#dick waving

anyway, the "Most hauntingly beautiful and tragic couple in the Naruto fandom" phrase rubbed me wrong.

it's a matter of opinion, of course (everybody is so strung up lately), but itasasu IMO beats hyuugacest. политкорректностьбля

at the very least she didn't kill him herself. opinions?

‘Six or seven months before he died, I met Harold Pinter and asked him how he was. This was the result of a mishearing on my part…I went over to greet him – I was one of the hosts — and I thought I heard him say, "How are you?"

‘"Fine thanks," I said. "How are you?"

‘"I didn't ask you that question," Pinter said. "I never ask people that question. It's a bloody stupid question."

‘"Oh," I said, and "Um."

...

‘I submitted myself to the storm. "What an insufferably silly question," Pinter continued, cruelly imitating my 'How are you?' like a bleating sheep. "Sometimes I come into my office in the morning and I hear my secretary on the phone saying, 'Fine, thank you', and I know the stupid question she's just been asked!" His timbre was turning from sheep to the more familiar Alsatian. "Why do people say it? Why? Such a pointless and ignorant question." Eventually a bystander – out of gratitude I name him as the novelist Howard Jacobson – intervened. "Oh, come on Harold, it's just a little social ointment, helps make the wheels go round," Jacobson said, or words to that effect. "Really? Do you think so?" Pinter barked. "Well, I don't. Fucking stupid question. I never ask it and I don't expect people to ask it of me."’

-- From an anecdote by Ian Jack, whose regular column in the Guardian is worth the price of the Saturday paper alone. 

Is it all right, do you think, what Pinter said? If you or I went to a party and behaved in this way amongst strangers, we’d be thrown out. Unless we were famous, I suppose, in which case such behaviour might not only be tolerated but may be expected. We want extraordinary acts from people whose output has already proved themselves exceptional. We crave their judgment. And stories like the one above read differently in retrospect, especially since the reader is utterly divorced from the anxiety of such an awkward situation. Mostly the story becomes a sort of comedy of errors, but for some (as in this case) we are invited to read more into it because of the legendary nature of the perpetrator. 

This kind of petulance is tolerated from the old. Sometimes it is even admired. We believe they have earned the right to a certain impatience with the way the world is run. From anyone younger and less proven, the same outburst could be dismissed as an ego-driven tantrum. But you could argue that Pinter was entitled to his tantrums; there’s his illness (also referred to in the article) but there’s also something else, a kind of special aura we ascribe to these anecdotes because the subject was a great artist. Or, more specifically, a great man. Ian Jack again:

'When Pinter died, Michael Billington in this newspaper mentioned that he had "a reputation for being short-tempered". Yes, and the Pope sometimes remembers to say his prayers. [Simon] Gray often witnessed the full paroxysm. "When he becomes angry, the eyes become milky, the voice a brutal weapon that is virtually without content," Gray wrote in his memoirs. "What I mean is that he speaks violently, really violently. His voice is like a fist driving into you, but he uses almost no words, three or four at most – 'shit', 'fuck' and 'I' are the ones you hear – [the rest are] dark and ugly sounds incomprehensible because they are not intended to be comprehended except as dark and ugly sounds, and full of eloquence therefore."'

The final comma makes it difficult to establish whether it was actually Pinter’s intent to express something ‘full of eloquence’ despite its incomprehensibility. To me, that ‘therefore’ suggests an interpretation of eloquence tacked-on by Billington. After all, everyone mumbles incoherently from time to time, but it’s difficult to imagine the author ascribing the same profundity to the dribblings of a child or the rantings of a drunken student. The implication seems to be that because this man was also a great writer even his worst moments were more meaningful than most. Why should we assume this is the case? 

Here is another view of the situation: Harold Pinter’s secretary is fully aware that ‘how are you?’ is a banal and meaningless question, but unlike her employer, she does not consider this any great insight, let alone a stick with which to beat the unwary. She understands that it is a rhetorical question with a ridiculous aspect. She also understands it is neither pointless nor ignorant, but knows its uses, the varying insinuations that come with stressing each syllable; and she knows that were she to apply Pinter’s attitudes to her everyday conversation, she would be fired.