Posted 6:40 AM by Gene

And speaking of cult, a member of the deadly cult of THOMPSONISM writes a book about MARILYN, and extrudes this spaghetti-like mess of a paragraph:

In fact, Marilyn Monroe's dead body metaphorically transforms womb into tomb, which is the conventional representation of the spinster. The woman who promised plenitude has proved to be barren; her redemptive femininity has not, in fact, brought us deliverance, but her death. The apocrypha explains Marilyn's death through variations on the theme of spinsterhood, the woman alone who might as well die. The spinster is nothingness: barren, alone, the solitary female is supposed to kill herself, registering her nullity through the only means left to her, her futile, abortive body. The spinster is the dead, negative flipside of the Virgin, and she is associated with a failure of home, a failure of fertility, with emptiness and with death. Unmarried, childless, a professional success, she will still be branded a personal failure. The prospect of the most desirable woman in the world becoming a spinster is finally what will kill her. She will die when the men have left the tale. She will die because she was a woman alone on a Saturday night -- a fate worse than death.

I disagree, Mr. Yardley, that MM has lost her appeal; it is highly unlikely that we'll see "thousands of magazines and newspaper stories, sixty full-length biographies, forty-odd bio-pic and documentary films, twenty or so plays, a dozen scholarly articles, at least ten novels, two academic monographs, two musicals, a ballet, an opera and an Elton John song" devoted to JLo. (Although we should never underestimate the perfidy of scholars, "such as they are," excreting reams of what you understatedly call "academic claptrap.") Nonetheless you have provided a new definition for the STUDY of POP CUL-TYURE: an academic charlatanism where "'iconic' seems to pop up in every other paragraph, and 'postmodern' and 'postfeminist' aren't far behind."