२५ डिसेंबर, २०२१
"For years my mother bought me perfectly nice sweaters of a kind that I never wear: sweaters with patterns, 'Cosby Show' sweaters, suburban dad sweaters."
"How must it feel to have your name airbrushed from the $8 billion film franchise born of your scribbling in a coffee shop, penniless, while your baby napped?"
"In one of her first moves, Ms. Mirabella had the red walls of Vreeland’s office repainted in shades of beige — her favorite color."
From the WaPo obituary for Grace Mirabella, who edited Vogue from 1971 to 1988. She replaced Diana Vreeland, when Vreeland was abruptly ousted, and she herself was ousted, replaced by Anna Wintour.
That's Patti Hansen, who absolutely exemplified the look of that time — "pretty!" She's still pretty, at the age of 65, living with her husband, Keith Richards, in Connecticut.
"Biden says ‘I agree’ when dad drops ‘Let’s Go, Brandon’ on NORAD Santa call."
President Biden got a visit from a Christmas troll Friday when a father participating in the annual White House NORAD Santa-tracking call used the phrase “Let’s Go Brandon,” the slangy stand-in for “F— Joe Biden.”
The dad, identified only as Jared from Oregon, wished the president and first lady Jill Biden a merry Christmas before adding the anti-Biden phrase at the end of his family’s portion of the call. “Merry Christmas and let’s go Brandon,” the father said as he signed off.
“Let’s go Brandon, I agree,” Biden said without missing a beat.
Video below. Maybe Presidents shouldn't be doing these sentimental holiday shows, and obviously they're straining for good press, so they're kind of inviting trolls. You'd think the call screeners would ensure that nothing hateful or humiliating gets through. I suppose some of you roared with laughter when you saw this or cynically muttered that Biden deserved it because of whatever bad things you think he's done, but it just made me feel sorry for Biden.
If your question is whether Biden even knows what "Let’s Go Brandon" means, maybe you're the one who needs to get tested for dementia.
Are you home for Christmas? Is home where you usually live, or did you need to go home?
If you're not home for Christmas, is it because you got deprived of your way to get home — perhaps at the last minute, as thousands of flights got cancelled? There are all the people who go somewhere other than home for Christmas, perhaps to some vacation spot or maybe just to someone else's home? And then, what is home? Maybe you feel that the place where you live is not a home — in which case, a special Christmas wish to you. And maybe you feel that wherever you hang your Santa Claus hat is home — lucky you!
२४ डिसेंबर, २०२१
Ah! It's finally here: "Yelp Reviews of Xmas" by David Sedaris.
I heard this story read aloud when Sedaris did his show here in Madison 2 weeks ago. He said it would be in The New Yorker "next week," so I've been looking and looking. Finally! I love the whole thing, but the part I've been wanting to quote is beyond humor and startlingly dark.
Oh! The part I've been waiting to tell you about is not in the short bit that The New Yorker published. It was about abortion. It's hard to explain how a harsh view of abortion could have fit into the comical idea of Yelp reviews of Christmas, but let me try.
The fictional Yelp reviewer criticized Christmas for causing the abortion clinic to be closed and, from there, manifested her outrageously self-centered character. She wanted the abortion for Christmas so she could — am I remembering this correctly?! — give it as a present to her ex.
It was way over the top, to the point where it would upset pro-abortion readers, because it wasn't just the usual refraining from discussing what is happening to the child as murder. The woman reveled in murdering the child. I thought: I need to see this in print.
From the version of the story that made it into The New Yorker, there's a 1-star review: "I like Christmas, except it has too many nuts in it and I’m allergic. There are nuts in the cookies—not all, but some—and even in the songs! I don’t think this is fair to people such as myself. Christmas needs to be more inclusive."
"I’m glad we have Biden. I’m really, really glad. That’s because I haven’t forgotten whom and what he replaced. It’s because I remember how we started the year..."
Frank Bruni dispenses wan Christmas cheer (in the NYT).
The NYT publishes an essay by JK Rowling, "J.K. Rowling on the Magic of 'Things.'"
I own a cuddly tortoise sewn by my mother, which she gave me when I was 7. It has a floral shell, a red underbelly and black felt eyes. Even though I’m notoriously prone to losing things, I’ve managed to keep hold of that tortoise through sundry house moves and even changes of country. My mother died over 30 years ago, so I’ve now lived more of my life without her than with her. I find more comfort in that tortoise than I do in photographs of her, which are now so faded and dated, and emphasize how long she’s been gone. What consoles me is the permanence of the object she made — its unchanging nature, its stolid three-dimensional reality. I’d give up many of my possessions to keep that tortoise, the few exceptions being things that have their own allusive power, like my wedding ring....
She has a new book, we learn, "The Christmas Pig" — "a story of objects lost and found, of things beloved and things unregretted."
It's the day before Christmas. Are you thinking about things — things to give and receive, to want and not want?
How powerfully do you imbue things with magic — or do you have anything going amongst your possessions that you could even vaguely term "magic"?
"A few months after Didion’s review [of Woody Allen's 'Manhattan'] appeared, the NYRB published a selection of responses from readers. These readers were not pleased."
From "Joan Didion’s Greatest Two-Word Sentence/The power of an ice-cold, unflinching gaze" by Molly Fischer (The Cut).
२३ डिसेंबर, २०२१
Sunrise — 7:22, 7:35, 7:36.
And please think of supporting this blog by doing your shopping through the Althouse portal to Amazon, which is always right there in the sidebar. Thanks!
Goodbye to Joan Didion.
This was a writer I truly admired, so I will give you my “Joan Didion” tag and go back and read what I’ve said about her over the years.
"Fonda kept insisting on telling people that he knew what it was like to actually be dead, in a misguided attempt to reassure George Harrison, who he wrongly believed was scared of dying..."
From "Episode 139: 'Eight Miles High' by the Byrds" (on the podcast "A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs"). I excerpted something about The Beatles, but the episode is ostensibly about The Byrds. That said, there's also plenty about John Coltrane and Ravi Shankar. And Sonny and Cher.
"During his COVID blather, Biden went on to claim that if he had said in November it would spread as rapidly as it has, people would have replied, 'Biden, have you been drinking?'"
"Under the cover of darkness early Thursday, authorities in Hong Kong tore down a public sculpture dedicated to the victims of the Tiananmen Square massacre..."
"For two years now, Aline, a 30-something graduate student in Ohio, has diligently — desperately, even — protected herself against the coronavirus."
२२ डिसेंबर, २०२१
“With COVID-19 cases surging across the country, the Supreme Court fast-tracked two disputes over the Biden administration’s efforts to expand vaccinations.”
"A Madagascan minister swam 12 hours to the shore of the island after a helicopter that was taking him to the site of a shipwreck off the island’s northeast coast crashed..."
Look at the water around you and as far as you can see, if there is lighter colored water that indicates shallow water and land is usually right by shallow water. Wave patterns can also be observed, waves refract as they approach land. Lastly, birds! If you see many birds together flying towards a certain direction, then that can be your key back to land!
How far away can you see? When you are at sea level, you can see other things at sea level only up to a distance of 2.9 miles (because of the curvature of the earth). So the answer would depend on the elevation of the land.
"Quidditch has the same problem Rowling has, which is that the arbitrary combinations of sounds and syllables that we call words only mean something in relation to the world they describe..."
"Sir, you need to go to prison."
Said the Madison judge, the Wisconsin State Journal reports.
Circuit Judge Ellen Berz said the sentence [8 years] for Treveon Thurman was the first time outside a homicide or child sexual assault case that she had ever sentenced someone to prison for their first adult convictions....
Thurman, 20, pleaded guilty... to charges in eight of the 26 felony cases... four counts of operating a motor vehicle without the owner’s consent, two counts of taking and driving a motor vehicle without the owner’s consent and two counts of second-degree reckless endangerment....
