Word: madcapping
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...Pulitzer Prize-winning confessional poet-cum-activist and titular "first cousin" of the author's mother (hence the author is "removed" from him by one generation). Sarah Payne Stuart '73 treats "Bobby" (as the family called Robert Lowell) as both a biological and literary predecessor, confronting the very madcap hypocrisy running through her bloodline that Lowell did in his poetry--the very hypocrisy that drove the latter many times to violently manic depressive breakdowns in various mental hospitals along the East Coast. However, Stuart sees the situation not as mentally debilitating but as a forum for exploiting her established sense...
What these not-so-subtle potshots at Harvardshow is that Cousin shines most and isultimately a completely satisfying read not as acoming-of-age story, a literary analysis or atravelogue, but as the hilarious personal memoirits madcap opening (in which Stuart races tofinish her application to Harvard the morning it'sdue) purports it to be. This opening also showshow her humor is mixed in with bittersweetrecollections of a life among unfounded arroganceand neurotic quirkiness: the problem Stuart facesin writing her essay--of defining herself based onher own merits and the merits of her first cousin(once removed) Robert Lowell-soon...
...Stuart is, as hokey as it may sound,necessarily honest to the reader and to herself.From this self-awareness stems her charming wit,uproariously deadpan delivery of madcap WASPmaneuverings and an impeccable sense of comictiming, matched with a poet's (or at leastrelated-to-a-poet's) awareness and a mother'stenderness. She is quick to admit to the bigoted,petty and, yes, manic shortcomings of hermuch-institutionalized family, but just as quickto admit her own shortcomings and accept them all.As this first cousin knows, being neurotic isgood, but knowing you're neurotic is even better
...with big contributors. Then again there is the episode in which a deputy chief of staff gingerly points out that Clinton's many fund-raising coffees may make it necessary to temporarily cut short those troublesome government duties like his daily briefings by advisers. All the same, for sheer madcap ingenuity, nothing beats the unsigned memo suggesting ways to reach "our very aggressive goal of $40 million." The ways? Offer donors seats on Air Force One and Two. Put them at the table at presidential dinners. Get them into that maximum lunchroom, the White House mess. Never...
...some vile sense of been-there-seen-that. I can't imagine a world without AIDS. Gay people have been marked, although I disagree with neo-con gay activists who claim that AIDS has taught gay people responsibility, as if, prior to the plague, homos were all shiftless and madcap. What AIDS has done is to make gay death terrifyingly ordinary. And yes, I know that the vast majority of people with AIDS are not gay, but I so rarely get invited to their memorials or their fund raisers honoring Angela Lansbury. I am also aware that equally or more...