yes and no. i _used_ to think Penny's was the top of the heap.
> Is it not supposed to be spoken of?
No. As I said, I was merely pointing out that it's a shock sometimes to learn that what you think is high class is what other people think is middling.
>You wrote a piece for _White Trash_. What can it possibly mean when men in
>that study you were fond of said that they wouldn't marry someone with big
>cassabas because they consider those women trashy?
>
>Huh? Is this guilt by association? Because I wrote a piece for that
>collection argying that the usual American habit of treating poor as
>synonymous with black and rich as synonymous with white was way off base,
>I'm participating in a class judgment about breast dimensions?
You wrote a piece for white trash. You participated in discussions at the BS list. You, of all people on this list, should get it. And, usually you do.
>That pedicure comment was made WRT an article (in The Nation?) written by
>some guy claiming that dressing like a dandy was a way of exhibiting care
>about your fellows. The implication was that people who dressed sloppily
>didn't care about their fellows. A few people were rightly annoyed with
>that because they can't afford to dress like a dandy.
>
>You're talking about Steve Duncombe's piece, appended below. It's not
>about what you can afford. His father is a minister, not an investment banker,
who cares?
> and he dressed like a dandy on a grad student's income.
A grad student income was the most I'd ever made in my life. Big fucking whoopee. If he was the son of a minister, I'll bet it was true for him, too.
NOne of this addresses my complaint. He's welcome to assume that he's special because he dresses like a dandy, but to imply that people who wear chinos and polos don't care about other people is just horse shit. How does he know? Maybe they check themselves plenty in the mirror. Maybe they think they look nice.
It's irrelevant, to me, that he scrounged around in second hand shops to look nice. I used to wear a dress everyday to grad school, teaching or no. I never wore slacks, let alone jeans. The one time I wore shorts and a pair of keds, the fucking department chair drooled and said, "you look like a co-ed". Which is another reason I never wore jeans. The last time I wore jeans to class in college, the prof made some comment and I eventually dropped out thinking I'd never ever be taken seriously. (Of course, a couple of people commented that I only wore those clothes because I was insecure and wanted to prove that I was something that I was not: one of them!)
That's another problem with his peice. Maybe these folks, like the Chinese rest. owners, think what they wear looks nice. Why does he assume that they are dressing for comfort? How can he possibly know?
So, all he's doing is expecting the world to understand, by osmosis, what good taste is according to Steve Duncombe. Maybe he can post it to a Web site and he can have a Best and Worst Dressed contest and splash it on the cover of The Nation once a year?
Boy, that ought to really be a strike for the future of humanity, that!
"We live under the Confederacy. We're a podunk bunch of swaggering pious hicks."
--Bruce Sterling