Althouse

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• "He thrives on the understanding of the classroom as an eroticized place, where there’s this kind of thrill of engaging in risky exploration about ideas that’s continuous with risky exploration of all kinds of boundary transgressions."
• Sunrise with duck — 5:04 a.m.
• "It remains to be seen, of course, whether Congress will end gender-based registration under the Military Selective Service Act."
• "You see the Earth from space and it changes you. It changes your relationship with this planet, with humanity. It’s one Earth."
• At the Newark Public Library, you can see a display of almost 4,000 books from Philip Roth's personal library....
• "Too much of the discourse on race is a dry, bland regurgitation of new vocabulary words with no work in the unconscious. And, if you want to hit the unconscious, you will have to feel real negative feelings."
• "Which office do I go to to get my reputation back?"
• "An acquaintance or colleague mistakes you for another person with the same hairdo or a similar name. But for people of Asian descent..."
• "No, Trump Did Not Wear His Pants Backwards at Rally."
• "His wife said he used to tell about the time the musician Dave Van Ronk and other friends offered to take him out for soul food..."
• Sweating fungus with shadow of a hand.

"He thrives on the understanding of the classroom as an eroticized place, where there’s this kind of thrill of engaging in risky exploration about ideas that’s continuous with risky exploration of all kinds of boundary transgressions." Posted: 07 Jun 2021 12:29 PM PDT Says an unnamed Yale Law School colleague of Jed Rudenfeld's, quoted in "The Tiger Mom and the Hornet's Nest For two decades, Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld were Yale Law power brokers. A new generation wants to see them exiled" (NY Magazine).

Sunrise with duck — 5:04 a.m. Posted: 07 Jun 2021 08:19 AM PDT

"It remains to be seen, of course, whether Congress will end gender-based registration under the Military Selective Service Act." Posted: 07 Jun 2021 07:29 AM PDT "But at least for now, the court's longstanding deference to Congress on matters of national defense and military affairs cautions against granting review while Congress actively weighs the issue." Wrote Justice Sonia Sotomayor in a statement, joined by Justices Breyer and Kavanaugh, quoted in "Supreme Court Won't Hear Case on Limiting Military Draft to Men/The justices had been asked to decide whether one of the last sex-based distinctions in federal law should survive now that women can serve in combat" (NYT). It was a cert. denial, and the rest of the Justices had nothing to say. The requirement is one of the last sex-based distinctions in federal law, one that challengers say cannot be justified now that women are allowed to serve in every role in the military, including ground combat. Unlike men, though, they are not required to register with the Selective Service System, the government agency that maintains a database of Americans who would be eligible for the draft were it reinstated. It's good to leave this to Congress. We don't currently have a draft, but if we ever did, it would be an emergency, and the need to judge masses of people crudely, by their physical abilities, would matter. There is an important government interest that is substantially related to the distinction between the sexes. Of course, registering for the draft is a different matter, and treating young men and women the same in this theater of patriotism has some meaning. Let Congress grapple with that meaning and consider abandoning registration altogether.

"You see the Earth from space and it changes you. It changes your relationship with this planet, with humanity. It’s one Earth." Posted: 07 Jun 2021 07:10 AM PDT Said Jeff Bezos before taking a trip into space, quoted in "Jeff Bezos will fly to space with his brother on Blue Origin rocket" (London Times). Why go to get the insight if you've already got it? Have we forgotten how to live? I want to do X so I can think a thought I am already saying.  But you're already saying it. So it must be... I want to do X so that when I say the conventional thing that people who do X say, I will somehow really mean it, in a way that I don't mean yet. But Jeff Bezos isn't going to have a changed relationship with Planet Earth and humanity! And I think he knows that. He's planning not to change, as shown by his recitation of the stock trip-to-space insight, spoken by endless astronauts through the ages. If he really believed in going to space to acquire insight, he'd wait until he'd gone to space and then tell us what wisdom seeped into his skull while he was up there floating in the tin can. I suspect all those astronauts talking about their relationship to the planet have been bullshitting. I'm buying into the verisimilitude of the scene in "The Crown" where Prince Philip believed he would learn something profound from the astronauts, and the astronauts, it turned out... ... had nothing.

At the Newark Public Library, you can see a display of almost 4,000 books from Philip Roth's personal library.... Posted: 07 Jun 2021 06:41 AM PDT "... including a four-volume set about the history of presidential elections, multiple copies of Kafka's 'The Trial' and a marked-up edition of 'Incredible iPhone Apps for Dummies.'"  According to "Look Inside Philip Roth's Personal Library/The author of 'Goodbye, Columbus' and 'The Human Stain' left several thousand books, many of them with notes or letters, to the Newark Public Library."  I love the high-low juxtaposition of "The Trial" and "Incredible iPhone Apps for Dummies."  And I love that there's lots of marginalia. (You may remember that marginalia was the subject of the first post on this blog, on January 14, 2004.)  There are some nice photographs at the link, such as the one of Roth's copy of Henry Miller's "Tropic of Cancer" — with Post-It notes and an underline sentence: "'Life,' said Emerson, 'consists in what a man is thinking all day.'" In that first blog post of mine, I said, among other things, "I do like writing in the margins of books, something I once caused a librarian to gasp by saying." Having made a librarian gasp, I'm pleased to see this Newark library constructing a shrine to marginalia.

