magnetism and piercing intellect. Miles calls Zappa a ''cold nihilist'' who felt no real emotions for anyone. Along with ''cynicism and misanthropy,'' he detects Catholic guilt and ''deep-seated problems with women.'' Zappa was ''stuck in a 50's time warp'' -- yet the bold feminist Germaine Greer was a Zappa fan.

Whatever the meaning of the S-and-M and fetish imagery in his songs (a theme that makes Miles squirm), the picture painted here of Zappa's family life is troubling. When not touring (which he loved to do -- Miles calls him a ''road rat''), Zappa spent 10 to 18 hours a day holed up in his cavernous basement studio in his Tudor mansion in the Hollywood Hills. He was a born tinkerer and a groundbreaker in early digital production.

Addicted to black coffee and cigarettes (he was fiercely antidrugs), he slept during the day and saw little of his family. His second wife, Gail, said, ''Frank did not do love.'' When she was 13, Moon Unit slipped a note under the studio door to ''introduce'' herself and her ideas. The result was the hit song ''Valley Girl,'' a phenomenon when it was released in 1982. Because he thought formal education a waste of time, Zappa took his children out of school at 15 and refused to pay for college.

Painful. But "black coffee and cigarettes" -- that reminds me, I'm in the middle of watching "Coffee and Cigarettes," and liking it very much. I'm up to the scene with Iggy Pop and Tom Waits and I'd only meant to stop for a minute to go see if the Tom Waits fan in the house wanted to watch that scene, and I got sidetracked by my laptop and that Paglia review!

Germaine Greer versus Australia:

I was 12 years old when I decided that I had to get out of Australia if my life was to begin. I had been bored ever since I could remember. I was ungainly and I was bored by sport, which in Australia is a sure sign that you're a bad person.

"I was 12 years old when I decided that I had to [blank] if my life was to begin." Isn't that pretty much the feeling of being 12?

The first time I ever sprang for the hardcover price of a book because I couldn't wait until it came out in paper, it was for a book by Germaine Greer. The price was $5.95. What great fun that book was back then! I well remember the shock--more shocking than Janet Jackson's Superbowl breast--of the photo of the brash feminist as she appeared on the back of the book: she wore heavy eye makeup right when it had seemed that we weren't going to do that any more.