Althouse |
- "With no daily obligations and no children around, the challenge was 'to profit from the present moment without ever thinking about what will happen in one hour, in two hours'...."
- 5:55 a.m.
- "'I didn’t come here to be insulted,' she murmured at one point, and Roth burst out laughing. 'But of course you did, he said. We all did.'"
- "So, Walter Mondale shows up in heaven the other day, and I’m all eager to talk to him because I’m kind of a political junkie — see Richard III — but before I can say anything..."
- "For people whose only home is a vehicle, the knock is a visceral, even existential, threat. How do you avoid it?"
- "Why had the polyamorous community rephrased the rush of falling in love as 'new relationship energy' (NRE for short)?"
- Tulips.
- "Caitlyn Jenner has accepted Joy Behar’s apology for misgendering the California gubernatorial hopeful, telling the daytime host she’s 'not about cancel culture.'"
- "If you’ve been to Mexico, you know that noise levels are often through the roof. Speaking of roofs, in many towns, 'watchdogs' are kept there..."
- Sunrise, 6:03.
- "[W]hen an alleged rapist writes a book about a brilliant but problematic novelist, and when that book is lauded and celebrated up until..."
- "This is a surreal depiction in which racism is concentrated everywhere. Everyone manifests racism, but then also a vulnerable human side."
- Tulips.
| Posted: 25 Apr 2021 06:51 AM PDT "In partnership with laboratories in France and Switzerland, scientists monitored the 15 team members' sleep patterns, social interactions and behavioural reactions via sensors. One sensor was a tiny thermometer inside a capsule that participants swallowed like a pill. It measured body temperature and transmitted data to a computer until it was expelled naturally. The team members followed their biological clocks to know when to wake up, go to sleep and eat. They counted their days not in hours but in sleep cycles. 'It's really interesting to observe how this group synchronises themselves,' [project director Christian] Clot said earlier in a recording from inside the cave.... Two-thirds of the participants expressed a desire to remain underground a little longer to finish group projects started during their stay.... " *** There is no comments section anymore, but you can email me here. Unless you say otherwise, I will presume you'd enjoy an update to this post with a quote from your email.  |
| Posted: 25 Apr 2021 06:28 AM PDT
The official sunrise time this morning was 5:59.  |
| Posted: 25 Apr 2021 07:03 AM PDT "'That's what I want carved on my gravestone. Philip Roth. He came here to be insulted.'" From "Excerpt: Novelist Philip Roth's Unsettled Marriage to Claire Bloom 'God, I'm fond of adultery,' Roth liked to say. 'Aren't you?'" by Blake Bailey (Vulture). That's from an excerpt from the Philip Roth biography we've been talking about, the one the publisher has been withholding because of allegations about the biographer. I've been reading about this book — have read several articles — and blogged it more than once. This morning, my readings brought me around to the subject of Claire Bloom, and I got to the point of blogging the quote above before I realized what I was reading was the writing of the accused man, the biographer — Blake Bailey. Strange! Claire Bloom and Philip Roth sound like an awful pair. I don't know if I want to read about them. I considered buying Claire Bloom's memoir, "Leaving a Doll's House," but it's not available on Kindle. I'll keep her at a distance, as the star of one of my all-time favorite movies, "Limelight." As for Philip Roth, it seems better to encounter him through his novels, and in fact, I'm reading one of his novels, "The Human Stain." When I blogged about the biography yesterday, I ran into a quote from that book, and it was fine enough to send me to Amazon to download the text and the audio. Here, I highlighted one quote so far. It's all one sentence:
Sure, you can diagram it. I'll start: point | is.... ADDED: The OED defines "caterwaul" as "The cry of the cat at rutting time. Also transferred. Any similar sound." It could be modernized into "catwail," but it's an old word, first seen in English in this sentence: "If the cattes skyn be slyk and gay, forth she wil, er eny day be dawet, To schewe hir skyn, and goon a caterwrawet." That's Chaucer. Circa 1386.  |
