Althouse

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• "Musk is the first person from the business world to host SNL since Donald Trump in 2015...."
• Somehow Trump remains the top news story.
• When the landlord drops by to photograph your apartment for presentation on the Internet...
• Look how they're advertising single malt whisky these days.
• "Everybody’s strength is their weakness, in politics as in life... [Biden's] strength is he’s always spoken his mind. There’s a genuineness to that."
• "She can paint a compelling portrait of what the inside of the Democratic Party activist bubble looked like, but shows no awareness that there is anything outside of the bubble..."
• The FBI releases its (very mundane) file on the death of Kurt Cobain.
• 5:35 a.m.
• "[A]ll the job gains in April went to men. The number of women employed or looking for work fell by 64,000...."
• Allium.
• "For a long time, Roth kept two small signs near his desk. One read, 'Stay Put,' the other, 'No Optional Striving.'"

"Musk is the first person from the business world to host SNL since Donald Trump in 2015...." Posted: 08 May 2021 09:09 AM PDT "Such unorthodoxy could give both Musk and [SNL producer Lorne] Michaels what they want: an important new audience for Michaels, and a humanization of Musk during a time of fierce anti-1-percenter sentiment. It also could blow up in their faces.... Musk will arrive on SNL just a week after four astronauts aboard a SpaceX Dragon capsule successfully splashed down at night in the Gulf of Mexico.... Musk has also garnered notice for his quixotic tunnel plans, his cryptocurrency investments, an unexpected move to Texas, an infamous Joe Rogan podcast appearance, a more infamous cybertruck failure, his belief that pandemic lockdowns were 'fascist,' and skeptical comments about the coronavirus vaccine, though he later walked those back.... 'I think Lorne recognizes if he just keeps playing to liberals on the coasts, his audience will wither,' said a late-night television veteran familiar with his thinking who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve a relationship with the producer. 'So he's trying something.' But those efforts are fraught; previous attempts at audience expansion have backfired. In 2019, Michaels hired the working-man's comic Shane Gillis in part to appeal to Middle America but had to let him go just days later when it was revealed Gillis had used racist and homophobic slurs. Another bid for red-state audiences came last October with the naming of the young country star Morgan Wallen as musical guest. That blew up, too, when Wallen was seen partying maskless in an Alabama bar...." Writes Steven Zeitchik in "Elon Musk is being brought in to save SNL's sagging ratings. He could sink the show in other ways. In the entertainment and business worlds, there is an argument in favor of the unorthodox host — as well as plenty of warnings" (WaPo). Zeitchik seems way overinvested in preserving "SNL" as a bastion of liberal/woke politics. Or is he beset with flashbacks over that 2015 Trump appearance? That all seemed like good fun — even a good way to hurt Trump — and then look what happened!  And I can't let this go without mention: "Musk has also garnered notice for his quixotic tunnel plans." He doesn't just get notice. He garners notice. That is he saves up the notice in garners — a "garner" being a granary or a storehouse for corn. "Garner" was a noun for centuries before it was a verb, and as a verb it's a dead metaphor, but some of us — me, chiefly — remember the dead.  If I worked on this post all day, I could figure out a way to connect garnering to "quixotic," because the reference is to Don Quixote, and Don Quixote famously tilted at windmills, so you have 2 things connected to grain — mills and garners. But I have some restraint. I'll just show you this fantastic Gustave Doré illustration:

Somehow Trump remains the top news story. Posted: 08 May 2021 08:45 AM PDT Here's what the top left corner of the NYT website looks like right now: Who's really "marooned"? Trump at Mar-a-Lago? Or the media cut off from Trump? That said, I love the photograph, and I approve of the front-page positioning of this story if only to give prominence to this fantastic shot.

When the landlord drops by to photograph your apartment for presentation on the Internet... Posted: 08 May 2021 08:02 AM PDT ... and — I guess! — can't touch your stuff but wants the photographs anyway, the rest of us get to see you live like this. It doesn't seem quite fair. Maybe you shouldn't look. I think it's funny... and real... both the way the tenant is living and the ludicrous landlord's representation that it's "Just renovated," with "new paint and carpet."

