"A lot of people really like him, so you’ll have a lot of people going, 'This is really cool.' And then you’ll have some people that’ll be like, 'What the fuck is he doing here?'"

"But hopefully the people who say, 'What the fuck is he doing,' when they realize why he’s here they’ll give him a second chance."

Said the producer of Kevin Spacey's new film, quoted in "Kevin Spacey to Make Surprise Appearance in Cannes to Accept a Lifetime Achievement Award" (Variety).

For the annals of Things I Asked Grok: "Tell me about the idea of a 'second chance.'"

From Grok's answer: "Christianity... emphasizes redemption through forgiveness, like the parable of the Prodigal Son. In Buddhism, the cycle of rebirth offers chances to correct past karma.... In stories, the 'second chance' trope is a classic—think redemption arcs in movies where the villain turns hero or the underdog gets a shot at glory. It’s compelling because it mirrors real-life struggles and the hope for a do-over."

In some of those second-chance stories, the second-chance getter goes on to do good things — Jean Valjean, Scrooge, etc. — but in other second-chance stories...

"If there’s one through line in this administration so far, it’s the amassing of power. And if there’s another through line, it’s the destruction of anything that might restrain power, and that’s bureaucracy."

Said David Brooks, quoted in "David Brooks on Why the Democrats Are Losing to Trump" (NYT)(free-access link).

Why does he keep saying "through line"? It seems to mean theme... but on a time line... or narrative... but with one clear idea... except there are 2 "through lines" in Brooks's telling. Is it a vogue phrase? I don't think I've used it or quoted it before in the 20+ year history of this blog.

But I didn't quote David Brooks to muse on the words "through line." I quoted him because I was astounded to see bureaucracy touted as if it were part of the system of checks and balances in the American constitutional system.

Or am I misreading him?

A Tale of Two Stories.

Tale #1: Kamala Harris overused the word "story" and looked ridiculous in the Fox News edit.

Tale #2: J.D. Vance said, "If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm going to do" and gave his antagonists great material for characterizing him as a fabulist.

***

What's the story with "story"? Is there some reason for this word to become more useful than "narrative" or "framing" in speaking about how politicians communicate with the people?

Advisers, behind the scenes, may be saying "story" because they think the voters are rather stupid and childlike and a "story" sounds easier than a "narrative." But "narrative," like "framing," seems to refer to the overall structure of the message, while "story" works better to refer to more specific anecdotes, such as the dog-eating incident.

"Certainly, in the history of narrative, there have been writers celebrated for their ability to be discursive only to cleverly tie together all their themes with a neat bow at the end — William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens..."

"... and Larry David come to mind. But in the case of Mr. Trump, it is difficult to find the hermeneutic methods with which to parse the linguistic flights that take him from electrocuted sharks to Hannibal Lecter’s cannibalism, windmills and Rosie O’Donnell...."

Writes Shawn McCreesh — a Dickensian name — in "Meandering? Off-Script? Trump Insists His 'Weave' Is Oratorical Genius. /Former President Donald J. Trump’s speeches often wander from topic to topic. He insists there is an art to stitching them all together" (NYT).

McCreesh quotes Trump: "You know, I do the weave. You know what the weave is? I’ll talk about like nine different things, and they all come back brilliantly together, and it’s like, friends of mine that are, like, English professors, they say, 'It’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen.'"

Not only does the article refuse to acknowledge that Trump's rally speeches are genius, it casts doubt on whether Trump has any English professor friends.

"If I'm going to rebrand myself, it would be maybe 'America's shaman' because the QAnon label has been stigmatized with the number of sub-labels or subcategories..."

"... conspiracy theories, white supremacists, terrorists.... I don't want to be associated with anything that the media has already maligned."

Said Jacob Chansley, quoted in "QAnon Shaman Rejects Conspiracy Theory That Helped Make Him Famous" (Newsweek).

A shaman is someone who — to quote Wikipedia — "interact[s] with the spirit world through altered states of consciousness, such as trance."

Chansley is apparently interacting with the media to receive his messages and inspiration. The media are not the spirit world. Alignment with whatever the media tell you — dissociating yourself from everything the media have maligned — is not a special state of consciousness. I wish it were. 

ADDED: The OED entry for "shaman" led me to a 1979 piece in the London Review of Books, "'Darkness Visible' is William Golding’s first novel for twelve years/John Bayley thinks it is his best, and thinks of him as a magician":

Borges​ has written (and it is certainly true of Borges) that the writer is like a member of a primitive tribe who suddenly starts making unfamiliar noises and waving his arms about in strange new rituals.

"The simpler your case is, with fewer charges and fewer defendants, the faster it can move. The federal prosecution looks like..."

"... it’s an attempt to do the sprint. As for [the Fulton County, Georgia, case], it is hokey to say it’s a marathon, but basically it’s more like an epic with a giant cast of characters. The other one’s Raymond Carver, and this is Dickens... A RICO charge is the kind of charge you bring when you have a lot of different people connected in different ways, but who form a loose organization, or sometimes a very tight hierarchical one—say, a Mob family—who are all working toward a common goal. But that common goal has been achieved during a long period of time and in potentially all sorts of different places. So, it’s the perfect charge for something where there are a lot of moving parts. It’s the most narrative-driven of the types of cases you can bring, to some extent, because some part of the trial has to be spent establishing the fact that there was an enterprise...."

Says Georgia State lawprof and former Assistant U.S. Attorney Caren Myers Morrison interviewed by Isaac Chotiner in "The Benefits and Drawbacks to Charging Trump Like a Mobster Racketeering statutes allow prosecutors to arrange many characters and a broad set of allegations into a single narrative. Making the story cohere can be a challenge" (The New Yorker).

The "enterprise" was winning a second term for Trump. The various defendants were working toward that common goal.

Prosecutors love RICO statutes because, like I say, they allow you to go back in time, and fold a whole bunch of people into it. It’s a very powerful tool. Obviously, whenever prosecutors have a very powerful tool, they like to use it. And then that raises issues on the defense side and sometimes on the public side that the prosecutors are overreaching or going too far....

"'Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people,' said Anne Lamott in Bird by Bird, her book about writing."

"'It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life . . .' But it’s not a choice, really. I am sure that whatever stopped Harper Lee from writing a second book, she’d have preferred the impediment not to be there. And Salinger, in that pitiful late-snatched photograph, didn’t look like a man who was enjoying his royalty checks and a few rounds of golf. Nor could the problem have been resolved by stern self-admonishment and a determination to let things go next time around. Any perfectionist needs to stop being who they are, and that’s hard. I understand Prince and Dickens better than I understand the perfectionists."

Writes Nick Hornby, in "Dickens and Prince: A Particular Kind of Genius" (Amazon).

"We were also puzzled by the way American waiters routinely congratulate you on your menu choice, rewarding you with 'Good choice,' 'Excellent' or even 'Awesome.' "

"You want fries with that? 'Awesome!'...  [O]n our way to Houston, we passed a roadside church whose huge hoarding exhorted us to 'Give Up Lust — Take Up Jesus.' I thought that sign might be my most abiding memory, until I’d spent a few hours at the Space Center Houston. I never guessed I’d be so riveted by topics like the geology of the moon and how NASA astronauts train underwater. But the cafeteria! It is astonishing, the best I’ve ever seen anywhere in a public building: brioche or sourdough sandwiches, homemade soups, hot roasts and grills, fresh tortillas, a salad bar to tempt the most die-hard carnivore, and no junk food in sight. It was a long way from the usual NASA fare of freeze-dried food in pouches and tubes...."

From "Prue Leith’s Great American Road Trip/The 'Great British Baking Show' judge steps out of the tent to sample the flavors of the U.S. on a 2,200-mile drive" (NYT).

"Earlier this month, Spotify announced that it was ending its partnership with the royal couple after they..."

"... produced just one season of Markle’s podcast in two and a half years. Spotify executive and podcaster Bill Simmons publicly branded them 'fucking grifters' on their way out. Then a Bloomberg report revealed some of Harry’s laughably implausible podcast pitches, like interviewing Vladimir Putin, Mark Zuckerberg, and Donald Trump about their childhood trauma.... Netflix isn’t interested in paying the Sussexes the additional $51 million... unless the couple cranks out some more hits.... [T]he [Wall Street] Journal reports that they are developing... 'a TV show for Netflix called Bad Manners based on Miss Havisham... [the] character from Great Expectations. The prequel would recast the lonely spinster as a strong woman living in a patriarchal society, though it is unclear whether the show will get a green light from Netflix.'... Other proposed projects seemed designed to replicate successful shows already on Netflix, such as a sitcom described as Emily in Paris, but about a man.... Netflix said no.... It’s unclear why [Netflix and Spotify] thought one of the stars of USA Network’s Suits and a guy who’s admittedly spent his life in a royal bubble would be good at churning out relatable TV and audio content."

From "Netflix’s Bold Ultimatum for Harry and Meghan: No Work, No Pay" (NY Magazine).

"My life goes on... I will go on living in this tiny cabin. But one thing has changed. I am going to dedicate myself to somehow figuring out a way for the women..."

"... who don’t have my platform to hold men accountable. Robbie and I are going to put our heads together. That’s how my life is going to change. I’m a crone. I’m an elderly woman on a mountaintop. But I think we’ve got a few good years left to figure out a way to end the culture of sexual violence. That’s what I want to do."

Said E. Jean Carroll, quoted in "E. Jean Carroll Discusses Trump’s Comeuppance/Since losing a civil case to the journalist, who accused him of sexual abuse and defamation, Trump has doubled down on his attacks" (The New Yorker). Kaplan is seeking additional punitive damages — not a gag order.

We're told:

Carroll is seventy-nine. She just adopted a new dog, a Great Pyrenees. “She’s right here, Miss Havisham, Sham for short,” she said, gesturing offscreen.

"Robbie" is the lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, who's quoted saying she considered seeking a gag order when Trump, having lost in the defamation case continued to repeat the defamation. But she didn't want the "First Amendment concerns," and she's seeking additional punitive damages instead.

The dog is named Miss Havisham — that is, the character in "Great Expectations" who devotes herself extravagantly to her disappointment in men. At trial, there was an unsuccessful attempt to introduce evidence that she'd once named a dog/cat "Vagina." 

"Before Ozempic, she’d hole up in her hotel on film shoots, juice-cleansing to fit into her costumes. Now, she says..."

"... 'you can eat one and a half meals a day and then you’re kind of hungry at night, but it’s not terrible. You can drink some tea with magnesium and maybe take a Xanax and get to sleep.'..."

I'm reading "Life After Food? A diabetes drug has become an off-label appetite suppressant, changing the definition of being thin and what it takes to get there" (NY Magazine).

"Aw, twenty-three!"

"By the way, I have come upon a new piece of slang within the past two months and it has puzzled me. I just heard it from a big newsboy who had a ‘stand’ on a corner. A small boy with several papers under his arm had edged up until he was trespassing on the territory of the other. When the big boy saw the small one he went at him in a threatening manner and said: ‘Here! Here! Twenty-three! Twenty-three!’ The small boy scowled and talked under his breath, but he moved away. A few days after that I saw a street beggar approach a well-dressed man, who might have been a bookmaker or horseman, and try for the usual ‘touch’. The man looked at the beggar in cold disgust and said: ‘Aw, twenty-three!’ I could see that the beggar didn’t understand it any better than I did. I happened to meet a man who tries to ‘keep up’ on slang and I asked [about] the meaning of ‘Twenty-three!’ He said it was a signal to clear out, run, get away."

Wrote George Ade, in 1899, quoted in the Wikipedia article "23 skidoo (phrase)."

But why did 23 come to mean get out?

Some people think it originated with Dickens's novel "A Tale of Two Cities"! It has to do with the numbers given to the doomed prisoners going to the guillotine:

"6 a.m. Wake up and put on knit cardigan, slacks, and sensible shoes. Feed my cat, Mr. Foibles. Have tea and English muffin..."

".... while I read Shakespeare and listen to symphonies. 7 a.m. Get into twenty-year-old Corolla, turn on NPR, get rattled by news and switch to listening to a Charles Dickens book on tape read by Alistair Cooke...."

From "HOW NON-LIBRARIANS IMAGINE A LIBRARIAN’S TYPICAL WORKDAY" — #15 on "COUNTING DOWN OUR 20 MOST-READ ARTICLES OF 2022" (McSweeney's).

I need to work on a list — something like 20 most-[something] blog posts of 2022. Maybe 20 most useful tags of 2022 or 20 most meandering sidetracks of 2022 or 20 least expected topics of 2022 or 20 best hobbyhorses of 2022....

"In the first week after the new rules we literally had customers with calculators out. It was a real novelty. And for the first two to three weeks..."

"... people would opt for the lighter dishes. For instance, orders for our mother butter chicken dish fell but orders for our lower-calorie agra chicken dish rose. But after about three weeks everyone got fatigued with it and we are now back to normal. It hasn’t made any difference to sales at all."

Said restaurant owner Nisha Katona, quoted in a London Times article about the calorie counts that have been required in the U.K. since last month.

The article cites a study of American restaurants with calorie counts that "in the first month, diners opted for dishes with an average of 60 fewer calories but after a year, the average reduction had fallen to 23 calories." And, we're told, the main difference is that people are taking more time to figure out what to order.

And here's another article on fatness in the London Times today: "Ancients believed in survival of the fattest/For most of human history food was precious and plumpness was something to be proud of, but then fashions changed" by Ben Macintyre:

Thrifty genotypes among the hunter-gatherers, who could store fat efficiently, were favoured by evolution.... The traditional desirability of excess flesh was reflected in social habits, politics, literature and arts, from Rubens to Shakespeare to Dickens. Scrooge is thin, in contrast to Joe in The Pickwick Papers, “a wonderfully fat boy”.

“Let me have men about me that are fat,” Shakespeare’s Caesar declares, while the dangerous Cassius “has a lean and hungry look”. Falstaff, the most famous fat man in literature, is loveable and trustworthy because he is stout....

There were exceptions: the Spartans ostracised fat men; Socrates danced every morning to keep himself trim; Hippocrates correctly warned that “Corpulence is not only a disease itself, but the harbinger of others”...

So! Socrates danced every morning?

But what dance did he do? 

"Dickens was a social critic. Almost all his fiction satirizes the institutions and social types produced by that dramatic transformation of the means of production."

"But he was not a revolutionary. His heroes are not even reformers. They are ordinary people who have made a simple commitment to decency. George Orwell, who had probably aspired to recruit Dickens to the socialist cause, reluctantly concluded that Dickens was not interested in political reform, only in moral improvement: 'Useless to change institutions without a change of heart—that, essentially, is what he is always saying.' In fact, a major target of Dickens’s satire is liberalism.... [I]n nineteenth-century England the typical liberal was a utilitarian, who believed that the worth of a social program could be measured by cost-benefit analysis, and very likely a Malthusian.... One of Dickens’s memorable caricatures in 'Bleak House' is Mrs. Jellyby.... We see her at home obsessively devoted to her 'Africa' project, while neglecting, almost criminally, her own children.... But Dickens is not ridiculing Mrs. Jellyby for caring about Africans. ... [S]he was based on a woman Dickens had met, Caroline Chisholm, who operated a charity called the Family Colonization Loan Society, which helped poor English people emigrate. And Mrs. Jellyby’s project is the same: she is raising money for families to move to a place called Borrioboola-Gha, 'on the left bank of the Niger,' so that there will be fewer mouths to feed in England. She’s a Malthusian. "

From "The Crisis That Nearly Cost Charles Dickens His Career/The most beloved writer of his age, he had an unfailing sense of what the public wanted—almost" by Louis Menand (The New Yorker).

"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."

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":

"Any suggestion that there isn’t gratitude for the institution, anything that could lead anyone in the public to think that senior members of the royal family aren’t grateful for their position, [William thinks] is really dangerous."

Said a source close to Prince William, quoted in "It wasn’t just the Queen: the whole royal family knifed Prince Andrew/After years of indecision, the Firm finally acted against the duke — and all his siblings were involved" (London Times).

Friends of Andrew say he has been doing “a lot of thinking and work on himself”.... There is much more thinking to be done as Andrew, who once described himself as “an ideas factory”, contemplates a permanent retirement devoid of flummery. Some in royal circles believe a safe option would be for him to run one of the Queen’s estates. Others, including the royal historian Hugo Vickers, think he should devote himself to a life of charitable rehabilitation.

“Prince Andrew needs to start up an animal sanctuary and work there, Profumo-style,” Vickers said. “The British love animals.”

Retirement devoid of flummery... "Flummery" is one of those words that gets my attention. Oddly enough, I have a tag for "flummery." I'm not sure how that happened. My favorite word is "flummox," as I've mentioned a few times on this blog. And yet I don't have a tag for "flummox," only for "flummery." It makes you wonder, what is flum? Is it like phlegm?

As I've discussed before — here — the OED calls the word "flummox" colloquial or vulgar and suggests it's onomatopoeic, "expressive of the notion of throwing down roughly and untidily." 

But what about "flummery"? That's not connected to "flummox." According to the OED, "flummery" originates as the name of a food — a "coagulation of wheatflour or oatmeal." From there, it got figurative: "Mere flattery or empty compliment; nonsense, humbug, empty trifling" or "Trifles, useless trappings or ornaments."

Yes, we don't need any of that from Andrew.

"Who would be a muse, eh? Loads of people, that’s the thing. Dante wrote about his childhood crush Beatrice di Folco Portinari in The Divine Comedy."

"Jane Austen used an old flame as inspiration for Mr Darcy. Charles Dickens based numerous characters on his lover Ellen Ternan. It was all fine and nobody minded. So what changed? Two words: the internet. Online, everybody gets to create a bubble where they are the star of their own finely honed story. So when someone else mines their life for a different story, it feels more like a violation. Also, who’s to say that Ternan enjoyed being written about? She couldn’t complain on Facebook. Does this story have a moral? Yes: it’s that writers are terrible people and you should cut them all from your life immediately."

From "‘Bad art friend’: should fiction writers ever lift stories from other people’s lives?/Great writers have always been inspired by friends and lovers, but a viral article has revived the moral arguments around muses. In the age of the internet, does using someone else’s story feel like a violation?" (The Guardian).

The "viral article" is "Who Is the Bad Art Friend?/Art often draws inspiration from life — but what happens when it’s your life? Inside the curious case of Dawn Dorland v. Sonya Larson" by Robert Kolker (NYT). I haven't read that, but The Guardian — after calling it "punishingly long" — summarizes it as "a woman donated her kidney to a stranger, and then a second woman wrote a story about donating a kidney to a stranger." 

At the NYT, one commenter puts it this way:

So... Dawn donates a kidney for whatever reason, I mean who cares? Then posts about it, then gets involved in a more pub[l]ic way, and... a bunch of writers secretly deride her (why, exactly? Guilt they aren't doing enough? Just plain pettiness?). Then one of those writers, Larson, uses the feelings she feels about this kidney donation to craft a story, using Dawn's actual words, never telling her, and then Larson has the gall to use racism as a defense? As a BIPOC artist, I take offense to Larson's re-characterization of what she, in fact, did - steal, plagiarize, and - while not illegal - Larson's ruthless backstabbing of someone she found ridiculous. It makes it harder for artists of color to cite racism when it actually occurs What was happening to Larson during her "summer of hell" and beyond was the result of her own lack of integrity and dishonesty and, yes, I'll say it, entitlement.

ADDED: Yes, there's a racial theme in the NYT article — which now sounds "punishing" in more ways than just length.

“My piece is fiction,” [Larson] wrote. “It is not her story, and my letter is not her letter. And she shouldn’t want it to be. She shouldn’t want to be associated with my story’s portrayal and critique of white-savior dynamics. But her recent behavior, ironically, is exhibiting the very blindness I’m writing about, as she demands explicit identification in — and credit for — a writer of color’s work.” 

Here was a new argument, for sure. Larson [the POC writer] was accusing Dorland [the white organ donor] of perverting the true meaning of the story — making it all about her, and not race and privilege. Larson’s friend Celeste Ng agrees, at least in part, that the conflict seemed racially coded. “There’s very little emphasis on what this must be like for [Larson],” Ng told me, “and what it is like for writers of color, generally — to write a story and then be told by a white writer, ‘Actually, you owe that to me.’”

"I think for a lot of marginalized groups who’ve never had their stories told in the mainstream, the atomization has been pretty affirming."

"Because what kind of stories were we getting when there just were a few big hits? Too many that were interesting just to straight, white males.... There’s just no mechanism for reassembling all these more representative stories into a larger whole."

Said Laura Grindstaff, a sociology professor at University of California, Davis, who studies popular culture, quoted in "The TV hit isn’t just dying — it’s already dead/Astute observers of television say that the idea of a unifying show on even a modest scale is gone. In its wake are a hundred Twitter niches — and a dangerous lack of common culture" (WaPo).

What pushed me over the line to blog this is that name — Laura Grindstaff. Wow. It's like a character in "Hard Times" by Charles Dickens. Speaking of shared culture and white men and all that....

"Eyebrows? Who cares? With all the suffering around us, with all of the important things to focus on, it flummoxes me to witness how people waste time and money."

That's the third-highest-ranked comment on a weirdly long WaPo article titled "Our pandemic eyebrows are driving us crazy. Can we learn to love them?" 

All the high-rated comments say just about exactly the same thing. I chose that one to quote because it features my favorite word: flummox. It's a colloquial and vulgar word, according to the OED. "The formation seems to be onomatopoeic, expressive of the notion of throwing down roughly and untidily; compare flump, hummock, dialect slommock sloven." 

The oldest appearance is 1837 in Dickens's "Pickwick Papers": "Ve got Tom Vildspark off that 'ere manslaughter, with a alleybi, ven all the big vigs to a man said as nothing couldn’t save him. And my 'pinion is, Sammy, that if your governor don’t prove a alleybi, he’ll be what the Italians call reg’larly flummoxed, and that’s all about it." 

Italians?! Is that like saying "Pardon my French"? 

"Pardon my French" or "Excuse my French" is a common English language phrase ostensibly disguising profanity as words from the French language. The phrase is uttered in an attempt to excuse the user of profanity, swearing, or curses in the presence of those offended by it, under the pretense of the words being part of a foreign language. Although the phrase is often used without any explicit or implicit intention of insulting the French people or language, it can nevertheless be perceived as offensive and belittling by Francophone speakers. However, most users of the term intend no such belittlement....

Required cultural reference: 

 

Bonus fact (from the above-linked Wikipedia article, "Pardon My French"): The word for a French kiss in French is "une pelle." It means "a shovel." Please use that knowledge wisely!