Boys Who Kill: Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb
The third installment of Boys Who Kill stars Nathan Leopold (right) and Richard Loeb (left). On 21 May 1924 in Chicago, Nathan and Richard kidnapped and killed a 14-year-old boy.
Nathan and Richard each had daddies who amassed mountains of money. Nathan’s daddy owned one of the biggest shipping business in the country and Richard’s daddy was the vice president of Sears Roebuck. But the wealth that surrounded them didn’t dispel boredom. The two didn’t want money, they aimed for fame, sensationalism, and transgression. One of Richard’s favorite dreams had him as a notorious criminal who was beat and whipped in public, with girls and boys arriving in droves to express their mixture of awe, sympathy, and disgust. As for Nathan, he envisioned himself as a king’s favorite slave. One day, Nathan saved the king’s life, and the king offered to set him free, but, being loyal, Nathan declined. Both fantasies are rather Jean Genet: they are sumptuous, romantic, and somewhat sordid.
Like that French prison boy, Nathan and Richard carried out many crimes, including stealing automobiles and smashing bricks through windows. Mostly, though, the crimes were initiated by Richard, who insisted that Nathan come along to serve as an audience. After the two stole a typewriter and other possessions from Richard’s former frat house at the University of Michigan, Nathan became upset at Richard because the latter wasn’t wasn’t having enough xxx with the former.
Nathan and Richard’s friendship/boyfriendship sort of resembles the typical depiction (though it’s likely bullcrap) of Eric and Dylan. Eric is the aggressor and Dylan is the follower. Eric constructed NBK and Dylan just acquiesced. It’s also been rumored that Eric and Dylan liked boys (though that’s definitely bullcrap). Columbine jocks told the media that the two BFFs were a part of the Trench Coat Mafia, whose members touched one another in hallways and convened group showers. In Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, the two Columbine-esque boys get into the shower together and kiss and maybe do other things before they commit their high school massacre.
But Nathan and Richard really did like boys. Though Richard was perceived as the leader, he was the one who took it in the tushy. That this is so, sort of confounds how boys who take in the tushy are assessed. Richard engineered many crimes, including murder, so maybe boys who take in the tushy aren’t all basic bitches after all. Another hypothetical reason for why Richard took it in the tushy is, as he declared to friends, he didn’t need xxx. Richard was beyond lust and all of that other stuff that occupies the ironic minds of 20-something Brooklyners day and night. The symbolism about taking it in the tushy had no effect on him, as he only cared about a life of crime.
Social Media is Unchristian
Once I read a really revealing book about social media and the primary 21st century economy. The book I speak of is 24/7 by Columbia University boy Jonathan Crary.
Jonathan’s thesis is that American and Americanlike people reside in a contemptuous 24/7 universe. Throughout the book, Jonathan explains what the term “24/7” means to him. According to Jonathan, 24/7 is a “time of indifference” that “renders plausible, even normal, the idea of working without pause, without limits.” If 24/7 was a person, it’d be an indelicate, indiscriminate one who insists on pumping out putrid products (like iPads and bisexuals) even on the most divine day of the year: Christmastime. 24/7 “decrees the absoluteness of availability.” Like those excessively-sexed gays, 24/7 people are always available. Whether it’s formulating a Facebook status, an Instagram, or a Tweet, in the 24/7 zone, accumulation occurs nonstop.
The base of 24/7 people’s identity is social media. Jonathan says that there are “numerous pressures” for these types to be like the “dematerialized commodities and social connections in which they are immersed so extensively.” Jonathan then posits that 24/ people “invent a self-understanding that optimizes or facilitates their participation in digital milieus and speeds.” Oscar says, “One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.” 24/7 people, though, want to be their social media accounts: open, overt, public, and explicit. Mystery and secrets are assaulted. Unlike the thrilling Victorian tales, where colonized girls are kept in attics and orphan boys haunt feverish heroines, 24/7 people conceal nothing, since their circumstances command constant communication.
Google boy Eric Schmidt deems the 21st century the “attention economy.” For Jonathan, Eric and others (like that utterly un-stylish Mark Zuckerberg), aim to normalize “unbroken engagement with illuminated screens of diverse kinds that unremittingly demand interest or response.” In the 24/7 world, thought and reflection are allocated little value. Any moment that isn’t spent liking something or refreshing something or commenting on something is of no use, since it’s a moment devoid of production.
