Althouse

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• The last day of fall is a beautiful day for a sunrise...
• "I worried that giving my time over so fully to crosswords would somehow prove symptomatic of relapse."
• "I’m asexual (yes, you can be asexual and have a boyfriend), and what that means for me is my penis was just for me."
• "'She was seen as too sexy and too lightweight to be serious,' her longtime agent... said... Ms. Babitz was a precocious child of Hollywood, born on May 13, 1943, stopping traffic at 13."
• "Appears"? You mean to you?
• "Gone were her signature black turtlenecks and black slacks; gone the bright red lipstick and blond hair ironed straight as a board or pulled into a chignon."
• "The breakdown comes at an especially difficult moment for Biden, whose struggle to fight the pandemic, rising inflation and supply chain problems were already gathering into a year-end maelstrom."

The last day of fall is a beautiful day for a sunrise... Posted: 20 Dec 2021 02:50 PM PST ... and for a waning gibbous moon...

"I worried that giving my time over so fully to crosswords would somehow prove symptomatic of relapse." Posted: 20 Dec 2021 05:07 PM PST "But I uncrossed the wires—puzzles ≠ disembodiment ≠ anorexia ≠ relapse—and took the job. Four days a week, I rode the Metro-North train from the city to Pleasantville, New York, to join [NYT crossword editor Will] Shortz at his home office.... Shortz is known for editing up to ninety per cent of the clues in a crossword submission, tailoring its references to suit a desired level of difficulty and an imagined audience—one that could be as broad or as narrow as Shortz wanted it to be.... We had markedly different frames of reference—he was a sixty-two-year-old who had grown up on a horse farm in Indiana, and I was a twenty-three-year-old who grew up in Tribeca—and the collision of our backgrounds made for good conversation and better crosswords. One of my proudest moments was getting him to rewrite the clue for bro (traditionally, 'Sister's sib' or 'Sibling for sis') as 'Preppy, party-loving, egotistical male, in modern lingo.' But, when I constructed a puzzle that prominently featured the term male gaze in the grid, he insisted that the phrase wouldn't be in the average Times solver's lexicon; it wasn't 'puzzle-worthy.' (Although I lost that battle in 2014, the term appeared three years later, under his editorship.)"   Writes Anna Shechtman in "Escaping Into the Crossword Puzzle/If, by the dumb logic of my eating disorder, I was losing something special about myself by gaining weight, I was bolstering my self-esteem by creating crosswords, something I knew to be difficult, precocious, and exceptional" (The New Yorker).

"I’m asexual (yes, you can be asexual and have a boyfriend), and what that means for me is my penis was just for me." Posted: 20 Dec 2021 09:55 AM PST "So what was even the point of having a lot of it? Was I greedy? Crazy? Weeks before my procedure, I got a block of clay and sat meditating and molding by feel, letting my body answer. The resulting phallus was the exact size I'd been requesting. For days, I lay on the floor on and off in the sunlight coming into my living room, asking my ancestors and transcestors for guidance. Some people might kill for this kind of access and choice. Certainly many, many, many, many people have died in the fight for it. One night, I woke up from a dead sleep, and all I heard was: Take the big dick. So I did. And it was perfect.... One of my surgeons asked me at some point if I'd want to follow up later with surgical girth reduction in case this here wondrous member we had conjured from fucking nothing into warm, space-displacing reality wasn't yet the fit that would stop the deafening five-alarm bereavement scream that had ricocheted around my insides incessantly since birth. But the screaming had stopped...." From "My Penis, Myself/I didn't need a penis to be a man. But I needed one to be me" by Gabriel Mac (New York Magazine).

"'She was seen as too sexy and too lightweight to be serious,' her longtime agent... said... Ms. Babitz was a precocious child of Hollywood, born on May 13, 1943, stopping traffic at 13." Posted: 20 Dec 2021 06:33 AM PST "(A soon-to-be famous actor, spying her on her front lawn in a leopard print bathing suit, cruised her in his convertible before realizing her age and speeding away, she recalled in 'Eve's Hollywood.').... She clocked the popular girls.... 'When they reach 15.... and their beauty arrives, it's very exciting — like coming into an inheritance and as with inheritances, it's fun to be around when they first come into the money and how they spend it and on what.'  Eve's inheritance was her appetite, her curiosity and her zaftig beauty, like Brigitte Bardot with a shag haircut and hip huggers. She was a hedonist with a notebook. Eve hung out at the Troubadour, the West Hollywood club that nurtured Jackson Browne, the band Buffalo Springfield, for whom she made album covers, and Steve Martin, whom she made over by showing him a book of Jacques Henri Lartigue's photographs featuring crisply dressed men in white suits on the beach in France at the turn of the century. In 1963, she wrote to Joseph Heller, the author of 'Catch-22,' angling to find a publisher for a nascent novel that never materialized: 'I am a stacked 18-year-old blonde on Sunset Boulevard. I am also a writer.'... Then in 1997, trying to light a cherry-flavored Tiparillo while driving her Volkswagen Beetle, her clothing caught fire, searing most of her body.... Holed up with her cat in her West Hollywood apartment, Ms. Babitz became a recluse — and a pugnacious conservative, converted by the talk radio that became the backbeat to her new life...." From "Eve Babitz, a Hedonist With a Notebook, Is Dead at 78/A child of Hollywood, she wrote of the sensuous pleasures of Los Angeles, and sampled them enthusiastically" (NYT). A strange obituary. And I've elided Frank Zappa, Salvador Dalí, and Marcel Duchamp.  Creepy, really. You'd think "Me Too" had never happened, She died of Huntington's disease, so maybe this obituary was composed years ago.  The scene on the front lawn in a leopard print bathing suit seems like the scene in the Kubrick movie where Humbert Humbert first lays eyes on Lolita. The Times sounds Humbertish referring to Babitz as "a precocious child." The editors left in "stopping traffic at 13." Maybe that's the tone of Babitz's writing. She wrote "When they reach 15.... and their beauty arrives, it's very exciting" and "I am a stacked 18-year-old blonde on Sunset Boulevard." And all this is added up to the role of "hedonist." It's as though the New York Times has devolved into Harvey Weinstein. Ah, but she turned into a conservative — "a pugnacious conservative" — so no holds barred.

"Appears"? You mean to you? Posted: 20 Dec 2021 04:58 AM PST I balk at this headline in The Guardian: "Why Trump appears deeply unnerved as Capitol attack investigation closes in." They have to use the word "appears," because they obviously don't know how Trump feels — deeply or shallowly — inside. Then the word throws off the whole idea, so it seems to be only what it is: How it looks to the Guardian writer (Hugo Lowell). I haven't read the piece, not yet anyway, but the easy answer to "Why Trump appears deeply unnerved" is that the author is seeing what he wants to see — which is Trump deeply unnerved. The brief headline also contains a second element of wishful perception: the Capitol attack investigation is closing in on Trump. Is it? We're expect to believe that it is, but that's not what I think. And I don't think Trump is deeply unnerved. I'm not convinced he's deeply anything.

"Gone were her signature black turtlenecks and black slacks; gone the bright red lipstick and blond hair ironed straight as a board or pulled into a chignon." Posted: 20 Dec 2021 04:10 AM PST "Gone, in other words, was the look immortalized on magazine covers of Fortune, Forbes and Glamour (and, yes, T: The New York Times Style Magazine). The look that inspired a host of ironic imitators at the beginning of her trial. The look that famously referenced both Steve Jobs (but glamorous!) and Audrey Hepburn.... Instead there was … sartorial neutrality, in the form of a light gray pantsuit and light blue button-down shirt, worn untucked, with baby pink lipstick.... The net effect of Ms. Holmes's makeover was middle manager or backup secretarial character in a streaming series about masters of the universe (but not her! uh-uh).... If in her previous incarnation Ms. Holmes's image was crafted to suggest confidence, control and single-minded, maybe ruthless, pursuit of a goal — and it clearly worked, part of the case made for investors — she is now conveying softness and dependency, so unassertive that, as her defense argued, she would make a perfect target for a man to Svengali her.... In this, her makeover is like a version 2.0 of the techniques employed by Winona Ryder in her 2002 shoplifting trial, when she wore a Marc Jacobs outfit that made her look like a polite schoolgirl, complete with a Peter Pan collar, as well as assorted discreet knee-length hemlines and headbands; or Anna Sorokin, the society grifter who, in the final days of her 2019 trial, wore sweet baby-doll dresses that practically blared 'innocent.'" Writes Vanessa Friedman in "The Verdict on the Elizabeth Holmes Trial Makeover/As the fraud trial of the Theranos founder draws to a close, could her new courtroom image affect the decision?" (NYT). Of course, when you're on trial, you dress innocent. But if you overdo it, you look like the con artist they're saying you are. And yet, how easily she conned sophisticated older men with a dumb black turtleneck and red lipstick! Who knows what you can do — what the right person can do — with fashion?

"The breakdown comes at an especially difficult moment for Biden, whose struggle to fight the pandemic, rising inflation and supply chain problems were already gathering into a year-end maelstrom." Posted: 20 Dec 2021 03:49 AM PST "Now he also faces an uproar once again in his own party. Democratic infighting was on full display on Sunday, undercutting efforts to project unity ahead of what many in the party privately believe will be an electoral wipeout. And liberal leaders who hoped to realize their longtime policy goals and campaign on the initiatives in the social spending plan were furious.... Rather than seeking to defuse hostilities as some Democrats had hoped, the White House lashed out at Manchin... [saying] that if he walks away from the talks, he would be breaking his word to Biden.... Democrats on Sunday began contemplating the far-reaching consequences. The social spending bill would make historic investments in curtailing global warming, expanding Medicare benefits and offering access to prekindergarten for all American children, among other things. Now there are new questions about how or even if Biden will be able to deliver on any of those fronts, all at a moment when the president and his party had initially hoped to reflect on a productive year and gear up for the midterms. In particular, the possibility of no legislative action on climate change sent a shudder through a party...." From "From charm offensive to scorched earth: How Biden's fragile alliance with Manchin unraveled" (WaPo). Why did they hope for so much when they had a 50-50 Senate? Why did they think they'd won the support "to realize [the liberal leaders'] longtime policy goals"?

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