Trendlist: Althouse

Thursday, February 10, 2022

Althouse

"As with previous months, higher prices oozed into just about every sector of the economy, leaving households to feel the strain at the deli counter, shopping mall and just about everywhere else."
"The art critic John Berger once remarked that 'the state of being envied is what constitutes glamour' — and glamour, Berger thought..."
"'This is not my city,' said Ellie Charters, 45, crossing the street before a line of shoulder-to-shoulder tractor cabs, their metal grills festooned in flags, handmade signs and stuffed toys."
And what would you do, alone at "The World as Non-Objectivity," loomed over by eyeless heads?
The frozen lake at sunrise.

"As with previous months, higher prices oozed into just about every sector of the economy, leaving households to feel the strain at the deli counter, shopping mall and just about everywhere else."

Posted: 10 Feb 2022 06:37 AM PST

Oozed!

It's getting nasty. WaPo is saying "oozed" in "Prices climbed 7.5% in January compared with last year, continuing inflation's fastest pace in 40 years/High inflation is undermining a robust recovery, testing policymakers at the Federal Reserve and White House."

The White House has been touting its actions to lower prices, including targeting corporate consolidation to help create product markets that are more competitive. But inflation has proved a blistering political handicap for Biden, and a litmus test for how many Americans judge the economy. Republicans largely blame Democrats' $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan for overheating the economy, and the GOP is set to hammer on inflation going into the midterm elections this fall.

ADDED: The word "ooze" — according to the OED — comes from the same line as the Old Frisian word wāse, which means mud, the Old Icelandic word veisa (wetness, mud, marshy ground), the Norwegian veis (marshy soil), and the Danish regional vejs, which means something that is more fun to say in English: oozy bottom). As a noun meaning wet mud or slime, "ooze" goes back to early Old English. The verb "ooze" is more recent, and I can see that the earliest uses had to do with bodily fluids. Example: "Ulcers that lye deep, and ouze out their Matter thro'..winding Passages" (1737).

Some of the greatest wordsmiths have deployed the verb "ooze":

1820 J. Keats Hyperion: a Fragm. i, in Lamia & Other Poems 153 This passion..made..His Druid locks to shake and ooze with sweat.
1824 W. Irving Tales of Traveller I. 46 The wind oozing through the rat-holes of the old mansion

1845 E. A. Poe Gold-bug in Tales 2 A scarcely perceptible creek, oozing its way through a wilderness of reeds and slime.
1847 C. Dickens Dombey & Son (1848) xiv. 129 Any such violent expression as 'breaking up', would have been quite inapplicable to that polite establishment. The young gentlemen oozed away, semi-annually, to their own homes; but they never broke up.
1864 Ld. Tennyson Sea Dreams 150 He..then began to bloat himself, and ooze All over with the fat affectionate smile That makes the widow lean.
1912 G. B. Shaw Androcles & Lion (1916) 37 What he would have called my faith has been oozing away minute by minute whilst I've been sitting here.
1915 V. Woolf Voy. Out v The wall behind him oozed with damp, which collected into drops and slid down.

I really think the OED should add WaPo's "higher prices oozed into just about every sector of the economy." It would fit nicely in the examples of " II. Figurative uses. 3. To pass slowly, gradually, or imperceptibly, as if through pores or small openings. a. intransitive. Of an immaterial quality (frequently with away)."

AND: Here's the full text of "Hyperion." Longer excerpt:

This passion lifted him upon his feet,
And made his hands to struggle in the air,
His Druid locks to shake and ooze with sweat,
His eyes to fever out, his voice to cease.
He stood, and heard not Thea's sobbing deep;
A little time, and then again he snatch'd
Utterance thus.—"But cannot I create?
Cannot I form? Cannot I fashion forth
Another world, another universe,
To overbear and crumble this to nought?
Where is another chaos? Where?"

Put that in the category of Things Read Out Loud at Meadhouse, and know that I immediately followed it with: "This is all about Biden's inflation."

"The art critic John Berger once remarked that 'the state of being envied is what constitutes glamour' — and glamour, Berger thought..."

Posted: 10 Feb 2022 04:42 AM PST

"... was what our culture (especially advertising) pushed us to aspire to. The cocktails, cars and expensive clothes that prove our superiority. Berger would have been horrified to discover how envy has triumphed, and become, perhaps, the predominant modern social emotion. Twitter, Instagram and Facebook earn our engagement (our clicks and eyeballs) by feeding our envious, self-wounding appetite for others' achievements.... Nietzsche writes with acute psychological perception about the way the vain, self-promoting man wants 'to give joy to himself at the expense of his fellow men' by aiming at a reputation so high 'that it would have to cause them all pain by arousing their envy.'... Half the moral fury on social media is envy in disguise, something that should give pause to those who desperately seek to be envied. Inspiring envy in others is a potentially self-destructive hobby...."

From "Online moral fury is often just envy in disguise/Inspiring jealousy is considered a great achievement but it also drives others to want to tear us down" by James Marriott (London Times).

