A Quote by Karl Kraus
There is a cultural taste which tries very hard to get rid of the lice in a fur coat. There is another which tolerates the lice and thinks the coat can be worn with them in it. And finally there is a taste which regards the lice as the most important thing about the coat and consequently places the coat at the lice's disposal.
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Critical lice are like body lice, which desert corpses to seek the living.
Nobody wants to admit their kid is the one with lice. Not only because of the work involved in getting rid of them, but because lice are still associated with dirt, grime, neglect and often poverty.
Head lice have their own animal-rights group, or may as well. The National Pediculosis Association doesn't exactly advocate letting lice live with dignity, but it does oppose pediculicidal treatments.
Medical researchers don't know much about head lice because they don't much care. The reason that they don't much care is, paradoxically, that they know a lot. That is, they know one important thing: there is no evidence that head lice transmit disease.
Bizarrely, someone involved in the children's show 'Sarah and Duck,' which I narrate, recently found a coat with my name on it in a secondhand shop. It's the coat I wore as Theseus in the 'Dream.' So it's back in my possession after all these years, which is rather strange and wonderful.
Do you know what Bill Gates has to pull out of an old coat, to feel like I did with a $20 bill? First of all, the idea that Bill Gates has an old coat is preposterous. If he has an old coat, it's the coat Abe Lincoln was shot in and he wears it as a bathrobe - no underwear by the way. He lets his billionaire balls swing willy-nilly beneath the death cloak of the great emancipator. That's your 1%.
When I see a person wearing a fur coat, I see not only the coat but the animals who were cruelly abused, killed and skinned to make that coat, and also I see the person wearing that coat being reborn as a poor fox crazily circulating in a tiny cage waiting to be skinned. And I see the poor dairy cow who has been raped and exploited, and in the same picture, I see the new future dairy cow taking her place, in the form of that person putting milk in her coffee, today.
Today's status symbol is the Palm Pilot; tomorrow's is not having one, because you have a whole staff keeping track of you. It's like a winter coat in Washington: The ultimate status symbol isn't cashmere, it's no coat at all on the snowiest day of the year - because that means you have a car and driver waiting for you, so why do you need a coat?
To me, it feels like 'The Doctor' has to have a long coat, and that's something imprinted on me from childhood, because he always did. And there's something heroic in a flapping coat, but at the same time, I need to get rid of it sometimes and just be a scrawny guy in a suit that doesn't quite fit.
Having a messy coat closet should not be a big deal in a full life, and yet there's something about getting control of that coat closet that's surprisingly satisfying.
We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason why they write so little.
Human beings are not like sheep; and even sheep are not undistinguishably alike. A man cannot get a coat or a pair oboots to fit him, unless they are either made to his measure, or he has a whole warehouseful to choose from: and is it easier to fit him with a life than with a coat, or are human beings more like one another in their whole physical and spiritual conformation than in the shape of their feet? If it were only that people have diversities of taste, that is reason enough for not attempting to shape them all after one model.
The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason they write so very little. But we do. We have so much we want to say and figure out.
The love of dress is very marked in this attractive animal; he is proud of the lustre of his coat, and cannot endure that a hair of it shall lie the wrong way. When the cat has eaten, he passes his tongue several times over both sides of his jaws, and his whiskers, in order to clean them thoroughly; he keeps his coat clean with a prickly tongue which fulfills the office of the curry-comb.
There's just no concept of layering a thick-sleeved sweater under a coat in L.A. A coat is more of a gesture than a necessity. You know, in case the temperature goes down to 55 degrees.
So...I'm larking through the Baby Gap, looking at tiny capri pants and sweaters that cost more than ... I don't know,more than they should. And I get totally sucked in by this ridiculous, tiny fur coat. The kind of coat a baby might need to go to the ballet. In Moscow. In 1918. To match her tiny pearls.
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