"Thomas M. Disch - Understanding Human Behavior" - читать интересную книгу автора (Disch Thomas M)

"There," she said, laying down the chalk and swinging round to face them, setting the heavy
waves of black hair to swaying pendulously, "it's as simple as red, white, and blue. These are
the three types of response people try to elicit from others by the clothes they wear. Blue, of
course, would represent solidarity. Policemen wear blue. French workingmen have always worn
a blinding blue. And then there's the universal uniform of blue denim. It's a cool color, and
tends to make those who wear it recede into the background. They vanish into the blue, so to
speak.

"Then white." She took a blank piece of paper from her desk and held it up as a sample of
whiteness. "White is for white-collar workers, the starched white shirt wearable only for a
single day being a timeless symbol of conspicuous consumption. I wish the slide projector
worked for this: I have a portrait by Hals of a man wearing one of those immense Dutch
collars, and you couldn't begin to imagine the work-hours that must have gone into washing
and ironing the damned thing. The money. Basically that's what our second category is about.
There's a book by Thorstein Veblen on the reading list that explains it all. Admittedly there are
qualities other than solvency and success we may be called upon to admire in what people
wear: good taste, a sense of paradox or wit, even courage, as when one walks through a
dangerous neighborhood without the camouflage of denim. But good taste usually boils down
to money: the good taste of petroleum-derived polyesters as against--" She smiled and ran
her hand across the pilled cloth of her dress. "--the bad taste of wool. Wit, likewise, is usually
the wit of combining contradictory class-recognition signals in the same costume -- an
evening gown, say, trimmed with Purina patches. You should all be aware, as consumers, that
the chief purpose of spending a lot of money on what you wear is to proclaim your allegiance
to money per se, and to a career devoted to earning it, or, in the case of diamond rings, the
promise to keep one's husband activated. Though in this case we begin to impinge on the
realm of desire."
To all which he gave about as much credence as he gave to actors in ads. Like most theories,
it made the world seem more, not less, complicated. Ho-hum, thought he, as he doodled a
crisp doodle of a many-faceted diamond. But then as she expounded her ideas about Desire
he grew uneasy, then embarrassed, and finally teed-off.

"Red," she said, reading from her deck of three-by-fives, "is the color of desire. Love is always
like a red, red rose. It lies a-bleeding like a beautiful steak in a supermarket. To wear red is to
declare oneself ready for action, especially if the color is worn below the waist."

There he sat in the back row in his red shorts and red sneakers thinking angry red thoughts.
He refused to believe it was a coincidence. He was wearing red shorts because he'd bicycled
here, a five-mile ride, not because he wanted to semaphore his instant availability to the
world at large. He waited till she'd moved off the subject of Desire, then left the classroom as
inconspicuously as possible. In the Bursar's Office he considered the other Wednesday night
possibilities, mostly workshops in posture or poetry or suchlike. Only one -- A Survey of Crime
in 20th Century America -- offered any promise of explaining people's behavior, so that was
the one he signed up for.



The next day, instead of going to work, he went out to New Focus and watched hang-gliders.
The most amazing of them was a crippled woman who arrived in a canvas sling. Rochelle
Rockefeller's exploits had made her so famous that even Richard knew about her, not only on
account of her flying but because she was one of the founding mothers of New Focus, and