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(a)
i think the uk office is brilliant. everything about it. getting kids to study ricky gervais is also brilliant. whether it produces the desired outcomes or not is hard to say---recently i read in the atlantic piece about the us financial oligarchy some snippets from authors of books that had been published across the 90s that were supposed to denounce the lunacy/lack of accountability and/or transparency within wall street---these folk were dismayed that their tell-all books were understood by hundreds upon hundreds of b-school students as how-to manuals.
so you never know.
btw the uk version is infinitely smarter and funnier than the american version. this even though i like the american cast.
(c)
i'm trying to imagine the catastrophes that would have been engendered had my mother tried to explain the world of social interactions from her particular---um---viewpoint. as it was, my main Instruction in anything like this regard came by way of table manners. apparently she thought that if i understood the meaning of sequences of forks on one side and spoons on the other and never fucked it up, i'd be good to go---so i could be inept in every other way, but the ability to navigate thickets of cutlery at table was basically pushing reset.
strangely, i found over the years that she was right.
what she left out, of course, were the complications that can follow from hitting the wine too early, before the food comes.
but that too is reflected in cutlery chaos, so i suppose she was also correct that way.
and it was better that she thought like this. trust me.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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