| Posted: 25 Apr 2021 03:38 AM PDT "... he's like, 'So?' And I'm like, 'So, what?' And then he goes, 'So, did you really write them?' And I'm like, 'Write what?' And he goes, 'Your plays.' And I'm like, 'What is this, some kind of Grant's Tomb trick question? Of course I wrote my plays. Who did you think wrote them? Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford?' I say that as a joke because Edward de Vere is a moron — I once asked him to borrow a codpiece, and he gave me an actual piece of cod. But then Mondale is all, 'Yes, I actually heard Edward de Vere did write them.' Mondale then fills me in on this whole crazy theory that I didn't write my own plays. You guys weren't going to tell me this? How has nobody ever mentioned this to me? I look over, and Christopher Marlowe is giving Mondale that 'stop talking' throat slash gesture thingy, but it's too late...." From "SHAKESPEARE FINDS OUT ABOUT THE 'SHAKESPEARE AUTHORSHIP QUESTION' FROM WALTER MONDALE" by Stephen Ruddy (McSweeney's). (To comment, email me here.)  |
| Posted: 25 Apr 2021 01:39 PM PDT "You hide in plain sight. Make yourself invisible. Internalize the idea that you're unwelcome. Stay hypervigilant to avoid trouble. Apart from telling you to clear out, the police can harass you with fines and tickets or get your home-on-wheels towed away to an impound lot.... In the film ['Nomadland'], Fern, played by Frances McDormand, is startled by a knock that interrupts a quiet meal. She looks up with a start and swears. A face hovers at the window, and a fist pounds once, twice, three times on the door. Then comes a gruff voice. 'No overnight parking! You can't sleep here.' Watching the character's panic at the sudden sound of a fist hitting her van gave me anxious flashbacks. Then it made me sad. Then I felt angry, because that scene was just too accurate, and I wished it didn't reflect the reality of how people treat one another.... Bob Wells, 65, has a popular video, 'Avoiding the Knock,' and has been lecturing on the topic for ages.... In a better world, people wouldn't have to go to such lengths to stay out of sight.... Some towns have created areas where vehicle dwellers can sleep undisturbed." From "What 'Nomadland' Exposes About Fear in America/People who live in homes-on-wheels should not have to be in constant fear of 'the knock'" by Jessica Bruder (NYT). Bruder is the author of the book the movie is based on. And here's the Bob Wells video. (Wells is in the movie.) By the way, Meade and I saw the movie. It was the first time we'd been out to the movies in over a year. I was disappointed in the experience. The image on the screen looked dim and dull. I would have preferred to watch it on TV (but not enough to subscribe to Hulu, which is what you need to do). I would have walked out if I had been alone. Meade, however, loved the movie. He said it was the best movie he'd seen since he saw "How the West Was Won" when he was a kid — and that movie was in Cinerama (true 3-lens Cinerama). "Nomadland" was my most extreme example of seeing a movie with someone whose opinion of it was the opposite of mine. I said, "I hated it." FROM THE EMAIL: Kate writes:
The vehicles shown in the movie have something like a kitchen and bathroom. That is, the toilet is a plastic bucket, and there's some device for heating food. Mostly the vehicles are old and quite ordinary vans. As for the word "home," there's a very important line in the movie. Asked if she's "homeless," the main character says: "I'm not homeless. I'm just houseless." A similar examination of language occurs when she's asked, "Are you married?" She says, "I am, but my husband died." The issue is, what really matters? What is a home? What is a marriage? People with less may have more. AND: Mary emails:
The main character in the movie used her van to travel from job to job. She preferred the job in the Amazon warehouse, but it was seasonal. It had the benefit of providing free parking for workers, but she had to move on to other jobs — park attendant, sugar beet factory, that sort of thing. She was a very hard worker, and not a person with any mental illness or substance abuse problem.
