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“The Empire of Chairs” makes me blub whenever I read it. A couple of times I’ve deliberately taken Raymond Briggs’s “Ethel and Ernest” from the shelf just to skip to the last, heart-breaking, few pages of the book – Sob! blub! And – Kate Bush’s – “Moments of Pleasure”, mwahh! Boo- hoo! And – the last scene of “Meet John Doe” – with – mnuh ahuh- ahuh – yer man standing on the edge of the building and – and the snow coming down and – nuhh ahuh bhwah ! 
…That kind of thing aside, though – “Cry when you have to, laugh when you can,” strikes me as sane advice. (Mad Tom being the other cameo role for Doctor H in The Invisibles?)
When it comes down to it, I like crying sometimes because it makes me feel good.
A Chris Ware comic, on the other hand, just leaves me feeling depressed. I’ve had enough (*gag*, *retch*) melancholy for one life, thank you. (*spit*)
I appreciate where you’re coming from, Illmatic. But subtlety can be overrated, for me. There’s a time and a place for it.
Getting back to The Psychopath’s Bible and Christopher Hyatt’s writing style, etc. – I came across this line while browsing through it today:
“But under no circumstances should you undervalue the power of knowing how to evaluate the power of food-chain consciousness.”
WTF? “Under no circumstances under-value…the power of knowing…how to evaluate…the power…” ?!? Is this some kind of Eriksonian thing?
Lionheart: What does Hyatt mean by "psychopath"?
Well, it seems that “everyone is a psychopath”, according to Nicholas Tharcher’s foreword.
But (pace Phil Hine) the barmy “Satan tells me to dismember prostitutes” type of psychopath isn’t what they have mind. While “Red Dragon” and “Silence of the Lambs” are on the recommended reading list, they seem to have aspects of the character of Hannibal Lecter M.D. in mind rather than the Tooth Fairy or Buffalo Bill.
We’re assured that neither the publisher nor the author wish to condone the initiation of any kind of violence at all, at all.
inanimate voyeur mentioned the movies “Point Break” and “Butch Cassidy”. Others they liked a lot include “Point of No Return” (that’s “The Assassin” to those of us in the UK and Ireland), the Charles Bronson movie “The Mechanic”, and “The Thomas Crown Affair”. The books “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead” are also recommended (but I’m pretty sure Ayn Rand would have been…um… uncomfortable with Hyatt’s moral stanceJ).
By psychopath they mean “the rare individual who writes his own song, plays his own tune and lives his own life”. Sounds nice! But wait… they specifically mean to refer to the kind of individual who “encourages the human race to the precipice”. Oo-er! The kind of person who [sinister music begins to rise in background] “does what he can to help the species destroy itself and let nature get on with something(s) different.” Gulp. Ha-ha! That Dr. Hyatt, eh? What a kidder! Ha-ha! No, you really love everyone, don’t you, Doc? Don’t you?
…Well, you at least love me, don’t you?
Doc?
Alex Burns, I think, did a disinfo.com piece on the book. You should be able to find it in the old disinfo archives. And there was some discussion of the book a year or so ago on the taciturn “quant-psych” yahoo-group. Search the group archive. (The most recent posts on quant-psych have concerned The Psychopath’s Bible too. Synchronicity? Or are agents of New Falcon attempting to drum up interest in the book as the new edition is about to hit the shelves? inanimate voyeur, j’accuse!) |
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