One of the sharpest and staunchest Christian boys ever, John Milton, believed that the commendable Christian’s primary task is to search for truth. Eden is so estimable because truth is installed in one location: God. All one must do is obey Him. But Eve (a girl) didn’t do that, so she, her boy, and consolidated truth bid bye-bye. Now, in the perverted postlapsarian predicament, Milton says truth “opens herself faster than the pace of method and discourse can overtake her.” Post-Eden truth is mobile, quick, nimble, and elusive. But the wonderful Christian never ceases to try to collect as much of it as he can. Through reading, reflecting, and thought, Milton could capture truth and “unite those dissevered pieces.”
The 24/7 world and Christianity are archenemies. The former is founded on careless compulsion, while the latter is infinitely entwined with divine consideration.
God engenders everything, so he obviously made Instagram, Twitter, and so on. But God is also really mischievous (just ask Job), so maybe he made these things to separate the thoughtful ones (Christians) from the fartheads (unchristians). Eric Schmidt and Mark Zuckerberg and all those other Cali boys may have mounds of power now, but when the coda comes, they’ll be spending their forever in hell, not heaven.
Baby Marie-Antoinette Opens Up Upon Simone Weil, Gang Rape, and More
Last week, I published a tiny story by Baby Marie-Antoinette, one that was titled Gang Rape Me Now Please.
Then, last nighttime, while the world acted woeful (as usual), Baby Marie-Antoinette sent me a telegram, telling me that she had things to say to me.
When a girl who, at less than 42 months, already has a biopic starring the striking Kirsten Dunst wishes to say things to you, then obviously you heed that.
That’s what I did.
In a vintage skirt (because boys can clad themselves in skirts) and a St. Louis Cardinals sweater (because they’re the best baseball team ever, and the LA Dodgers are gay), I met Baby Marie-Antoinette (as well as her mommy) at a McDonald’s in Midtown.
Baby Marie-Antoinette munched on a vanilla ice cream cone. I did the same.
BMA (Baby Marie-Antoinette): Thank you very much for meeting me.
Me (M): You’re very welcome.
BMA: My mommy articulated that it’d be agreeable if I articulated further about gang rape and such, and I agreed.
M: K…
BMA: So… you should probably inquire further…
M: Why are you so struck by gang rape?
BMA: I don’t believe in autonomy, freedom of speech, freedom in general, liberty, individual rights, or any such stuff.
M: Why?
BMA: I am Catholic. I absolutely believe in God, as God will make it so that I am the Queen of France. God cares for me. Another girl who God cares for is Simone Weil. She is a French girl who is sort of looked down upon because she didn’t spend her nights at white people bars on the Lower East Side.
M: What does that mean?
BMA: She didn’t got nuts for the human body or anything that humans nowadays (or in the olden days) deem progress. In Simone’s notebooks, she states, “We possess nothing in this word other than the power to say ‘I.’ This is what we must yield up to God.” For Simone, all the rights that people are roaring for are abhorrent. They are as unheavenly as a croissant without warm cherry cream in the center. According to Simone, “The self is only a shadow projected by sin and errors which blocks God light.”
M: So even though America says the self is the splendidest form ever; really, it’s sordidness.
BMA: Uh-huh. So when the self is destroyed, and when the attributes attributed to selfhood are tossed into the trash, it’s not naughty for God, it’s naughty for the ideologies that promulgate free personhoods.
M: Like the United States of America.
BMA: That’s a country that’s corrupted by personhood. In Gravity and Grace, Simone says, “We have to be nothing in order to be in our right place.” But Americans advocate the antithesis. They try terribly hard to be something, which is why they talk so much, eat so much, spend so much, and make so much trash.
M: But really, this “something” isn’t “something”; really, this “something” is “nothing,” only a different kind of nothing than what Simone is referring to, as it’s a nothing that has nothing to do with God, and thus it’s meaningless.
BMA: Sigh.
M: So why does 24/7/365 gang rape stay on your mind?
BMA: Because with gang rape it’s boy after boy being utterly uncaring about your body and what you yourself want to do with it. Simone says in her notebooks, “The more I efface myself, the more God is present in the world.” I could try to terminate myself, but that seems so self-involved, so I’d rather have boys do it. According to Simone, “When the ‘I’ actually is abased, we know that we are not that.” I know that my body is not nice. A pink and fuzzy Miu Miu coat is nice. But flesh, like Simone says, is “vile.”
M: Maybe the reason why gang rape is regarded as one of the top revolting behaviors in the world is because so much of the world cares about their bodies and not about God.
BMA: Uh-huh, people nowadays seem to be invariably promoting themselves, especially on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and any other gay social media platform designed by California loser. Simone says, “There is a lack of grace with the proud man.” Does Sheryl Sandberg possess grace? No. She’d likely be really upset if boys gang-raped her.
M: But what about those who equate !@@$% with purity?
BMA: These types should read John Milton’s play, Comus.
M: I read that play while I ate a chocolate cupcake.
BMA: My mommy read it to me while I ate a raspberry cupcake.
M: It’s about a girl who’s lost in the woods and is danger of being raped by a monster.
BMA: But even if the monster did rape her, it couldn’t corrupt her, because her purity isn’t positioned in her skin.
M: Perchance this is why Baby George III says Sasha Grey is more religious than Adrienne Rich. Baby George III saw Ariana Reines’s lecture at NYU a while ago, and during the question and answer, she compared Jesus to porn starlets, since both are renown for being transfixed by myriad external elements.
BMA: Perchance… The reason why gang rape is regarded as it is is because the world is wrought with utterly unthinking ungracefulness.
This is when Baby Marie-Antoinette asked her mommy to purchase her another vanilla ice cream come.
When I Looked At Your Cock My Imagination Died
When I Looked At Your Cock My Imagination Died is the title of one of the sections in Ariana Reines’s collection of verse Mercury.
One nighttime, while considering all the boys I had heart-crushing crushes on (like you-know-who and yes-him and obviously-that-one-who-cares-if-he-did-what-he-did) I read this very section of poems for what may just be the one millionth and first time.
The first poem of this section is a letter (maybe it’s one of those electronic letters that all those 20-somethings in Brooklyn send back and forth or maybe it’s the type of letter that wonderful Willa Cather sent her eloquent girlfriend Edith Lewis).
“ariana,” commences the correspondence, “all I can think is the sex. Practice with the butt plug. Wear it around tonight. I want them to double penetrate you.” The boy talks about transferring money into Ariana’s account. He also dispenses further directions:
I want the video to start with you on the phone talking to me on your knees with their cocks touching your face and you looking up into the camera as you talk to me and begin sucking their cocks. When you start fucking I want to be on the speaker phone and jerking off. I want to see everything as they go in and out of you together.
The boy is quite tyrannical, and every worthwhile heart beats boisterously for tyrants, as there’s truth in being controlled and possessed. As the French boy who said 9/11 was symbolic points out, Western culture (i.e America and their ho bags) is nearly omnipresent, and the places where Western culture hasn’t grown its gay garbage — choice Muslim and black countries — there’s not likely to be many Western culture subjects (unless your name is Nicholas D. Kristof). Those who flaunt freedom aren’t free. They are dependents to the unpleasant pragmatic tyranny of America and its ho bags . If America and its ho bags was, perchance, destroyed, they’d be too. Jason Collins, to cite one dependent, wouldn’t be so if the hegemonic culture on earth gave zero craps about an average GLADD boy who can’t play basketball.
So, when Ariana surrenders her agency to this boy, she abandons phoniness as well. Stating that agency is an actuality is similar to stating that chocolate chip cookie dough is downright disgusting — it’s utterly untrue! A long time ago the Marxist boy Louis Althusser’s “moment of interpellation” brought out that bestowing identity is not the act of a single subject. More than one someone is required to be recognized as an entity. In Bodies That Matter, famous girl-boy Judith Butler put Louis’s interpellation in action. A policeman summons a citizen with a “Hey you!” The policeman heeds the “you.” He recognizes that the “you” is entwined with his world. The “you” may reply, but the “you’s” reply is due to the policeman’s summons. If the policeman didn’t say “Hey you!” then the citizen wouldn’t be impelled to speak to him — the citizen wouldn’t be able to utilize his voice. A creature can neither create an identity by his lonesome nor speak for himself on his own. Invariably, he must be recognized by someone not himself, even if that someone is a cuddly, invisible teddy bear.
All of that was completely necessary to convey so that I could confirm that Ariana is biding bon voyage to an idea of no value whatsoever. To sum up, agency is a tricky, corrupt instrument of American hegemony; and America, as Jewish novelist John Updike noted in the 60s, has lost the blessing of God. Ariana, though, has not. The poem proceeding the letter reads: “I want the gold. / Shimmer shimmer shimmer shimmer shimmer.” Since Ariana got to the truth, she shall get her gold too. Truth, says the sensational John Milton, is the foundation of Christianity. In the postlapsiarian planet, truth has been slashed into infinite tiny piece. The commendable Christian’s duty is to discover as many of these pieces as possible. All of this is why Ezekiel’s vision of New Jerusalem is “pure gold like clear glass.” God is there! Where God is, truth is; where truth is, gold (something of supreme value) is. By spotlighting the truth of subjection, Ariana aligns herself with God, truth, and gold.
Also in this section is another prose poem that begins “when i get on your cock like a bag my face is scarred”. Punctuation, paragraph breaks, capital letters — all of these components have been cast aside. Clauses collide into one another, like “i gaze up at the fat man to be reverential and durty none of us has hair i think i look confused so i wet my fat tongue i think exciting thoughts fake nails in clits fake nails in clits fake nails in clits.” First person pronouns are in the same caste as nouns, adjectives, and adverbs. The “i” isn’t capitalized: it’s been toppled (I believe capital letters aren’t pretty in the first place). An upheaval has happened and the words arrive at whiplash speed, like a flood, a plague — a circumstance from the best book ever, The Bible. Both are extreme, and that, according to me, is how things should be.
Alexandra Petri and John Deming Should Probably Get Married Because They Have A Lot In Common Because They Are Both Considerably Misinformed About Poetry
I intentionally missed most of the inauguration of Bruce Springsteen’s boyfriend. Symbols of democracy and freedom make my tummy quite queasy. I prefer the enchantment of The Little Mermaid to the mediocrity of the middle class and the person that they pick to govern them. But a couple of days after The Boss’s “partner” was publicly sworn in, I overheard two princess friends of mine discussing a poetry quarrel that arose from this inauguration. Supposedly a poet named Richard (I’m not sure of his last name, and considering his connection to Obama, he’s certainly not talented enough to Google or even Bing) read. The poem prompted a girl Washington Post blogger, Alexandra Petri, to declare that poetry is probably dead. A poetry boy, John Deming, quickly rendered a rebuttal. After reading both, I’ve come to the conclusion that each has a very un-magical, unsupportable viewpoint on poetry.
To begin, I’d like to declare that being “dead” isn’t deplorable: it’s delightful. Sylvia adored the dead. She covered herself in concentration camp victims. Her skin was “bright as Nazi lampshade.” Was Sylvia disempowered or on the margins of culture? No way, progressive gays! Sylvia was a spitfire. She slashed her daddy and her canonized poet husband. Charles Baudelaire, one of the best boy poets ever, sought the dead too. In “Spleen (ii)” Charles boasts that his skull holds “more corpses than a common grave.” Identification with dead doesn’t disadvantage Charles either. He’s a dandy — someone superlatively superior to humans, a boy who follows his own special set of laws. The dead are special and unique. They’re much more powerful than humans. To call someone or something dead is a term of incredible endearment, and should be embraced.
i like “paradise lost” a whole lot and “paradise regained” a little a lot and i haven’t read “samson agonistes”
this is a picture of john milton. he looks like if you asked him if he wanted to just rent a super nintendo and chill he would nod once and say, "indeed."
for real though, i like milton. there is no manifest point to this article. i just wanted to tell people that yes, i really like milton. i like milton. i also like that he was blind. i don’t mean that i like blindness is general. but it makes me want to be his friend more (he’s dead though). i think he had his daughters write down his poems as he spoke them. i wonder if he was mean to his daughters or nice. if i was one of his daughters and he was mean i would just write down random shit instead of the actual poems. to recap, i enjoy milton. he makes satan seem really lovable. and in “paradise lost” i liked the war in heaven. he was writing slayer song titles centuries in advance. i like milton.
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August 17th, 2009 / 11:41 pm
August 17th, 2009 / 11:41 pm
2 Recordings of Flannery O’Connor Reading Her Work!
This comes with a tripple hat-tip, and proves why the internet is awesome.
1) Did you know I have the same name as a somewhat famous preacher? That’s right. Justin Taylor of Wheaton, Illinois, who blogs at Between Two Worlds and is the author and/or editor of several books, including Overcoming Sin and Temptation, Communion with the Triune God, The Supremacy of Christ in a Postmodern World, and Where Did Christianity Come From? I often wonder if he knows I exist. I mean, if he searches his own name on Amazon, he’ll get my anthology The Apocalypse Reader, as his #3 response, right between Communion with and Supremacy of.