Writing this post, I discovered I had a tag called "envy shortcircuiting," but I'd only used it the time I created it, and I'd meant for it to be something I was going to keep track of. In that post, the subject was "poverty appropriation," where people who have a choice chose something associated with poor people. I wrote:

I can see being envious that somebody else had a choice, but if they chose the thing you're stuck with, wouldn't that give you a fresh, positive perspective on how good that thing is? And if it doesn't, aren't you the one who needs a better attitude? Let's try to think of examples other than living in a small house (something some people are compelled to do because they can't afford larger). These are not all exact analogies, but I want to explore the general area that the author of the linked essay (July Westhale) calls "poverty appropriation." I think she's describing something that's a subcategory of what I'm going to call envy shortcircuiting.

I thought up 5 examples of what I wanted to start noticing, then failed to notice. Here are those 5 examples, which, looking back, I see are really needed to understand the concept:

1. X is disabled and cannot walk and sees her neighbor Y choosing to sit at every possible opportunity.
2. X is diabetic and her doctor has forbidden her to eat anything with added sugar. She's having dinner with Y who doesn't order dessert because she just doesn't like sweets.
3. X lives in a sleepy midwestern town. Y — who had several job offers in different places — chose to move to this town.
4. X is a member of a religious group that requires him to wear black clothing. He knows this other guy who has no obligation to wear black but adopted an all-black wardrobe to make shopping and getting dressed in the morning more efficient.
5. X was a poor student in high school and couldn't get into college, so he found a job working in construction. One of his co-workers is Y, a guy he went to high school with who had excellent grades and went to a good college and graduated. X asked Y, "What are you doing working here?" And Y said: "I like to work outdoors. I like to make things."

"'This is not my city,' said Ellie Charters, 45, crossing the street before a line of shoulder-to-shoulder tractor cabs, their metal grills festooned in flags, handmade signs and stuffed toys."

Posted: 10 Feb 2022 04:16 AM PST

"Ms. Charters, a local resident, called the party scene a 'sanitization' of the protest's darker motives. From the start, the protest, initially organized to oppose a vaccine mandate for cross-border truckers, has attracted the company of far right, anti-government and other fringe groups in Canada.... Many demonstrators... demanded Parliament be dissolved, and Mr. Trudeau be removed from office. But when many of the thousands of protesters who first arrived in Ottawa went home, several hundred truckers held firm. They parked their vehicles and refused to leave — and the police could do little to force them out. Now, the protesters who have dug into Ottawa's core for nearly two weeks are giddy with their sense of collective purpose and, so far, perceived success. However, many of the residents who live in nearby apartment buildings and renovated heritage homes don't see it as a celebration but as an unruly, disrespectful and even dangerous occupation. How could a group of ostensible anti-vaccine protesters, many wonder, descend upon their city and manage to take it over?... Many protesters say they are here in peace. Some get on their knees and pray outside Parliament.... But there is a definite edge — like that end-of-the-night feeling at a tailgate party, when some of the crowd might have had too much to drink, and things could go sideways..... Many locals said they felt abandoned by the police..... 'Why weren't they enforcing the law at all? The police aren't doing anything,' said Ms. Charters, a community activist..."

From "'This Is Not My City': Protesters Turn a Quiet Capital Upside Down/The Ottawa protesters are giddy with their sense of collective purpose. But local residents see the demonstration as an unruly, disrespectful and even dangerous occupation" by Catherine Porter (NYT).

It's like the takeover of Portland, Oregon in 2020. How long did that go on and how did it end? And the old Occupy movement. These things demonstrate how close we are to chaos. I understand that these protests are against the excessive imposition of order by the government, but for a lot of people, they prove the opposite, how much we love order. The order we rely on is mostly invisible. It becomes visible in its absence.

And what would you do, alone at "The World as Non-Objectivity," loomed over by eyeless heads?

Posted: 10 Feb 2022 03:38 AM PST

Let's have some empathy for the security guard, tasked to watch over something called "The World as Non-Objectivity," an art exhibit at the Yeltsin Center in Yekaterinburg. I mean I'm trying to be non-objective!

Here is the alienating image, "Three Figures" by Anna Leporskaya:

Look at them long enough and they call to you. Have mercy, kind sir, give us eyes!

He got out a ball point pen and drew in little eyes. Who are you to condemn him? An objective observer? What are you doing here, in The World as Non-Objectivity?!

***

The headline at The Daily Mail says, "£740,000 painting is ruined after 'bored' security guard draws eyes on faceless figures on his first day in the job at Russian gallery," but the text of the article says, "The painting is being restored, the damage... can be eliminated without any long-term damage to the artwork." The cost of repair is estimated at £2,470, so that's a far cry from "ruined."

You see? We don't need Russian painters from the 1930s to nudge us, artistically, toward the concept non-objectivity, which usually tends to mean abstract, without reference to things in the real world, but aren't those supposed to be heads?

Maybe not! Maybe that's the eye-dee-a. They're NOT heads. Not at all what makes you think they are heads?

But we don't need Russian painters in Yekaterinburg to demonstrate the absence of objectivity, because we've got our idiot press, every damned day, with something as bad as saying a £740,000 painting is ruined when it can be completely restored for £2,470. We've got non-objectivity like mad.

The frozen lake at sunrise.

Posted: 09 Feb 2022 03:53 PM PST

Western vista: