Orange Hippo!

I’ll try not to make this review too cloudy, you know. If there were a book: “Little Guide to Goosecap: Style to Live By”, the first quote would probably be me saying, “Intellectualize the obvious”, you know…. I don’t know, it’s a fun little book. It would be easy to geek hardcore against someone like Coco Chanel, or almost any French woman, you know. “Coco Chanel is the reason why World War Two happened and American imperialism triumphed! I knew you couldn’t trust a non-scientist!” But it’s a good book, in two ways. (I’m not going to bother to refute the macho man fretting that Coco is responsible for military atrocities, because that’s what the macho man has to bring it back to, right.) One, it’s a style guide—technically, they’re aphorisms, or it’s almost like style philosophy—and so it’s different from fashion generally: not as strongly gendered, or time-sensitive, and just more, I don’t know, generally applicable. And it makes you think about why you want to be stylish, which is the second point. It alludes to joy: we do not live only to know, or even only to overcome. Of course, Coco could be an ordinary person in certain aspects—watching TV compulsively while hating herself for doing that, for example—but she was an important woman who helped to de-Victorianize—and de-corset—the 20th century, and will be remembered ages and ages hence, as a cool chick, you know. Stylish. If only making people pleased were a way to earn respect, she’d even be respected. 😉

…. There is a sort of bravery in Coco, too, though; to do boldly what you know others frown upon and call silly (which to them is more than a small bad), and to do what you know will bring attention to you, the attention of a strange if sometimes a good world.

…. …. And I don’t want to belabor the point, but I think you need to be a little wily to survive. If you’re the naive-bloodthirsty man, you might make a splash, but you’ll never survive. (It can be hard to differentiate the two sometimes, and people ineffectively try to do it by quoting statistics and browbeating people, which just makes you the hard-boiled bully, at best.) Cruel naiveties don’t lead to survival, you know. You have to be a little wily. The naive bloodthirsty man can be hypnotic, whether on a big scale or a small one, but at the end of the day it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. It’s a poor substitute, really.

…. I mean, if you were a leader you’d probably have to choose one of those, but for a lot of people it can be a little hard to distinguish, really. If some “Let’s Go Brandon” guy curses out somebody for deciding to park their car instead of slowing down, jumping out, and letting it careen out of control (the other way)—I mean, that’s not leadership (technically what politics is supposed to be about), it’s just negativity. Generalized negativity can be a choice in life as well as in politics.

Of course, it is also possible to have generalized positivity, but it’s very rare…. I’m not going to say it’s impossible, but it can be very hard to reconcile with sexuality, and lack of privilege or at least special arrangements, some sort of departure from being ‘just a citizen’, you know. But I don’t think you can require generalized positivity. Certainly it wasn’t Coco’s way, you know.… (altro)