You had to look at a seating chart and pick seats. Only 25% of the seats were available. You were required to wear a mask, but no one came around and enforced the mask requirement, so if you took it off at your seat, no one said anything. Food and drink were for sale, so the people who needed mouth access were obviously going to be taking off their masks. I didn't do that, and I kept my mask on.  |
| Posted: 25 Apr 2021 03:32 AM PDT "Why would anyone endeavor to rebrand love into something like a start-up, complete with its own energized, abbreviated lingo? And how could Juhana encourage me to pursue other relationships? Did I truly inspire so little emotion he wouldn't care if I dated someone else? 'I am willing to endure the discomfort,' he would reply, 'because you are worth it.' But why couldn't he be willing to endure the discomfort of depriving himself of someone else? Why, I wanted to know, was one pain fundamentally more acceptable than the other?" From "My Boyfriend Has Two Girlfriends. Should I Be His Third?/My mind could rationalize polyamory, but my heart rebelled" by Silva Kuusniemi (NYT). Spoiler alert: She rejects him. *** There is no comments section anymore, but you can email me here. Unless you say otherwise, I will presume you'd enjoy an update to this post with a quote from your email.  |
| Posted: 24 Apr 2021 05:30 PM PDT   |
| Posted: 24 Apr 2021 08:10 AM PDT "'Don't sweat it, @JoyVBehar,' Jenner, 71, tweeted early Saturday morning. 'I'm not about cancel culture. I know where your heart is. California has bigger issues than pronouns.'... '[Behar] didn't say it pointedly. She kept making the mistake. She corrected herself, and then accidentally did it again. She was not being malicious by any means,' an insider told Page Six while pointing out that Behar is an 'advocate' who 'has been honored by [LGBTQ+ rights group] GLAAD.'" Good move by Jenner. Someone who wants to win the support of the masses can't lean into self-based fussiness. It's fine to recommend compassion about pronouns for young people who are struggling with their identity, but when you want to present yourself as ready to take on everyone else's problems and govern, you need to make people feel that you are well grounded and fully supported from within. You need to make other people comfortable — not worried that in talking about you they could say something wrong and have their lives ruined. It's really a matter of etiquette, and a politician should not make people feel that they have to live up to some new, difficult standard of etiquette. Behar can't even do it when she's on TV and trying to make up for a slip she's already made. (To comment, email me here.)  |
| Posted: 24 Apr 2021 06:16 AM PDT "... and they bark all the time — at nothing or at everything. And then there are the parties, for birthdays, quinceneras, religious and other holidays. Often these events include rented speakers as big as refrigerators set up in the street in front of their (and your) house. You might find your street blocked by a bounce house or funeral memorial for a day... or three. Strolling musicians are common and can be lovely, but sometimes you might prefer a quiet conversation at dinner or listening to waves at the beach instead of a 10-piece, horn-heavy band. In Mazatlán, open-air taxis, called pulmonias, have gigantic sound systems with speakers that blast music as they make their way through the neighborhoods...." From "64-year-old retiree who left the U.S. for Mexico: 7 downsides of living in a beach town for $1,200 per month" (CNBC). I quoted the material on the noise downside. There are 6 more downsides at the link. But the author, Janet Blaser, says she's got no regrets about her decision. (To comment, email me here.)  |
| Posted: 24 Apr 2021 05:30 PM PDT
The actual sunrise time today was 6:00.  |
| Posted: 24 Apr 2021 05:34 PM PDT "... the moment two women say the author assaulted them — when all that happens, you wonder how the 900-page tome reads in hindsight." Writes Monica Hesse (in WaPo). She bought the book after the publisher withdrew it. You can still download the Kindle version. [ADDED: You can even buy the hardcover book at that link. Amazon has its stock to ship. But the publisher, Norton, isn't shipping any more books, and it's not doing publicity.] That takes some of the heat out of the argument that the book has been censored. I stand by my opinion — expressed here — that the book should be sold no matter what the author, Blake Bailey, may have done. The book is not doing any sort of active harm — where we might have a real debate about censorship. It's just the argument that the author is a bad person, and these are only allegations. I would support publishing the book even if Bailey had shot a man on 5th Avenue in broad daylight. Roth is an overwhelmingly important writer, and this was the biographer he authorized, which caused many people to give interviews to Bailey. It's unfair to the Roth to deprive him of the story of himself that he chose Bailey to tell, and it's unfair to keep that story from us. But we can get the Kindle version. And maybe we're more interested in it now. Monica Hesse got interested — interested in reading the book with "hindsight." I guess that means that all the time she's reading about Roth, she's thinking about how she's hearing the story of this "problematic" man as analyzed by another problematic man. Let's see what Hesse makes out of her assigned task of perceiving the problematic through an extra layer of problematizing:
Ha ha ha. That is rich. That's some really good feminist writing. Bailey is damned by his "thinnest of pretexts." He assumes Maggie just wanted to interrupt Roth, that there couldn't possibly be a legitimate reason for the person cooking dinner to ask the other person in the house to go out and buy a missing ingredient. Bailey seems to think that a person in a house with a Genius at Work must know not even to ask for help with mundane household matters. Here — if you're going to Amazon to download the Kindle of the Roth bio (or anything else) — why not buy this sign to tack onto your study door and see how it works out with your stuffed-up spouse: When Roth began "openly dating other people" while still married, Maggie's "demands for his attention took more and more bizarre forms," Bailey writes — as if trying to rekindle affection from a serially philandering spouse is nonsensical and strange... "Even at his worst, when [Roth] was ranting and raving at his 'b---- of a wife,' he was charming and funny and essentially benign," Bailey told an interviewer with the Los Angeles Times....Most people wouldn't trust a sentence reading, "all women are nagging shrews," but we all can be swayed by the skillful, gently persuasive phrasing that good writers know how to employ, and both Roth and Bailey are very good writers. This is how a misogynistic culture is conceptualized, created, cultivated and codified.It doesn't happen because one dude does a bad thing. It happens when like-minded dudes are allowed to be one another's gatekeepers, and the gatekeepers of broader culture, when faults are allowed to go unexamined, and so they instead spread: Harvey Weinstein dictated the content of movie theaters for decades; it turns out he was abusing women all along. Roger Ailes, Charlie Rose and Matt Lauer shaped coverage and discussion of sexual misconduct scandals throughout the 1990s and 2000s; they were later accused of sexual misconduct themselves.Exactly. Very well put. This is well put too:
ADDED: It is so much better to get the book and to read it with insight than to suppress it. If readers don't know how to do something like what Hesse is doing — active, critical reading — then they really don't know how to read. So many people don't know how to read, and, as a consequence, when they are bothered by a text — or a writer — the answer they think of is censorship. Their call for censorship is a pathetic, unwitting confession of their inability to read. Of course, these people don't value reading. For them, reading is a lowly activity. They're heroes to themselves, doing us all a favor, sparing us from books that might put the wrong thoughts in our head. FROM THE EMAIL: Temujin writes:
AND: Bob emails: "After two women say the author assaulted them — Bill Clinton got a $15 million advance for his autobiography." ALSO: An emailer named John writes:
And Karen emails:
Thanks!  |
| Posted: 24 Apr 2021 05:39 PM PDT "The characters' stories were nicely, complexly interwoven. I liked it — even when it skewed melodramatic. I liked that you were kept on your toes about which characters to love or hate, to respect or revile." That's something I blogged in February 2006, after watching the movie "Crash," which had just been nominated for the Best Picture Oscar. The movie went on to win that Oscar, a fact I'm contemplating this morning because I'm reading "The Oscars always get it wrong. Here are the real best pictures of the past 45 years" (Washington Post). Here's the entry for that year:
That's not new writing. It's something WaPo published in 2016 and is now republishing along with new material to cover more recent movies. This republication had to be updated for full disclosure: "We published this fine quarrel in 2016, but they just keep on handing out Oscars to the wrong movies, so we have updated it for your further education." The word "education" — though facetious — takes the position that opinion is stable and what they said 5 years ago about "Crash" is the same thing they'd say today. But in 2016, anti-homophobia was predominant, and overheated worry over racial discord may have seemed passé. WaPo ought to have updated its opinion! Maybe "Brokeback Mountain" seemed better than it was because of the issue it hit, and the Academy voters were prescient to give the prize to " Crash."Here's what I wrote the morning after "Crash" won the Oscar:
So I was saying Hollywood plays it safe, and anti-racism is especially safe, even safer than anti-homophobia. I certainly wasn't predicting that 5 years later we'd be having a heyday of anti-racism, and real life would become a surreal depiction in which racism is concentrated everywhere and the approved elite cultural belief would be that everyone is racist. FROM THE EMAIL: Temujin writes: I liked 'Crash' very much the first time around for the reasons you nailed in your commentary from back in 2006. The idea that you weren't sure who to like or hate in this movie, that behavior was fluid- as fluid as human interaction can be. And it did a fine job in showing us all as human. In that sense it was a very real movie. And yes, it skewed melodramatic, but even those parts were so well acted, that it held you. And in its way it believably portrayed the racism built into LA society at that time. Yes, American society too, but LA had (has?) a particularly interesting way of doing it, with so much immense wealth across so many different types of people who interact with each other daily. And the LA cops had a racist reputation long before it became in vogue. They actually practiced it.
Ha ha. I too never saw that movie. For just about exactly that reason. Plus, it bothered me that people were straining so hard to be pro-gay that they had nothing much to say about the plight of the wife who got stuck in a marriage to a man who loved someone else. The love between then men had to be exalted. That annoyed me.
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| Posted: 23 Apr 2021 06:41 PM PDT  -  |
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