Thurman would sometimes broadcast live video of himself while speeding around the Madison area in stolen cars, sometimes showing the speedometer at speeds over 100 mph. In one instance he broadcast himself going about 140 mph in a stolen car.
The audacity of that live broadcasting — at 140 miles per hour! — says something about the low value Madison has placed on keeping order. This person ought to have been stopped much sooner. We, as a community, have nurtured this outrageous danger.
"Manchin is especially vulnerable to accusations of imperial remove. Photos that circulated online show him chatting over the rail of his houseboat in Washington with angry constituents, who had arrived by kayak."
Writes Evan Osnos in "West Virginians Ask Joe Manchin: Which Side Are You On? The senator’s blockade against programs that have helped his constituents escape poverty makes some question 'who matters to Joe'" (The New Yorker).
Is it "imperial" to live in a houseboat — a houseboat accessible by angry kayakers?
Eh. Everyone has to write a lot of sentences about Joe Manchin right now. It's tedious but you can find some gems in there.
The Manchins are machers; Joe’s grandfather ran Farmington’s grocery store and served, over the years, as its fire chief, constable, justice of the peace, and mayor. His father had a similar stature in local politics, while also expanding the family business from groceries into furniture and carpets....
Machers... I had to look it up. It's a Yiddish word, I learned, reading "What Makes a Macher" (Forward):
"A long time ago, I munched on a few handfuls of fetid mushrooms and brought on personal crises of my own design."
Writes Vinson Cunningham in "The Bad Trip of 'Flying Over Sunset'/James Lapine’s new musical, at the Vivian Beaumont, sets the LSD hallucinations of three nineteen-fifties celebrities to song" (The New Yorker).
"The history of personal fitness is strewn with objects that once gleamed with promise and now seem redundant, even ridiculous."
From "ThighMasters, Jazzercise, Yoga and Other Chapters in the History of Women and Exercise" (NYT)(reviewing "Let’s Get Physical/How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World").
"This article was written by a semi-rational leftist using traditional rhetoric to persuade his perceived comrades."
Writes Richard Dillman, commenting on this post yesterday.
I'm making a new post about this because it's so provocative, and it rings true to me — not just about the specific article he's talking about but about public discourse generally.
"Do Zoomers make good colleagues?"
Somehow I find that the most interesting question on the NYT's list of "The Year in 47 Debates" ("From the urgent conversations we had as a nation to the minor controversies that fascinated us, these are the things that got people talking, and talking, and talking...")
Each debate is briefly explicated. Here's the discussion of Zoomers:
As Gen Z’s advance guard enters the work force, such as it is, their denim preferences, Slack etiquette and penchant for self-care are inspiring angst among older colleagues. Even the Zoomers’ immediate forebears — the millennials once at the white-hot center of youth culture — describe feeling fear and foreboding at the prospect of committing an emoji faux pas, fielding a request for a mental health day or staking out a companywide activist position. Some of these concerns reflect predictable anxieties about losing touch with the latest fashions; ominous “kids these days” tales have most likely circulated since our foraging ancestors were scandalized by Generation Agriculture. But others betray a sense of unease among managers who are dealing with a resurgence of worker power and a labor movement revival. The spotlight on generational trends may be obscuring a broader change in employee expectations for more humane hours, safer conditions and fairer treatment. A revolt, it would seem, is underway against a broken and oppressive corporate culture, but it’s coming from workers of all ages.
"In New York City, the slightest runny nose has people canceling holiday gatherings and lining up for hours outside coronavirus testing centers."
In New York City, the slightest sniffle has people canceling holiday plans and packing coronavirus testing centers, where in recent days lines have stretched for blocks....
Despite receiving negative tests, some people keep burning through at-home coronavirus swabs just to stay calm....
There is a distinction between reasonable fear and anxiety that becomes disproportionate and all-consuming, said Dr. Itai Danovitch, the chair of the department of psychiatry and behavioral neurosciences at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles. A meta-analysis of dozens of community-based studies on mental health and the coronavirus showed that anxiety among the general population has increased threefold during the pandemic.