"Too much of the discourse on race is a dry, bland regurgitation of new vocabulary words with no work in the unconscious. And, if you want to hit the unconscious, you will have to feel real negative feelings." Posted: 07 Jun 2021 06:10 AM PDT "My speaking metaphorically about my own anger was a method for people to reflect on negative feelings. To normalize negative feelings. Because if you don't, it will turn into a violent action.... Something is emotionally dangerous about opening up a conversation about race.... No one wants to look at their actions or face their own negative feelings about what they are doing. The best way to control the narrative is to focus on me, and make me the problem, which is what I stated occurs in the dynamic of racism.... My work is important. And, I stand by it. We need to heal in this country." Said Dr. Aruna Khilanani, quoted in "A Psychiatrist Invited to Yale Spoke of Fantasies of Shooting White People/The Yale School of Medicine said the tone and content of a lecture by Dr. Aruna Khilanani, who has a private practice in New York, were 'antithetical to the values of the school'" (NYT).  What  Khilanani said in her lecture really was awful:  "This is the cost of talking to white people at all — the cost of your own life, as they suck you dry," Dr. Khilanani said in the lecture, which drew widespread attention after Bari Weiss, a former writer and editor for the opinion department of The New York Times, posted an audio recording of it on Substack on Friday. "There are no good apples out there. White people make my blood boil." Dr. Khilanani added that around five years ago, "I took some actions." "I systematically white-ghosted most of my white friends, and I got rid of the couple white BIPOCs that snuck in my crew, too," she said, using an acronym for Black and Indigenous people and people of color. "I had fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step, like I did the world a favor," she said, adding an expletive. Later in the lecture, Dr. Khilanani, who said she is of Indian descent, described the futility of trying to talk directly to white people about race, calling it a "waste of our breath." "We are asking a demented, violent predator who thinks that they are a saint or a superhero to accept responsibility," she said. "It ain't going to happen. They have five holes in their brain." ADDED: Khilanani has lots of TikTok videos, which you can see here.

"Which office do I go to to get my reputation back?" Posted: 07 Jun 2021 05:38 AM PDT A very memorable quote, discussed in detail in "Raymond Donovan, 90, Dies; Labor Secretary Quit Under a Cloud/He faced fraud charges when he left the Reagan administration, but a jury acquitted him, leaving him to ask, 'Which office do I go to to get my reputation back?'"

"An acquaintance or colleague mistakes you for another person with the same hairdo or a similar name. But for people of Asian descent..." Posted: 07 Jun 2021 05:28 AM PDT "... it happens without question when there are a few other Asians in the office, even when they look and sound nothing alike.... There's even a term for it: the interchangeable Asian.... [S]cholars of sociology, psychology and Asian American history said there was something serious — and damaging — behind this phenomenon of casual Asian-face blindness that borders on cavalier. Some pointed to unconscious biases that make office workers less inclined to remember the names and faces of Asian colleagues.... Others labeled the carelessness a form of discrimination derived from stereotypes with deep roots in American history that people with Asian heritage all behave and look alike — an army of nameless automatons not worth remembering for promotions....  If one requirement to ascend in your career is to be distinguishable to people in power, it may come as no surprise, then, that Asian Americans — who make up 7 percent of the U.S. population and are the fastest-growing racial group — are the least likely group to be promoted in the country, according to multiple studies.... An overwhelming majority of workers I interviewed said they did not clarify to their colleagues that they had been mistaken for the wrong Asian because they wanted to avoid confrontation." From "The Cost of Being an 'Interchangeable Asian'/At some top companies, Asian Americans are overrepresented in midlevel roles and underrepresented in leadership. The root of this workplace inequality could stem from the all-too-common experience of being confused for someone else" (NYT).

"No, Trump Did Not Wear His Pants Backwards at Rally." Posted: 07 Jun 2021 05:02 AM PDT Snopes had to fact-check that.

"His wife said he used to tell about the time the musician Dave Van Ronk and other friends offered to take him out for soul food..." Posted: 07 Jun 2021 04:45 AM PDT "... a term he didn't know. At the restaurant, when the collards and fatback, cornbread, fried pork chops and such arrived, his friends asked what he thought. 'Back home,' he told them, 'this is what we just call "food."'" From "Patrick Sky, '60s Folk Star and Later a Piper, Dies at 80 He was a part of the folk revival emanating from Greenwich Village, mixing melodic songs and satire. Then he became infatuated with the uilleann pipes" (NYT).  Goodbye to Patrick Sky. He was a big favorite of mine in the 1960s, and I still have 2 albums of his that I could go search for it right now, but I've got Spotify, so "Patrick Sky" (the album) is already playing here. This is the one that begins with "Many a Mile" (famously covered by Buffy St. Marie).  I saw Patrick Sky in concert once. He was very funny. He has beautiful love songs, but there were also comedy songs. I remember him launching into a song I'd never heard before: "There's a man who lives over the ocean/And who has got a great notion/That he is the World's Greatest Hope/He's Giovanni Montini, the Pope." This got huge laughs. It ended: "Giovanni Montini/You know who I meanee/The one with the beanie! Giovanni Montini, the Pope." Listen to a live version of it here. Who sings about the Pope? It was quite absurd. I didn't even know the Pope's name was Giovanni Montini, but it had a musical lilt and you could do some rhymes with it. Here's another comical song of Sky's, one that amused me a lot in the 1960s, "Separation Blues":   ADDED: I didn't follow him in his "Songs That Made America Famous" period. For a taste of that, try "Fight for Liberation." I could only get a few seconds into it: In the draft board here we sit Covered o'er with Nixon's shit While our sweat is turning Agnew's filthy mill And the people, as they pass They jam Melvin up our ass Well I guess we've had our god damn fucking fill Painful, but I remember that pain. Melvin. Indeed.

Sweating fungus with shadow of a hand. Posted: 06 Jun 2021 06:11 PM PDT

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