Whoa. Has anyone read this month’s issue of GQ? I’m referring specifically to “The Forbidden Word,” which is ostensibly an article about the devastating affect of the word “cunt” on the female psyche. In actuality, it’s this amazing outline of the author’s own insecurities about his virility, and his open rage at the feminist movement. It’s super creepy and seriously fascinating in a “how is this a cover story in a mainstream publication” sort of way.

Also GQ has it listed in the Advice section. Sweet! Check out this solid “advice,” fellas:

“When I find myself cornered by a woman, my very masculinity in jeopardy, there is something more important than love: making her feel filthy and subhuman.”

“Use it and you have every right to fear a call to the police within five minutes. ‘That’s it,’ you can imagine your partner saying. ‘I’m packing my stuff and going to a shelter.’ Even worse, most shelters would probably take her.”

“Maybe men should be grateful for this word, still capable in a way that nothing else is of turning back the social clock to a time when women’s self-esteem didn’t impinge on ours.”

“Back in the ’70s when I was young and feminism was a strange new force in my tiny Minnesota town, I remember my sense of puniness and dread as one by one of my buddies’ mothers became aware of their talents and potential and started doing things like taking night classes in Journal Writing and Sketching the Male Nude. Houses that had been spick -and-span for years suddenly languished, with toys all over the living room and half-eaten TV dinners in the trash cans. Something big was happening. Big and bad.”

“‘You shouldn’t roll over like that,’ my buddy said.

‘I know. I know’

‘They don’t respect it,’ he said.

I asked him what they did respect.

‘When you call them a selfish cunt,’ he replied.

That night, my relationships with women changed.”

I subscribe to a newsletter called TrendCentral, and one of last week’s newsletters contained the following blurb:

“Musical Roads: In Japan, the Hokkaido Industrial Research Institute has embedded grooves into sections of roads, which boom a tune up through cars. They’re in the process of planning different melodies for different locations, picking songs that are somehow associated with the locale.”

In a related program, the tollbooth operators are passing out complimentary pieces of chewing tinfoil and bamboo slivers just big enough to fit under drivers’ toenails.

Best part of a recent New York Times Magazine article �Sidewalk Socrates.� Sidney Morgenbesser was a professor of philosophy at Columbia known for his quick wit. Philosopher J.L. Austin was giving a talk on the philosophy of language�

�Austin noted that while a double negative amounts to a positive, never does a double positive amount to a negative. From the audience, a familiar nasal voice muttered a dismissive, �Yeah, yeah.�

Excerpt from this week’s New Yorker:

TINY NINJA THEATRE PRESENTS HAMLET
A miniature plastic action figure is the Danish prince in this multimedia production of the tragedy, in which all the roles are played by figurines. Directed by Dov Weinstein.

My friend, Jenny Traig, recently published her very amusing childhood memoirs. The book is called Devil in the Details: Scenes from an Obsessive Girlhood, and you will like it. It’s about her struggles with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder that manifested itself as Scrupulosity, a kind of religious OCD. These are the best parts:

“Today the condition is common enough that there’s a Scrupulous Anonymous group. I’ve never joined, so I can’t tell you if they subscribe to all twelve steps or if they just repeat one step over and over.”

“After a perfectly pleasant exchange with a great aunt, I’d spend hours trying to recall whether or not I’d told her to go screw herself the hard way. I would beg my sister Vicky for reassurance. “You heard our conversation. Did anal sex come up at all? I know it sounds crazy, but I think aunt Rose may have raised the issue.”

“Like many girls who don’t get asked out in high school, I spent my teenage years believing I was a displaced European. It was so obvious I’d been born in the wrong country, what with me having such sophisticated Continental sensibilities and all. As soon as I was old enough, I told myself and anyone who would listen, I was moving to a country where my unconventional looks, difficult charms, and erratic hygiene would be appreciated.”

Isabel Allende and 826 Valencia just produced a new student quarterly called Waiting to Be Heard. I helped proofread, and one student’s words struck me as particularly poignant. Ben Schuttish writes:

“President George W. Bush learned [war] from his father when his father was president, and now he is taking what he learned and applying it to the war in Iraq… Instead of immediately declaring war, President Bush should have used his brain to think of some other options first. He couldn’t help it though, because war was what he had been taught by his father. This is wrong.”

Best parts of A Home at the End of the World by Michael Cunningham:

“I was my father’s daughter. i wanted to be loved by someone like my tough judicious mother and I wanted to run screaming through the headlights with a bottle in my hand. That was the family curse. We tended to nurse flocks of undisciplined wishes that collided and canceled each other out. The curse implied that if we didn’t learn to train our desires in one direction or another, we were likely to end up with nothing.”

“He had big square hands and face blank and earnest as a shovel.”

“I tried to make myself stop caring about what I looked like. As she started in the with scissors, I reminded myself that our lives are made of changes we can’t control. Letting little things happen is good practice.”

“Woodstock is what towns were supposed to become before the old future got sidetracked and a new one took its place… I appreciate the kindness of its quiet streets and the people’s cheerful determination to live in ways that are mainly beside the point.”

The best parts of Bel Canto by Ann Patchett:

“The room was filled with the pleasant smell of candles just snuffed, a smoke that was sweet and wholly unthreatening. A smell that meant it was late now, time to go to bed.”

“The room was sugared with promise.”

“They were early [to the opera], but other people were earlier, as part of the luxury that came with the ticket price was the right to sit quietly in this beautiful place and wait.”

“Certainly he knew (though did not completely understand) that opera wasn’t for everyone, but for everyone he hoped there was something.”

“In his day, Oscar himself had made too many girls forget their better instincts and fine training by biting them with tender persistence at the base of their skull, just where the hairline grew in downy wisps. Girls were like kittens in this way, if got them right at the nape of their neck they went easily limp.”