Sunday, May 9, 2021

Althouse

Althouse

Pink and white.

Posted: 09 May 2021 11:11 AM PDT

In the UW Arb today... pink redbud and white redbud... 

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Pink and white magnolia... 

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Me, in pink and white... 

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"One of the reasons I built [my house] was to express my artistic vision through another medium, in addition to the scarless rhinoplasty and facial enhancement."

Posted: 09 May 2021 11:02 AM PDT

Says one of the plastic surgeons quoted in "Cosmetic Surgeons Are Building L.A. Megamansions, and the Results are Over-the-Top/Celebrity dermatologist Dr. Alex Khadavi is listing his 21,000-square-foot Bel-Air property, which includes space to show off your NFT artwork, as well as a DJ booth, an outdoor tequila bar and a car museum" (WSJ). 

Another says: "In order to be great you have to dare to be bad. You have to take risks.... There are these tech and cryptocurrency guys who are still young and who want to have fun."

I wonder if they feel that way about faces too — In order to be great you have to dare to be bad. That would explain some of the things I see in the subreddit Botched Surgeries.

"In the final months of his life, when it was clear that he wouldn’t recover, Atwater lamented the dirty, divisive campaigns he’d run, and apologized far and wide for them."

Posted: 09 May 2021 10:44 AM PDT

"His memoir calls on politicians to instead follow the Golden Rule. Roger Stone, who formed an early consulting and lobbying firm in the Washington area with Atwater, along with Paul Manafort and Charles Black, remains unconvinced about Atwater's spiritual awakening. 'Lee was a great storyteller,' Stone told me in a recent interview. 'But, in the end, he was just grasping at straws. The Atwater family disagrees and has no doubt that he became a Christian. But at that point he was also Buddhist, Hindu, and everything else.'... In Stone's view, however, Atwater was more of an opportunist. 'We both knew he believed in nothing,' Stone told me. 'Above all, he was incredibly competitive. But I had the feeling that he sold his soul to the devil, and the devil took it.'"

Writes Jane Mayer in "The Secret Papers of Lee Atwater, Who Invented the Scurrilous Tactics That Trump Normalized/An infamous Republican political operative's unpublished memoir shows how the Party came to embrace lies, racial fearmongering, and winning at any cost" (The New Yorker).

Gah! Why don't I have a "Lee Atwater" tag? I have about 10 old posts with his name. I'll bet every time I thought something like: No, he's a secondary character from a bygone age, not likely to come up enough to deserve his own tag. Meanwhile, I've got hundreds of tags for individual names that I've only used once. Atwater comes up a lot because his name is synonymous with "dirty tricks" and because he supposedly regretted it all when he came face to face with Death.

So that explains why I'm blogging this snippet from The New Yorker: It casts doubt on the deathbed conversion story. But it's just Roger Stone. We never actually believe Roger Stone. Then again, does it matter? Does it matter that a man regrets his evil deeds when he's no longer in a position to benefit from them? He took all his advantages when it worked in his favor, but he tells you to the Golden Rule. What's the basis for believing him?

FROM THE EMAIL: Richard writes: 

The New Yorker headline of "Lee Atwater, Who Invented the Scurrilous Tactics That Trump Normalized" is ironic in so many ways. First, "Scurrilous Tactics" rather well describe the Democrat attacks on Trump, beginning with the Russian Collusion myth and the Impeachments. Second, the Daisy Nuclear Holoucast ad that the Democrats ran against Barry Goldwater in 1964- an ad that ordained Baptist minister Bill Moyers approved- points out once again that Democrats are not unfamiliar with using "Scurrilous Tactics" themselves.

Consider the Willie Horton ad. Willie Horton was a convicted murderer, in prison for life without parole. He committed rape and armed robbery in Maryland while on a weekend furlough from prison in Massachusetts. First, Governor Dukakis vetoed an addition to the inmate furlough program that would have prohibited convicted murderers from being eligible for weekend furloughs. Second, Al Gore was the first to bring up the furlough program during the campaign, though he didn't mention Willie Horton.

