"But the threat of a second Trump presidency means that having my birth certificate reflect present reality has turned into a matter of grave importance."

"Quite frankly, whatever is on that document may in the not so distant future determine whether one can live one’s life in peace."

Writes Jennifer Finney Boylan, in "Why I Changed My Birth Certificate 25 Years After I Transitioned" (NYT). Boylan is 66 and "transitioned nearly 25 years ago."

Despite the essay title, there's nothing more about the why — no detail about why Trump is a threat and why a revised birth certificate would work as protection against that threat. Most of the essay is about the process of getting the new birth certificate.

It reminded me of the David Rakoff essay "Love It Or Leave It" in his 2005 book "Don't Get Too Comfortable" (commission earned). It begins:

George W. Bush made me want to be an American. It was a need I had not known before.

"Let’s all give each other a pass, shall we?"

The awful politics around what Donald Trump said to the widow made me want to find a quote I know is in the archive. (I've blogged it twice.)

From "Half Empty" by David Rakoff (who was facing the cancer treatment of amputation of his left arm and shoulder):

A friend asks if I’ve “picked out” my prosthetic yet, as though I’d have my choice of titanium-plated cyborgiana at my disposal, like some amputee Second Life World of Warcraft character. Another friend, upon hearing my news, utters an unedited, “Oh my God, that’s so depressing!” Over supper, I am asked by another, “So if it goes to the lungs, is it all over?”...

But here’s the point I want to make about the stuff people say. Unless someone looks you in the eye and hisses, “You fucking asshole, I can’t wait until you die of this,” people are really trying their best. Just like being happy and sad, you will find yourself on both sides of the equation many times over your lifetime, either saying or hearing the wrong thing. Let’s all give each other a pass, shall we?

In a somewhat similar vein, in the NYT: "Trump’s Not Alone. A Lincoln Condolence Letter Stirred Controversy, Too."

If we make it too hard to talk to a person in dire circumstances, a lot of people will play it safe and not speak at all.

Indeed, John Kelly advised Trump against calling the widows of fallen soldiers. But that's not the kind of person Trump is. He goes ahead and speaks, even though it's often imperfect, and he knows he's got antagonists ready to jump on anything he says. I've regarded him as a free-speech inspiration ever since I had a dream about him — long before the election — in which I hugged him and thanked him for showing that free speech — with mistakes, straight from the human head — is much better than inhibition, self-censorship, and holding back until you've somehow arrived at the ability to get it exactly right.

Here's something Scott Adams wrote (in the WSJ) about Trump's imperfect speech:

When Mr. Trump smack-tweets a notable public critic... it violates our expectations of his office. That's what makes it both entertaining and memorable. He often injects into his tweets what memory expert Carmen Simon calls a "little bit of wrongness" to make it hard to look away. If the wrongness alarms you, consider that for years he has adroitly operated within a narrow range of useful wrongness on Twitter without going too far. That suggests technique. In the Twitter environment, strategic wrongness is jet fuel.

That's not about giving people a pass and tolerating wrongness. In this analysis, a little bit of wrongness is a good thing.

The Carmen Simon idea is: Impossible to Ignore. A different value of a little bit of wrongness is: Proof of Humanity. If you say things that aren't entirely correct, it shows you're not tightly scripted, that you are speaking the thoughts that are alive in your head right now. Perhaps when the President awkwardly connects volunteering for the military, understanding the risks, and the meaning of courage and, literally, it seems to say that the man signed up to die, the response should be something more like, Thank you for letting me see your imperfection, your humanity.

Fred Armisen in his feminist bookstore persona Candace Devereaux reads "Portlandia Travelogue: The Brussels to Antwerp Express."

Downloadable free here.

A literary train journey on the Brussels to Antwerp Express through the erotic world of European train stations and mysterious faces, by Candace Devereaux (Fred Armisen) from Portland's Women and Women First Bookstore.

It's a reminder that "Portlandia" begins a new season soon.

