Althouse

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• "Teachers taking the backseat — that flies in the face of white Western thought, right?"
• "I saw a bald eagle in the wild a few years ago, and to be honest, it looked, even as it flew over the snakey river and the murmuring pines and the hemlocks—Canadian trees, according to Longfellow, whose 'Evangeline,' is a poem of exile I adore—like a bigot."
• The fox reappears...
• "During a trip to Italy, [his wife] gets behind the wheel of a Renault and speeds along a mountainside road outside of Siena."
• "The Christian Baker Who Said ‘No’/Jack Phillips is again in court for refusing to bake a cake with a message he objects to."
• "I have seen no evidence to support a seditious conspiracy charge against my client, Donovan Crowl. I was surprised that the former U.S. attorney would comment so publicly on the case."
• At the Monday Night Café...

"Teachers taking the backseat — that flies in the face of white Western thought, right?" Posted: 23 Mar 2021 09:56 AM PDT

"I saw a bald eagle in the wild a few years ago, and to be honest, it looked, even as it flew over the snakey river and the murmuring pines and the hemlocks—Canadian trees, according to Longfellow, whose 'Evangeline,' is a poem of exile I adore—like a bigot." Posted: 23 Mar 2021 08:42 AM PDT Sentence of the Day.  Sentence of the Day is a declaration I make now and then — certainly not every day — when I encounter a complicated and weird sentence.  That's in "Of Mice and ICE" (at the Poetry Foundation). The author is Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb, an English professor at the University of Toronto, who teaches poetry and postcolonial theory and literature. She was writing in 2018, when the ICE problems were Trump's.  I got there as a result of googling "beastie," a word I used in the previous post, about a fox, and have used now and again and again on this blog.  A "beastie" is "A little animal; an endearing form of beast n. Also applied jocularly to insects. (Originally Scottish)" (OED). The oldest usage is in the Robert Burns poem that is referenced in that Poetry Foundation piece with the complicatedly weird sentence.  Here's the Burns poem with "beastie" in the first line — "Wee, sleeket, cowran, tim'rous beastie." Here's Longfellow's "Evangeline" — which begins "This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks...." What other sentences have caused me to declare "Sentence of the Day"? There was this, in 2005: "Plump couches, radical books, free WiFi, $5 microbrews, killer sound system, a menu that runs from catfish and collard greens to peanut butter, banana and honey sandwiches: a cool, comfortable, slightly bourgy haven for a hot, bothered, slightly bourgy peace movement." This, in 2017:  "It is a mildly disconcerting experience, seeing conscious evolutions and experiments in style; baroque, ornate, urgent, dyspeptic; the repetitions and modalities at various points and the stylized categorizations and oppositions – prudes and perverts, monsters and insanity, measures and tests, inquiries and examinations, bodies and boys, punishment, pleasure, asceticism, suicide; the going back over old themes in new ways; how the old becomes new but how the new can never entirely disown the old; the desire for both fidelity in the evocation of moods and worlds, but not necessarily strict historical accuracy, whatever that might in the end be taken to mean; and the desire to write all this up somehow as a history of the present."  And here's another 2017 example:  "You know like any face I made when I was young was adorable and now if I'm worried there's this pathetic gleam of how do I look and yet we love an old dog or an old leather couch so why not an old female arm or an ass all its own, speaking powerfully shabbily in time."

The fox reappears... Posted: 23 Mar 2021 08:18 AM PDT   Next time... I plan to get a better picture. I've got to reach for my old time-y camera. I'm keeping it right here on my desk. It's a mistake to grab the iPhone. What a fumbling idiot I become when suddenly excited by a chance to photograph the fox! Too many button images to look at and emphatically touch. I got that one picture and then — even though the beastie paused to take a shit — I could not get a second shot.

"During a trip to Italy, [his wife] gets behind the wheel of a Renault and speeds along a mountainside road outside of Siena." Posted: 23 Mar 2021 09:23 AM PDT "Suddenly, like Nicole in 'Tender Is the Night,' she declares, 'I'm going to kill both of us!' Roth grabs the wheel, and they continue on to the Rhône Valley. Roth started seeing Hans Kleinschmidt, an eccentric name-dropping psychoanalyst, three or four days a week. Asked later how he could justify the expense ($27.50 a session), Roth said, 'It kept me from killing my first wife.' He told Kleinschmidt that he fantasized about dropping into the Hoffritz store on Madison Avenue and buying a knife. 'Philip, you didn't like the Army that much,' Kleinschmidt told him. 'How will you enjoy prison?'... Roth has a fling with Alice Denham, Playboy's Miss July, 1956, who, as her cheerfully unapologetic memoir 'Sleeping with Bad Boys' revealed, also slept with Nelson Algren, James Jones, Joseph Heller, and William Gaddis. 'Manhattan was a river of men flowing past my door, and when I was thirsty I drank,' she wrote. So did Roth. Roth and [his first wife] finally split up in 1963." From "The Secrets Philip Roth Didn't Keep/Roth revealed himself to his biographer as he once revealed himself on the page, reckoning with both the pure and the perverse" (The New Yorker). Here's Denham's rather decorous Playboy centerfold from 1956, when sex, apparently, entailed pillow fights, with feathers flying, and a big fluffy feather was always right there as an impromptu pastie, lest you see too much.  I had to look up "pastie," because... is it "pasty" or "pastie"? Don't want any mixup with the meat pie. Turns out it's either "pasty" or "pastie," and, really, how often do you need the singular? But I did get to while away a few moments — disrupting my contemplation of the "a river of men" that was Manhattan in the 50s — with the Wikipedia article "Pasties".  There, I encountered this photograph — cc by Mark Lidikay — captioned "A group of women protesting for the right to go topless anywhere a man could. Venice Beach California. The demonstrator with the microphone is wearing a pastie in the shape of a nipple":

"The Christian Baker Who Said ‘No’/Jack Phillips is again in court for refusing to bake a cake with a message he objects to." Posted: 23 Mar 2021 06:35 AM PDT Headline at the Wall Street Journal.  Philips was in the news years ago after he refused to make a same-sex wedding cake. He's dealt with that problem by not making custom wedding cakes anymore (and, we're told, losing 40% of his business).  Now, he's accusing of discrimination against transgenders: In her original complaint to the [Colorado Civil Rights Commission, Autumn Scardina] wrote that she'd told the bakery the design was "intended for the celebration of my transition from male to female." Blue icing on a pink cake. After Masterpiece turned down this cake, Ms. Scardina called to request another. This one would feature Satan smoking a joint. Mr. Phillips declined.... "Jack didn't single Scardina out for being transgender," [said Kristen Waggoner, general counsel for the Alliance Defending Freedom]. "He wouldn't bake cakes with those messages for anyone." This is a baker who won't even make Halloween cakes, she adds, and serves everyone regardless of gender identity or sexual orientation....

"I have seen no evidence to support a seditious conspiracy charge against my client, Donovan Crowl. I was surprised that the former U.S. attorney would comment so publicly on the case." Posted: 23 Mar 2021 06:20 AM PDT Said lawyer Carmen Hernandez, quoted in "Justice Dept. Said to Be Weighing Sedition Charges Against Oath Keepers/Investigators have for weeks focused on the role of the militia in the attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob" (NYT).  The potential for sedition charges received renewed attention this week after Michael R. Sherwin, the outgoing leader of the investigation, said on "60 Minutes" that the government had most likely obtained enough evidence to bring such a charge. "I personally believe the evidence is trending toward that, and probably meets those elements," Mr. Sherwin said. "I believe the facts do support those charges. And I think that, as we go forward, more facts will support that." The comments echoed his assertions in the days after the assault, when Mr. Sherwin said that the Justice Department had formed a strike force of senior national security and public corruption prosecutors to look at more serious charges, including sedition. "Their only marching orders from me are to build seditious and conspiracy charges related to the most heinous acts that occurred in the Capitol," Mr. Sherwin, then the acting U.S. attorney in Washington, said at a news conference on Jan. 12.... Mr. Sherwin recorded the interview days before he handed leadership of the inquiry over to Channing D. Phillips, the acting U.S. attorney in Washington. While Mr. Sherwin is no longer working on the investigation, he is still a Justice Department employee and federal prosecutor in Miami. Is the new administration pursing sedition charges? The article says the decision about that has "languished" because of the Senate confirmation process. The new Attorney General, Merrick B. Garland, was sworn in on March 11th. The NYT observes that "The Justice Department has rarely brought charges of sedition, the crime of conspiring to overthrow the government, and has not successfully prosecuted such a case in more than 20 years."

At the Monday Night Café... Posted: 22 Mar 2021 05:35 PM PDT  ... you can talk about whatever you want.

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