Finally, while The New Yorker and assorted Democrats may disagree with this point, "soft on crime" was a valid description of Dukakis. Willie Horton wasn't the only example. In one of the debates, Dukakis stated that he opposed the death penalty for someone that had raped and murdered his wife.

And Shane writes:  

Without excusing whatever was done or believed to have been done in 2016/2020, I just don't understand the "Trump normalized" nasty politics and racial fear-mongering thing. "Put y'all back in chains"? "Binders full of women"? the stupid high school forced haircut? Bork and Clarence Thomas? Biden saying his wife and child were killed by a drunk truck driver, when by all other accounts the truck driver was heroic and suffered for Biden's lies. Politics at a local level can be nasty, but once you reach the statewide, let alone federal political arena, its bare knuckles as it has been for centuries. Jefferson/Adams, Grover Cleveland, Harding, FDR and JFK personal lives cover up. Trump only normalized the media exposing their blatant taking of sides, and then only after they dumped him as a useful foil that backfired on them.

"That's Boris... That's a beautiful black bear."

Posted: 09 May 2021 06:48 AM PDT

(Language warning.) UPDATE: The next episode — Anthony takes things too far.

"Musk, dressed in all black, began with an admission: 'I’m actually making history tonight as the first person with Asperger’s to host SNL—or at least the first to admit it.'"

Posted: 09 May 2021 06:34 AM PDT

"'So, I won't make a lot of eye contact with the cast tonight. But don't worry, I'm pretty good at running "human" in emulation mode.' (Though a brave admission, Musk is not the first person with Asperger's to host SNL—Dan Aykroyd, a former cast member, also has Asperger's and returned to host the show in 2003.)" 

From "Elon Musk's Deceptive and Deeply Awkward SNL Monologue" (The Daily Beast)(video of the monologue at the link). 

Wow! That's some shocking disregard for Dan Aykroyd, but The Daily Beast seems to slough that off, even as it purports to show that the monologue was "deceptive and deeply awkward." 

The silly use of the word "deeply" was noted on this blog in 2014, in a post titled, "Deeply... it's such a poser word."

Here's the 2013 article in The Daily Mail: "'I have Asperger's - one of my symptoms included being obsessed with ghosts': Under the microscope with Dan Aykroyd." 

I was diagnosed with Tourette's at 12. I had physical tics, nervousness and made grunting noises and it affected how outgoing I was. I had therapy which really worked and by 14 my symptoms eased. I also have Asperger's but I can manage it. It wasn't diagnosed until the early Eighties when my wife persuaded me to see a doctor. One of my symptoms included my obsession with ghosts and law enforcement — I carry around a police badge with me, for example. I became obsessed by Hans Holzer, the greatest ghost hunter ever. That's when the idea of my film Ghostbusters was born.

"I was accustomed to thinking of most novels the way Nabokov wanted me to, or as Flaubert did—he once wrote that the most beautiful books depend 'on nothing external . . . just as the earth, suspended in the void, depends on nothing external for its support.'"

Posted: 09 May 2021 10:37 AM PDT

"Then something happened to change my thinking. I realized that the real world is full of people who, presumably, have feelings about being appropriated for someone else's run at the Times best-seller list.... Is moving someone down the existence scale from 'human person' to 'character' anything like murder?... I thought that I recognized my past in a stranger's words... Yet perhaps I was exaggerating the similarities, getting paranoid, self-absorbed.... Who owns a story? In writing my original piece, I lifted the lives of my parents and sister.... If Hall did use my text in some way, perhaps she only turned me from a superpowered narrator back into a character... 'My'... ends up a desiccated, unlovable, insect-like creature; her twin sister dies young.... Interrogating [my] anger now, I find it fascinating. It scans as an authorial fury. My essay was not just a personal history; it was an attempt to reckon with literary and societal representations of anorexia..."

From "Who Owns a Story? I was reviewing a novel. Then I found myself in it" by Katy Waldman (in The New Yorker). This article is from 2019. It came up in a search I was doing this morning (about a book that's mentioned in a different part of the essay).

In asking "who owns a story," Waldman isn't asking for a discussion of copyright. It's about art and ethics. Personally, I've been somebody else's fictional character. More than once. It's a complex matter to be used like that. You may enthusiastically support it, at least some of the time. You might want your story told... but perhaps not quite like that. And if it's told once, is it still there for you to tell it? 

In Waldman's case, she wrote something that another author apparently soaked up as raw material and transformed into a new work of art. Waldman never authorized or encouraged this other person, but she had put her experience out there to be absorbed by other people and to become part of their understanding of the world. Their understanding can't stay locked inside your understanding. And, of course, Waldman reappropriated everything and made a new piece of art out of it, the New Yorker essay, "Who Owns a Story?"

The book I was doing a search on is "The Human Stain" by Philip Roth. Roth used a real-life incident that happened to his friend and spun it out into an elaborate fictional story. The book shows a friendship between 2 men who are essentially Roth and his real-life friend. In the book, the friend insists that Roth write a book about what happened to him, and the Roth character says no. But the book is the Roth character's book about the friend character, but it's not the book the friend character wanted written. It's something else entirely, the book the Roth character (and Roth) wanted to write, not the book the friend character wanted written.

FROM THE EMAIL: Bothsidesnow writes: 

A few years ago I dived into the six or seven volume work My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard. The author takes the narrative of his life and those around him -- his father, his uncle, his brother, girl friends and wife and fashions a novel/long essay/work of some type of literature. By the time he writes the last volume, the first volume has been published, and the last volume in part details the reactions of the living people whose lives he has captured and published for the world to see. The first volume, in my view, is essentially a tale of a monster, with overtones of the Grimm brothers and other works of the literature of monsters. The monster is Karl Ove's father, who dies at the end of volume one in grotesque circumstances, so never gets to read the work. Karl Ove, before he publishes Volume One, sends the manuscript to his brother and uncle and invites or at least indicates he will accept reactions. His uncle responds in a brief email with the heading "I have been raped." [This is from memory] His wife, after reading the manuscript, is admitted to a psychiatric ward for several weeks. [Again, from memory.]

Apparently in Scandinavian literary culture, there is now a somewhat extensive body of works by authors who write similar works based on their own life, family, and friends.

Knausgaard is reportedly not a common last name in Norway, in fact, only one family bears the name, so there was never any doubt about the subject. The first volume was purchased by an astonishingly large % of Norwegians.

"Post-Quarantine Conversation" — this is excellent... and Elon Musk did a good job (in the role of a normal, awkward person).

Posted: 09 May 2021 04:29 AM PDT

5:53 a.m.

Posted: 08 May 2021 06:06 PM PDT

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The official sunrise time this morning was 5:41. Earlier today, I posted pictures taken at 5:35, 6 minutes before sunrise, when things looked much redder — as if some horrible disaster were taking place on the opposite shore. But this photo, 12 minutes after sunrise, is mellower, the red replaced by gold. 

The season of the days of the longest light has just begun. Picture the summer solstice in the middle of a 3-month period and you'll see that we're just entering this period. This is something I talked about — squirreled away in the comments — on March 7th of last year:

We're in the part of the year when day and night are balanced. It's already almost 12 hours between sunrise and sunset — and of course the light begins before the actual sunrise time and lasts after the sunset time. It's still winter, and it was a bit cold this morning, but the light is now completely spring.

I think the seasons are wrongly divided. They shouldn't begin with an equinox/solstice, but should have the equinox/solstice put right in the middle. That would correspond to how I feel about the seasons: It's about light, not temperature. Winter should have the solstice as its center and should end by mid-February and so forth.

Using that terminology, I'd have to say that summer has just begun. Perhaps it's better to pick different names, with the season that begins now called Light.

As I write this post, it's 7:58, and the sun hasn't set. Sunset time is 8:06 p.m. today, so I'm looking out on sunset colors, though not from a great vantage point.
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