I'd never noticed that the character had the last name Devereaux. That's significant to anyone who's read the great David Rakoff essay "The Satisfying Crunch of Dreams Underfoot" (found in the collection "Half Empty"). He tells about having to judge a best-unpublished-novel contest and plowing through 2,000 manuscripts:

For the most part we ate our sandwiches and worked silently, all the while, of course, vigilantly on Devereaux Watch. For mysterious reasons, possibly having to do with schlock auteur Aaron Spelling, in amateur writing, Devereaux is the default name for either the president, a ne’er-do-well scion of a powerful clan, an iron-willed jewel-encrusted dowager, or the family manse whose stately façade conceals many dark secrets. There was no prize for winning the Devereaux Watch. Coming upon the first—and by no means only—appearance of the name on a given day’s reading was its own reward, and finding it never took longer than seven minutes.

When did Aaron Spelling start this? I assume it was 1984, the "New Lady in Town" episode of "Dynasty":

For some reason, the NYT is taking "cryonics" seriously... in the context of a man having to preserve the head of his 23-year-old girlfriend at the point of death.

This is a big, glitzy — animated! — front-pager.

More than memories, Josh, then 24, wished for the crude procedure to salvage whatever synapses gave rise to her dry, generous humor, compelled her to greet every cat she saw with a high-pitched “helllooo,” and inspired her to write him poems....

We're told this is a series, "Chasing Immortality."

Family members and strangers alike told them they were wasting Kim’s precious remaining time on a pipe dream. Kim herself would allow only that “if it does happen to work, it would be incredible.” “Dying,” her father admonished gently, “is a part of life.”

Yet as the brain preservation research that was just starting as Kim’s life was ending begins to bear fruit, the questions the couple faced may ultimately confront more of us with implications that could be preposterously profound.

There are elegant photographs with captions like "The containers that are used to store frozen brains and bodies at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Ariz." and "An operating room at Alcor. The clear box is used to prepare the patient's head for preservation."

Empathy cards.

"I created this collection of empathy cards for serious illness because I believe we need some better, more authentic ways to communicate about sickness and suffering. 'Get well soon' cards don’t make sense when someone might not. Sympathy cards can make people feel like you think they’re already dead. A 'fuck cancer' card is a nice sentiment, but when I had cancer, it never really made me feel better. And I never personally connected with jokes about being bald or getting a free boob job, which is what most 'cancer cards' focus on...."

ADDED: This makes me want to quote, once again, to the late David Rakoff's statement in "Half Empty." Rakoff had cancer and had been told the treatment would require the amputation of his arm and shoulder:

A friend asks if I’ve “picked out” my prosthetic yet, as though I’d have my choice of titanium-plated cyborgiana at my disposal, like some amputee Second Life World of Warcraft character. Another friend, upon hearing my news, utters an unedited, “Oh my God, that’s so depressing!” Over supper, I am asked by another, “So if it goes to the lungs, is it all over?”...

But here’s the point I want to make about the stuff people say. Unless someone looks you in the eye and hisses, “You fucking asshole, I can’t wait until you die of this,” people are really trying their best. Just like being happy and sad, you will find yourself on both sides of the equation many times over your lifetime, either saying or hearing the wrong thing. Let’s all give each other a pass, shall we?

"When Nir Iveniaki told his grandmother back home in Tel Aviv that he was emigrating from Israel to Germany, the first thing she did was produce a gun."

"The tenacious 88-year-old had wielded the antique pistol during World War II, when she fought with a band of Jewish partisans in Nazi-occupied Poland...."

Iveniaki was sure enough to kiss grandma on the cheek, pack his bags and follow an unlikely trail being blazed by thousands of young Israelis who are moving to Germany.... The wave of newcomers from Israel is accelerating the rebirth of Jewish culture in the country that nearly extinguished it....

“I generally feel way safer in Berlin than I felt in Paris,” said Raphael Podselver, a 25-year-old French Jew who moved to Berlin to work for an IT start-up.

ADDED: This made me think of a passage from David Rakoff's "Half Empty":

A few years back, my first book was translated into German and I was flown over for a tour. I don’t kid myself: the primary reason for their interest in me was precisely because I am Jewish, our extirpated culture being somewhat fetishized in Germany today. I was a phantom talisman, like an ivory-billed woodpecker willingly visiting the strip mall that used to be his swampy habitat, or the walking illustration of that rueful old joke about the suburbs being the place where they chopped down all the trees and then named the streets after them. I spent a week as a Professional Jew...