But in such tumultuous times, a certain level of anxiety is understandable, he said. “It is important to normalize how people are feeling: Anxiety and fear are common, it’s OK to feel anxiety, it’s OK to feel low, it’s OK to feel some distress,” Dr. Danovitch said....
There's a great photograph at the link of a woman wearing a T-shirt that says:
My body is a temple
Ancient & crumbled
Probably cursed.
Harboring an
Unspeakable horror
Is it "important to normalize" that? How much fear and anxiety should a person simply accept as just the way it feels to be human? The psychiatrist tells us our bad feels are "OK." Fine. But how should we live? How can we flourish?
I've heard from my NYC informants that the lining up for testing is quite extreme. Why aren't people afraid they'll catch the disease from standing around in line? I know that people maintain distance between other people in the line, but they are still hanging around, not isolated, crowding the streets for hours. And what good is another test? It could be a false negative. At some point all the checking and rechecking is a mental disorder. But if the whole city is doing it, it's the new normal.
२१ डिसेंबर, २०२१
"The year since I wrote the original essay on the Five Deadly Sins of the Left has not resulted in a sea change in the left’s attitudes embodied in these five sins."
Writes Ruy Teixeira, in "The Five Deadly Sins of the Left/Time to Repent!" (Substack).
"Brigitte Macron is to sue over an 'outlandish' conspiracy theory being spread by extreme rightwingers that she was born a man before undergoing a sex change...."
"You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better."
So suck it up, LW. You did what you did. Instead of letting it destroy her she took her pain and turned it into a survival guide that is helping others feel less alone. Yes, some folks probably know it's about you. You'll have to suck that up too. I'm pretty sure that's what you're mostly worried about, or you would have been around with your apologies a long time ago.
I don't completely agree with Anne Lamott, though if I had something I truly wanted to write and publish, I would rely on her statement to give me courage. But the truth is that no one can behave well enough to save them from the fate of looking bad in someone's novel! The novelist might be a victim, but I think most novelists are not victims. They are observers, often highly judgmental, and they're inclined to develop their raw material into the most interesting and amusing and agonizing form, not to treat everyone fairly. Yes, you "own" the raw material you gathered from others, and no one can stop you from applying the brutal force of your creativity to what you've got there, but don't imagine that these people deserve it all because they weren't good enough!
That said, the letter writer in that WaPo column sounds perfectly awful, and I'm willing to believe that he deserved it. You know, he owns what happened to him, including the fate of becoming somebody else's fictional character. He's free to justify himself to the hilt and destroy the first wife by whipping up his own novel. Maybe she should have "behaved better." But I'm thinking it would probably be a better novel if he dragged himself through the mud.
ADDED: I hope WaPo made sure the letter was really from the ex-husband of the novelist. It makes him look so bad that I'm imagining one of his enemies sending that letter in as a way to draw attention to the book and lock him into the interpretation that the character in the book is really him.
"What blows my mind is that it was all organic. It just happened. There was no planning. It just grew out of everybody’s desire for beauty and joy and connection."
Says one of the participants in a Christmas-decorating style described in "A man strung Christmas lights from his home to his neighbor’s to support her. The whole community followed" (WaPo).
Don't get any ideas about stringing lights across the street — from house to house — in your neighborhood. With ideas, it won't be organic, it won't have just happened, there will be planning. It does look nice... but what if I don't want to be connected by lights to my neighbor? Suddenly, I'm the Scrooge?
"Should a journalist — particularly one as distinguished and influential as [Thomas] Friedman — disclose his direct financial support of those he’s writing about?"
When all else fails... get a puppy!
Imagine if Trump got a German shepherd and called it Commander! What a Nazi he is!Welcome to the White House, Commander. pic.twitter.com/SUudQnPv29
— President Biden (@POTUS) December 20, 2021
"I'm from West Virginia. I'm not where they're from and they can just beat the living crap out of people and think they’ll be submissive."
The intense frustration emanating from the most liberal members of Congress adds an extra layer of complication for the White House and Democratic leaders who are scrambling to find a path forward to save some of the roughly $2 trillion domestic policy bill Manchin torpedoed over the weekend.
Torpoedoes and emanations! What will happen next?! All these layers.... layers of complication. It's a long story but it's rather boring and obvious.
२० डिसेंबर, २०२१
"I worried that giving my time over so fully to crosswords would somehow prove symptomatic of relapse."
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."
"'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?
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."
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).
"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."
From "From charm offensive to scorched earth: How Biden’s fragile alliance with Manchin unraveled" (WaPo).
१९ डिसेंबर, २०२१
Another dull sunrise — photo taken at 7:15 a.m. on the second to the last day before the solistice.
"Baby boxes have a history that goes back to 'foundling wheels'—revolving barrels that were installed in the sides of churches and convents during the Middle Ages..."
"I don't wanna minimize — denigrate — Mike's talent, but I had a money machine rolling."
"Professor Put Clues to a Cash Prize in His Syllabus.... Tucked into the second page of the syllabus was information about a locker number and its combination. Inside was a $50 bill, which went unclaimed."
“Free to the first who claims; locker one hundred forty-seven; combination fifteen, twenty-five, thirty-five,” read the passage in the syllabus. But when the semester ended on Dec. 8, students went home and the cash was unclaimed.
“My semester-long experiment has come to an end,” [Kenyon Wilson, a professor at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga] wrote on Facebook, adding: “Today I retrieved the unclaimed treasure.”...
Tanner Swoyer, a senior studying instrumental music education, said that he felt “pretty dumb, pretty stupid” when he saw the professor’s post... Mr. Swoyer immediately texted his classmates, who also felt “bamboozled,” mostly because, he said, this was something Professor Wilson would do....
I see no bamboozling here. I've already blogged about the word "bamboozle" — complete with a quote from "The Life of Pi" — here. But, briefly, to "bamboozle" is to trick. There's no trick here. The students didn't lose or risk losing their own money. It was the professor's money, and he put it where anyone could easily take it, if they were sharp enough to see.
Let this be a lesson to everyone: What fine benefits are right there for you to take that you do not see? Jesus said:
[T]heir ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes they have closed; lest at any time they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears, and should understand with their heart.... But blessed are your eyes, for they see: and your ears, for they hear. For verily I say unto you, That many prophets and righteous men have desired to see those things which ye see, and have not seen them; and to hear those things which ye hear, and have not heard them.
"A growing body of preliminary research suggests the Covid vaccines used in most of the world offer almost no defense against becoming infected by the highly contagious Omicron variant...."
"I cannot vote to continue with this piece of legislation. I’ve tried everything humanly possible. I can’t get there. This is a no."
For months, Mr. Manchin had huddled privately with Mr. Biden and his top officials in an attempt to secure a compromise. His objections forced the White House to substantially curtail the scope of the package and remove certain programs, including the creation of a clean electricity program and a plan to ban new oil drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.
As early as last week, even as Mr. Biden confirmed that efforts to pass the legislation had stalled, he waxed optimistic, saying that talks with Mr. Manchin would continue and that he believed that “we will bridge our differences and advance the Build Back Better plan.”...
“They’re just trying to make the adjustment for the time to fit the money or the money to fit the time,” Mr. Manchin said. “Not changing our approach, not targeting things we should be doing.”
UPDATE: Statement from Press Secretary Jen Psaki:
Senator Manchin’s comments this morning on FOX are at odds with his discussions this week with the President, with White House staff, and with his own public utterances.... Senator Manchin pledged repeatedly to negotiate on finalizing that framework “in good faith.”... If his comments on FOX and written statement indicate an end to that effort, they represent a sudden and inexplicable reversal in his position, and a breach of his commitments to the President and the Senator’s colleagues in the House and Senate....