Look how they're advertising single malt whisky these days. Posted: 08 May 2021 10:09 AM PDT I'm finding that photograph so funny, because I like to take a bath and read a book, and I could be lured into bringing a glass of whisky into that scenario and to put it on a spindly table right by the tub. And I could see getting out of the tub, wrapping my head in a towel and putting on a satin robe and then picking up the book again, but under no circumstances can there suddenly be a big dog in that recently vacated bath... a dog with halfway shampooed hair, no less. That dog and all that glass... not just the whisky on the spindly table but all that extra glass on the ledge behind the dog. The message becomes: Whisky is a disaster waiting to happen.  Also, I want my legs to remain attached to my pelvis. The faceless model has a leg that comes out of nowhere. Speaking of reading — is that model really reading? it seems to be a travel guide — I wanted to quote something else from that 2000 article about Philip Roth that I talked about yesterday. This is something I was thinking about during my sunrise run today (as I realized I didn't finish reading "The Human Stain" by getting to the end of reading all the words on all the pages but that I'd only gotten into the position where I can begin to read it): "Every year, seventy readers die and only two are replaced. That's a very easy way to visualize it," Roth said. By "readers," he said, he means people who read serious books seriously and consistently. The evidence "is everywhere that the literary era has come to an end," he said. "The evidence is the culture, the evidence is the society, the evidence is the screen, the progression from the movie screen to the television screen to the computer. There's only so much time, so much room, and there are only so many habits of mind that can determine how people use the free time they have. Literature takes a habit of mind that has disappeared. It requires silence, some form of isolation, and sustained concentration in the presence of an enigmatic thing. It is difficult to come to grips with a mature, intelligent, adult novel. It is difficult to know what to make of literature. That's why I say stupid things are said about it, because unless people are well trained they don't know quite what to make of it... "I think that the whole effort of certainly the first half of the twentieth century, the whole intellectual and artistic effort, was to see behind things, and that is no longer of interest. To explore consciousness was the great mission of the first half of the century—whether we're talking about Freud or Joyce, whether we're talking about the Surrealists or Kafka or Marx, or Frazer or Proust or whoever. The whole effort was to expand our sense of what consciousness is and what lies behind it. It's no longer of interest. I think that what we're seeing is the narrowing of consciousness. I read the other day in a newspaper that I occasionally see that Freud was a kind of charlatan or something worse. This great, tragic poet, our Sophocles! The writer is just not of interest to the public as somebody who may have an inroad into consciousness. The writer is only interesting in terms of how much money did he get and what's the scandal. That's all they're interested in. Why? Because the other stuff is useless, they don't want it. There has always been a debate over what literature is and what's it for, because it is a mysterious thing, and the mysterious side of existence, certainly for secular people, is not an urgent problem. "I'm not a good enough student of whatever you have to be a student of to figure this out, but one gets the sense—and not just on the basis of the death of reading—that the American branch of the species is being retooled. I see the death of reading as just an aspect of this. I have to see it that way, otherwise it's just cultural whining, and cultural whining is boring. It's an aspect of some great shift that's occurred—been going on for a while—in that which interests the most intelligent members of American society." In this period of Roth's maturity, his book sales have been modest, ranging between thirty and forty-five thousand in hardcover.... "It doesn't make any difference really if a hundred thousand read the book or ten thousand or five thousand, frankly. Five thousand people is a lot of people. And, as a friend of mine said about five thousand readers, 'If they came through your living room one at a time they'd leave you in tears.' "So when I talk of the death of reading, I'm not saying, 'Poor me, or poor the other guy, we don't have the readership.' I just mean that this great human endeavor has come to an end..." (To comment, email me at annalthouse@gmail.com.)

"Everybody’s strength is their weakness, in politics as in life... [Biden's] strength is he’s always spoken his mind. There’s a genuineness to that." Posted: 08 May 2021 10:11 AM PDT "There's also a danger. In politics as in sports, you want to maximize your principal's strengths and minimize his weaknesses. They've effectively maximized his earnestness and decency. They've not allowed him to be in situations where he can stray.... I was frustrated [not being able to book Biden for an interview]. But stepping back from my own selfish interests, I understood and admired their discipline. They were going to control his interactions. Their job is not to serve us. Their job is to serve him. Said David Axelrod, quoted in "How the White House Polices Language in Washington" by Olivia Nuzzi (NY Magazine). After that quote, Nuzzi adds: This reminded me of something William Safire once wrote describing how the administration of George H.W. Bush had screwed him over to neuter a damaging story: "What a joy it is to see really professional media manipulation."  Another quote from Nuzzi:  During the Trump years, it was amusing how often it was possible to report with a straight face that the president said one thing while the White House said another, as though he was just some guy who happened to hang around there. But this odd dynamic persists into the Biden era. That's terribly funny, the idea of the President as just some guy who happens to hang around in the White House. What if it's always been like that and the odd thing is that it took Trump to make us see?

"She can paint a compelling portrait of what the inside of the Democratic Party activist bubble looked like, but shows no awareness that there is anything outside of the bubble..." Posted: 08 May 2021 08:04 AM PDT "... or even that she was inside of one. Warren does deal extensively with campaign questions about her electability. But she treats these as largely, and even axiomatically, sexist.... But sexism alone has a hard time explaining why Warren took the lead in national polls of primary voters before collapsing in the fall of 2019. Surely, the reason many of the voters who were prepared to nominate her changed their mind is not that they learned her gender.... At the outset of her campaign, Warren staked her ground closer to the ideological center of the party.... [But] the competition with Sanders pulled her farther and farther left.... In February 2020, at a moment Biden's campaign was bottoming out... the balance of power within the Democratic primary was held by voters with 'somewhat liberal' views. Warren's campaign, though, has spent a year sprinting away from those voters, as if the party was actually torn between social democracy and democratic socialism.... [She should have learned] to treat the cadres of activists on Twitter and in academia as just one small yet vocal constituency within the party, not the party itself.... [T]he same misread of the electorate tripped up most of the field, with the famously Not Online Joe Biden being an exception." From "Elizabeth Warren's Book Shows She Has No Idea Why Her Campaign Failed" by Jonathan Chait (NY Magazine).

The FBI releases its (very mundane) file on the death of Kurt Cobain. Posted: 08 May 2021 08:05 AM PDT Read it here.  Here's the Billboard article on the long-secret file. It tells us that the 10-page file contains 2 letters — both from people who were concerned — based on what they'd read in book or seen in a movie — that the death was not a suicide but a murder. The file also contains the letter the FBI sent in response to each letter, telling them that murder is usually a matter of state and local law and that without "specific facts... to indicate... a violation of federal law," there's no basis for an FBI investigation. There's a little bit more to it, but basically that's it.  ADDED: What stationery do you use when you write to the FBI?

5:35 a.m. Posted: 08 May 2021 08:05 AM PDT

"[A]ll the job gains in April went to men. The number of women employed or looking for work fell by 64,000...." Posted: 08 May 2021 08:05 AM PDT I see, reading several paragraphs into "It's not a 'labor shortage.' It's a great reassessment of work in America. Hiring was much weaker than expected in April. Wall Street thinks it's a blip, but there could be much deeper rethinking of what jobs are needed and what workers want to do on a daily basis" (WaPo). The author of the analysis, Heather Long, presumes the difference is attributable to "child-care issues." But that goes counter to the notion that we've got "a great reassessment of work." Maybe the idea is that if we get the schools open and functioning once again as our childcare centers, then the difference between men and women will go away, and we'll be left with a gender-neutral problem — the great reassessment of work.  But what is the great reassessment of work? The coronavirus outbreak has had a dramatic psychological effect on workers, and people are reassessing what they want to do and how they want to work, whether in an office, at home or some hybrid combination. A Pew Research Center survey this year found that 66 percent of the unemployed had "seriously considered" changing their field of work, a far greater percentage than during the Great Recession. People who used to work in restaurants or travel are finding higher-paying jobs in warehouses or real estate, for example. Or they want to a job that is more stable and less likely to be exposed to the coronavirus — or any other deadly virus down the road. Consider that grocery stores shed over 49,000 workers in April and nursing care facilities lost nearly 20,000. Economists describe this phenomenon as reallocation friction, the idea that the types of jobs in the economy are changing and workers are taking awhile to figure out what new jobs they want — or what skills they need for different roles.... In some cases, the problem is a mismatch in skills....

Allium. Posted: 08 May 2021 08:06 AM PDT

"For a long time, Roth kept two small signs near his desk. One read, 'Stay Put,' the other, 'No Optional Striving.'" Posted: 08 May 2021 08:16 AM PDT "Optional striving appears to be a category that includes everything save writing, exercise, sleep, and solitude.... 'That act of passionate and minute memory is what binds your days together—days, weeks, months—and living with that is my greatest pleasure. I think for any novelist it has to be the greatest pleasure, that's why you're doing it—to make the daily connections. I do it by living a very austere life. I don't experience it as being austere in any negative sense, but you have to be a bit like a soldier with a barracks life, or whatever you want to call it. That is to say, I rule everything else out of my life. I didn't always, but I do now.... I have to tell you that I don't believe in death, I don't experience the time as limited. I know it is, but I don't feel it.... I could live three hours or I could live thirty years, I don't know. Time doesn't prey upon my mind. It should, but it doesn't. I don't know yet what this will all add up to, and it no longer matters, because there's no stopping.'" From a 2000 article in The New Yorker, "Into the Clear/Philip Roth puts turbulence in its place."  I'm reading that because the recent talk of the new — and out of print! — biography of Roth led me to read his novel "The Human Stain," which came out in 2000, so I was reading contemporaneous articles about that.  I chose that quote for blogging because it's about heroic isolation and dedication to writing — writing and staying alive. Here's a passage that I found in "The Human Stain" that goes into the same subject: Abnegation of society, abstention from distraction, a self-imposed separation from every last professional yearning and social delusion and cultural poison and alluring intimacy, a rigorous reclusion such as that practiced by religious devouts who immure themselves in caves or cells or isolated forest huts, is maintained on stuff more obdurate than I am made of. I had lasted alone just five years—five years of reading and writing a few miles up Madamaska Mountain in a pleasant two-room cabin situated between a small pond at the back of my place and, through the scrub across the dirt road, a ten-acre marsh where the migrating Canada geese take shelter each evening and a patient blue heron does its solitary angling all summer long. The secret to living in the rush of the world with a minimum of pain is to get as many people as possible to string along with your delusions; the trick to living alone up here, away from all agitating entanglements, allurements, and expectations, apart especially from one's own intensity, is to organize the silence, to think of its mountaintop plenitude as capital, silence as wealth exponentially increasing. The encircling silence as your chosen source of advantage and your only intimate. The trick is to find sustenance in (Hawthorne again) "the communications of a solitary mind with itself." The secret is to find sustenance in people like Hawthorne, in the wisdom of the brilliant deceased. I put 2 things in boldface to connect them for the purpose of contemplating whether they are the same thing.

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