The Germanized Yiddish I spoke to make myself understood to hotel clerks and taxi drivers was met with what can only be described as delight, and a kind of wistful nostalgia for a time no one really remembered anymore, which invariably led to the time none of them seemed capable of forgetting. Every conversation I had began precisely the same way: “How does it feel for you to be here?”

"A person claiming to be the thief who stole about $1 million worth of accessories and jewelry from Texas socialite Theresa Roemer's famous three-story closet..."

"... sent the Houston Press a package with a few items as proof. The burglar allegedly demanded $500,000 from Roemer after discovering that the goods were knockoffs."

1. So... a lady has a famous closet.

2. If the goods were, in fact, knockoffs, it wasn't "$1 million worth of accessories and jewelry," was it?

3. A burglar, it seems, has contacted his victim to extort money from her lest he expose her as a phony, flaunting expensive-looking goods that aren't what they appear to be, and he thinks his silence might be worth $500,000 to her? If she had that kind of money to throw around, why was she buying fakes? I guess the answer to that last question could be: Her game is quantity, not quality. Why else would you have a 3-story closet and do what was needed to make the closet famous? If you had genuinely expensive things, you probably wouldn't call attention to where you were storing them.

4. The top comment at the link is: "Sounds like an insurance scam heading south."

5. Newspapers seem to have settled on the term "she-cave," but I'm also seeing "female man-cave." Why not the parallelism of "woman cave." Looking back at material that predates the Roemer incident, I'm seeing a lot of repetitions of a joke in the form of asking: If men have something called a "man cave," what is the female equivalent? Answer: The rest of the house.

6. As I was typing in my search "what's the female equivalent of...," Google tried to help with the following suggestions: cockblock, a bromance, a neckbeard, and phallic.

7. Among the alternative terms for female man-cave: Ma'am Cave, Estrogen Den, A Room of One’s Own, and Ovarium. That's from a blog post that takes the idea of a special women's room seriously. That is, it's not just a big closet, a very nice bathroom, or the old "rest of the house" joke. But what is in that room? It seems to be either a room with feminine colors and furniture, set up for conversation or reading, or a space for doing Martha Stewart-type crafts. Not that some men don't love that sort of thing. Here's David Rakoff in "Martha, My Dear":

I have a cupboard in my living room, a freestanding armoire that holds, among a ton of other stuff, the following supplies. Six stamp pads, rubber linoleum printing blocks, seven boxes of Chinese flash cards, bindery fabric sample books from the garbage of the carpet and tile store on 20th, acrylic paints-- approximately 40 tubes-- rhinestones, pearl buttons, architectural balsa wood, pipe cleaners, and a tin cracker box of golf tees. Quantity, approximately 1,000 assorted colors.

I make stuff. Boxes, lamps, mirrors, small folding screens, painted jackets for kids, that kind of thing. It's what I do in my spare time. Some people need to exercise every day, my salvation lies in time spent alone with an X-acto knife and commercial-grade adhesive.

8. The female equivalent of cockblock is "clam jam." The female equivalent of bromance is "womance." The female equivalent of phallic is "Perhaps women are not so neatly summed up." And the female equivalent of neckbeard is:

If the neckbeard uniform is a fedora, a stanky Slayer tee, and cargo pants, I'd say the female equivalent is webbed fingerless gloves, an ill-fitting corset worn over a stained t-shirt, and anime pins on her backpack/cargo messenger bag. I think we've all went to school with this girl before.

"Despite being declared dead and kept in a deep freezer at his ashram for six weeks, an Indian guru’s followers are confident he will return to life to lead them."

"Mission spokesman Swami Vishalanand insisted earlier this week their leader [Ashutosh Maharaj] was not dead but was in fact in a state of 'samadhi,' the highest level of meditation, and was therefore still conscious."

How different is it from the Christian belief in Jesus returning from the dead? It's different in that Maharaj's followers are asserting that he hasn't died, but is in a state of deep meditation.

But then why put him in the freezer? I see that a man petitioned a court and accused the followers of keeping the body frozen as a way to acquire his property, but Maharaj has been officially declared dead, so from a legal standpoint it's just a question about what to do with a dead body, which, I take it, is unrelated to inheriting the dead person's property.

Is freezing a permissible method for dealing with a dead body? In the United States, we have our cryonics places.

"Time’s gone by since that silly, regrettable business/When she became known as The Girl Who Ruined Christmas."

"Helen harbors the hope that the passing five years/Have made folks forget both the vomit and tears..."

And throwing of glassware and drunken oration,
That half-hour tirade of recrimination
Where, feeling misused, she had got pretty plastered,
And named His name publicly, called him a bastard.
The details are fuzzy, though others have told her
She insulted this one and cried on that shoulder,
Then lurched ’round the ballroom, all pitching and weaving
And ended the night in the ladies’ lounge, heaving.

From David Rakoff's "Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish: A Novel," found, this morning, on my search for "Christmas" amongst my ebooks.

"Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish."

I just bought the Kindle and the audiobook versions of David Rakoff's new book. I bought both because I love his vocal performance and I also like to see words. Both preferences are especially true with respect to poetry, and this is a novel in verse.

"The last time I had dinner with David, about six weeks before he died, he was so weak..."

"... that it was impossible to imagine him mustering the strength to work. But he was so close, he said. 'I need to finish it, and then I’ll be ready.'"

"Ah, whither love's ardor whose heat used to scorch her?/Now his mere face can assail her like torture..."

"And being alone with him renders her frantic/It makes her a hectoring shrew, a pedantic/Wet blanket, although it is also true, in her defense/That Nate can be maddeningly oafish and dense."

Who chips a mug without knowing it, or

Doesn't see that they've just spilt some milk on the floor?

And once pointed out, he goes all Lotus

Position-y, saying mildly, "Wow. I didn't notice."

It's the new book — sadly, posthumous — by David Rakoff. "Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish: A Novel."

I exclaim "Oh, great!" out loud when I see that he's the narrator on the audiobook version. I'm so sorry that he died, but he had time to write a last book and time, even, to read it — act it — to us.

On the subject of "A Child Called 'It.'"

The previous post refers to "A Child Called 'It'" — a questionable book that I've only ever read about.

There are no people in [Dave] Pelzer's book, only demons (his mother and grandmother), angels (Pelzer and a few foster parents), and incompetents. Psychological motivation scarcely interests him. He makes only a halfhearted effort to explain his mother's lunacy. The point is the suffering. As the trilogy progresses, Pelzer is forced to increase the dosage of wickedness to top what came before. (Iron law of sequels: They must be bloodier than the original.) His mother becomes more cartoonish, more Cruella De Vil. In the first book, she's horrible but erratic. By the third she is the incarnation of pure, calculating evil, saying things like, "You gave me no pleasure, so you were disposed of."

I just wanted to show you the passages in 2 of my favorite books that allude to "A Child Called 'It.'"

Bill Bryson's "The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir" begins this way:

My kid days were pretty good ones, on the whole. My parents were patient and kind and approximately normal. They didn’t chain me in the cellar. They didn’t call me “It.” I was born a boy and allowed to stay that way. My mother, as you’ll see, sent me to school once in Capri pants, but otherwise there was little trauma in my upbringing.

And David Rakoff's "Half Empty" has an essay called "Shrimp" that begins:

Nothing assails the writer’s credibility more than the pleasant childhood. I freely admit to having had one myself. A happy fact reflected sadly in my book sales. And yet I’d sooner do most anything short of putting needles in my eyes than willingly remember what it was like to have been a child. Things were not terrible. I was neither beaten nor abused. No dank cellars or chilly garrets for me. Neither my trust nor my body were violated by a clergyman or a beloved family friend. I was safe and sound.

"Did Recording the McConnell Meeting Violate State Law?"

Orin Kerr takes a look at the Kentucky eavesdropping statute and this relevant commentary:

A conversation which is loud enough to be heard through the wall or through the heating system without the use of any device is not protected by KRS 526.020. A person who desires privacy of communication has the responsibility to take the steps necessary to insure that his conversation cannot be overheard by the ordinary ear.

Kerr comments:

This is arguably quite relevant: the McConnell campaign discussion apparently was loud enough to be overheard from outside the door; from what we can tell, it was recorded from a phone or video camera without audio amplification. So that language makes me think that the recording was probably not a crime. At the same time, the commentary is ambiguous. It could be read as merely making the obvious point that eavesdropping requires a device. That is, listening with your ears is different from recording with a microphone.

Obviously, you don't want to make a crime out of happening to hear a conversation on the other side of a door or wall. Perhaps there's something a little more wrong about stopping to listen, once you realize you can hear people talking. If you can hear through the wall when your neighbors talk, should you have an obligation not to pay attention or is it their responsibility to make sure you can't hear? Yet to record them seems to cross a moral line, I would think.

But what would you say about writing down quotes? Many times, I've sat in cafés and heard people talking, and I've jotted down quotes I've found interesting. And here's a specific example: Once we sat in a café at a table where we could not help overhearing a conversation. We recognized one participant as a famous professor and he was saying some extraordinarily foolish things. There's a certain word, that — if you knew how to pronounced it the way this professor did — you could say and crack me up in one second. I could have written down a lot of quotes that day and blogged them. Decency constrained me. But, surely, that could not be made into a crime in the United States.

ADDED: I'm musing about what we might consider morally wrong because it relates to what the statute might mean and also what the government may — if it chooses — criminalize.

AND: It seems to me that putting your ear against the wall/door is wrong in a way that pausing to listen when you hear talking through a wall/door is not. Here's a passage from David Rakoff's book "Half Empty":

Once during the day... I could hear Raul Rivas having sex in the office downstairs. I skittered around the apartment like a cockroach on a frying pan, trying not to make noise while desperately looking for a knothole in the crappy floorboards. Eventually I just lay down flat against the tile of the kitchen floor, listening. Lying flat against the tile of the kitchen floor listening to someone else have sex is essentially my early twenties in a nutshell.

Morally wrong, but how morally wrong?

A non-"Gatsby" sentence.

You know I have this "Gatsby" project where I blog a single sentence — out of context — from "The Great Gatsby" and we analyze it however we want — its narrative arc, its language, its weirdness, our own weirdness, whatever. I'm starting a new thing — we'll see what happens with this — where I give you a sentence from something else I'm reading. I'm not sure what kinds of sentence will make it into this project, but I'm going to start with this strikingly long sentence...

...from a writer I greatly admire, David Rakoff. The book is "Half Empty":

Should you happen to be possessed of a certain verbal acuity coupled with a relentless, hair-trigger humor and surface cheer spackling over a chronic melancholia and loneliness — a grotesquely caricatured version of your deepest Self which you trot out at the slightest provocation to endearing and glib comic effect, thus rendering you the kind of fellow who is beloved by all yet loved by none, all of it to distract, however fleetingly, from the cold and dead-faced truth that with each passing year you face the unavoidable certainty of a solitary future in which you will perish one day while vainly attempting the Heimlich maneuver on yourself over the back of a kitchen chair — then this confirmation that you have triumphed again and managed to gull yet another mark, except this time it was the one person you’d hoped might be immune to your ever-creakier, puddle-shallow, sideshow-barker variation on “adorable,” even though you’d been launching this campaign weekly with a single-minded concentration from day one… well, it conjures up feelings that are best described as mixed, to say the least.

"Don’t trade up..."

That's a rule that "starts out as a bit of simple, practical instruction — don’t back out of a social engagement just because a snazzier offer came along — and broadens out into an entire perspective on how to live."

Don’t grade friendships on a hierarchical scale. Don’t value people based on some external indicator of status. Don’t take a competitive view of your social life. There are very few rules I carry around with me every day. Don’t trade up is one of them, and I truly can’t tell you how many seemingly complicated situations it resolved into clarity and fairness. I am grateful to you for that.

One of the lessons learned. 

Plus... handmade impromptu gifts, like a little chair made out of that wire that goes around a champagne cork.

2 passages read recently on what makes an artist.

I've been rereading Tom Wolfe's "The Painted Word" in Kindle the last couple days, and I ran across a great passage that shed light on something in that collection of essays I keep pushing, David Rakoff's "Half Empty."

First, Rakoff:

An artist is something you are, not something you do.

I first encountered this Seussian syllogism in a used-book store, where I spent an extra thirty minutes fake-browsing just so I might continue to eavesdrop on the cashier, who was expounding to his friend about Johnny Got His Gun, Dalton Trumbo’s classic antiwar novel. The cashier had a theory about the book’s protagonist, Johnny, wounded and blinded and amputated to such an extent that, while sentient, he was little more than an unresponsive trunk of meat with a rich inner life.

"The Power of Negative Thinking."

"Both ancient philosophy and modern psychology suggest that darker thoughts can make us happier."

Just thinking in sober detail about worst-case scenarios—a technique the Stoics called “the premeditation of evils”—can help to sap the future of its anxiety-producing power. The psychologist Julie Norem estimates that about one-third of Americans instinctively use this strategy, which she terms “defensive pessimism.” Positive thinking, by contrast, is the effort to convince yourself that things will turn out fine, which can reinforce the belief that it would be absolutely terrible if they didn’t.

That's from a new article in the WSJ. There's a similar chapter in David Rakoff's great collection of essays "Half Empty." Excerpt:

"I'm free and I love to be free/To live my life the way I want/To say and do whatever I please..."

Consider the use of the old Lesley Gore song — "You Don't Own Me" — for political, pro-Obama purposes:



Now, I love old Lesley and her classic song. And it's fine with me if the Democratic Party is her party — and she'll cry if Obama loses, cry if Obama loses, you would cry too if it happened to you. "You Don't Own Me" dates back to 1963 — pre-Women's Liberation, pre-Beatles. But let's consider the lyrics and the extent to which they express the values of the present-day Democratic Party.

By the way, Ms. Gore did not write "You Don't Own Me." It was written by 2 men, John Madara (who also wrote "At the Hop") and David White (who co-wrote "At the Hop" and was a member of the doo-wop group Danny & the Juniors who recorded "At the Hop"). Madera and White also co-wrote "The Fly," which was a dance that you could do at the hop, and here's Chubby Checker showing you how:



That was 1961, 2 years before Lesley sang Madera and White's declaration to female autonomy, which is no kind of dance song at all, though Diane Keaton, Bette Midler, and Goldie Hawn manage to turn it into a dance for the purpose of bringing a close to the execrable 1996 movie "First Wives Club":



That movie is best described by David Rakoff in "Half Empty": "A gynocentric comedy predicated on the scenario where men are cheating bastards and middle-aged women the goddesses who best them while cementing their sisterhood with Motown-scored makeover montages, vengeful shopping sprees, warmed-over Lucy-and-Ethel hijinks, and random humiliations visited upon women who are younger and therefore by definition stupid whores."

Anyway, look at the lyrics to "You Don't Own Me," words which a couple youngish guys put in the female singer's mouth, as repurposed for the 2012 election "war on women" theme:

I'm young and I love to be young
I'm free and I love to be free
To live my life the way I want
To say and do whatever I please

Sounds libertarian to me. But it's the Obama side using this, so presumably we're supposed to hear something like:

I'm free and I want my birth control to be free
To live my life the way I want
To say and do whatever I please and have the government pay for it

Karl Lagerfeld "said that in the future it would 'unfortunately' be 'OK' for women to be fat..."

"... but that at the moment it was unacceptable." He said runway models are "are skinny but they’re not that skinny. All the new girls are not that skinny. You know, there’s a new evolution." They're not anorexic — "nobody works with anorexic girls.... That has nothing to do with fashion. People who have that, they have problem with family and things like this. There are less than 1 per cent of anorexic girls, but there are over - in France, I don’t know about England - over 30 per cent of girls who are big, big, overweight."

If that irks you, enjoy this description of Lagerfeld written by the late great David Rakoff:

... Lagerfeld’s powdered white ponytail has dusted the shoulders of his suit with what looks like dandruff but isn’t. Also, not yet having undergone his alarming weight loss, seated on a tiny velvet chair, with his large doughy rump dominating the miniature piece of furniture like a loose, flabby, ass-flavored muffin over-risen from its pan, he resembles a Daumier caricature of some corpulent, overfed, inhumane oligarch drawn sitting on a commode, stuffing his greedy throat with the corpses of dead children, while from his other end he shits out huge, malodorous piles of tainted money.

ADDED: The Daumier he might have been picturing: