the ultimate party dude

We may see why Nietzsche termed [Laurence] Sterne “the most liberated spirit of all time.”

Flamenco must battle a succession of enemies like a supersonic S&M horse, a rhino wearing a boiling pot like a scalding diaper, and a giant piranha that hands out poisoned Kleenex.

It was at this place, according to the biblical narrative, that the Israelites loudly complained about constantly eating only manna, and that they had had a much more varied diet, of fish, vegetables, fruit, and meat, in Egypt; the text states that this led Moses, in despair, to cry out to Yahweh, who then promised them so much meat that they would vomit it through their nostrils.

Prominent among those with whom Molesworth is forced to mingle are: his younger brother, Molesworth Two; his best friend, Peason, who is almost exactly like Molesworth but less fat and with a pointier nose; Grabber, ‘who is head of the skool captane of everything and winer of ther mrs joyful prize for rafia work’; Gillibrand, whose ‘pater is a general’; and the inimitable Fotherington-Tomas, ‘uterly wet and a sissy’, who has a sister called Arabella, lives in a cottage called ‘swete lavender’ and skips about saying ‘Hullo clouds, hullo sky.’

By that point the pineapple had “lost all human traits,” said Geoffrey Cowling, 13, so eating it did not seem so bad.

Billions of fleshbody humans refuse to have anything to do with the blasphemous new realities.

Lockhart’s painting analogy is possibly even better than his music analogy:

Meanwhile, on the other side of town, a painter has just awakened from a similar nightmare… 

I was surprised to find myself in a regular school classroom– no easels, no tubes of paint. “Oh we don’t actually apply paint until high school,” I was told by the students. “In seventh grade we mostly study colors and applicators.” They showed me a worksheet. On one side were swatches of color with blank spaces next to them. They were told to write in the names. “I like painting,” one of them remarked, “they tell me what to do and I do it. It’s easy!" 

After class I spoke with the teacher. "So your students don’t actually do any painting?” I asked. “Well, next year they take Pre-Paint-by-Numbers. That prepares them for the main Paint-by-Numbers sequence in high school. So they’ll get to use what they’ve learned here and apply it to real-life painting situations– dipping the brush into paint, wiping it off, stuff like that. 

Of course we track our students by ability. The really excellent painters– the ones who know their colors and brushes backwards and forwards– they get to the actual painting a little sooner, and some of them even take the Advanced Placement classes for college credit. But mostly we’re just trying to give these kids a good foundation in what painting is all about, so when they get out there in the real world and paint their kitchen they don’t make a total mess of it." 

"Um, these high school classes you mentioned…" 

"You mean Paint-by-Numbers? We’re seeing much higher enrollments lately. I think it’s mostly coming from parents wanting to make sure their kid gets into a good college. Nothing looks better than Advanced Paint-by-Numbers on a high school transcript." 

"Why do colleges care if you can fill in numbered regions with the corresponding color?" 

"Oh, well, you know, it shows clear-headed logical thinking. And of course if a student is planning to major in one of the visual sciences, like fashion or interior decorating, then it’s really a good idea to get your painting requirements out of the way in high school." 

"I see. And when do students get to paint freely, on a blank canvas?" 

"You sound like one of my professors! They were always going on about expressing yourself and your feelings and things like that—really way-out-there abstract stuff. I’ve got a degree in Painting myself, but I’ve never really worked much with blank canvasses. I just use the Paint-by-Numbers kits supplied by the school board." 

Instead of declaring these things, instead of appealing to justice, to mercy and to liberty, he resorted to feats of jugglery.

The first half of this elucidating course offers a new perspective on the Objectivist theory of abstraction as such, contrasting the Realist idea of “insight” with Ayn Rand’s theory of “the unit-perspective.”

Machan is a syndicated and freelance columnist; author of more than one hundred scholarly papers and more than forty books, among them the recent Why is Everyone Else Wrong? (Springer, 2008).