Lady Chatterley's Principles

In "A Nietzschean Coup D'Etat" (found in Escape from the Nineteenth Century), Peter Lamborn Wilson tells the story of the Autonomous Sanjak of Cumantsa, a free society that existed for about a year and a half at the end of World War I. They lived off usurped treasure, celebrated a wild melange of folk lore and culture, and put together a founding manifesto using only selections from Nietzsche's oeuvre. Pretty interesting stuff. Anyway, I woke up in the middle of the other night with the vague and dazed notion of compiling a list of all the places serving breakfast tacos that I want to visit in Austin (seems to be a running theme in this blog, huh?). This deliriously half-awake state somehow got me thinking of Cumantsa, and how it might be fun to compile my own found-miscellanea document, but with something other than Nietzsche. As I became more conscious, the source became obvious: Lady Chatterley's Lover, by D.H. Lawrence. This great novel is pretty quotable and wide-ranging in its critique. Again, just for fun... or, perhaps this should become my manifesto for life in Austin?

Opening
Oh, intellectually I believe in having a good heart, a chirpy penis, a lively intelligence, and the courage to say 'shit!' in front of a lady. - Tommy Dukes

Progress
'Home!' . . . it was a warm word to use for that great, weary warren. But then it was a word that had had its day. It was somehow cancelled. All the great words, it seemed to Connie, were cancelled for her generation: love, joy, happiness, home, mother, father, husband, all these great dynamic words were half dead now, and dying from day to day. Home was a place you lived in, love was a thing you didn't fool yourself about, joy was a word you applied to a good Charleston, happiness was a term of hypocrisy used to bluff other people, a father was an individual who enjoyed his own existence, a husband was a man you lived with and kept going in spirits.

Industry and Capital
All the lot. Their spunk is gone dead. Motor cars and cinemas and aeroplanes suck that last bit out of them. I tell you, every generation breeds a more rabbity generation, with india rubber tubing for guts and tin legs and tin faces. Tin people! It's all a steady sort of bolshevism just killing off the human thing, and worshipping the mechanical thing. Money, money, money! All the modern lot get their real kick out of killing the old human feeling out of man, making mincemeat of the old Adam and the old Eve. They're all alike. The world is all alike: kill off the human reality, a quid for every foreskin, two quid for each pair of balls. - Oliver Mellors

Environment and the Spectacle
As for people! people were all alike, with very little differences. They all wanted to get money out of you: or, if they were travellers, they wanted to get enjoyment, perforce, like squeezing blood out of a stone. Poor mountains! poor landscape! it all had to be squeezed and squeezed and squeezed again, to provide a thrill, to provide enjoyment. What did people mean, with their simply determined enjoying of themselves? No! said Connie to herself. I'd rather be at Wragby, where I can go about and be still, and not stare at anything or do any performing of any sort. This tourist performance of enjoying oneself is too hopelessly humiliating: it's such a failure.

Real-body-politik
The human body is only just coming to real life. With the Greeks it gave a lovely flicker, then Plato and Aristotle killed it, and Jesus finished it off. But now the body is coming really to life, it is really rising from the tomb. And it will be a lovely, lovely life in the lovely universe, the life of the human body. - Connie