"Thank you, Lord, thank you for making me who I was and not some little squirming powerless nincompoop."

"Thank you for making me unique, one of a kind, incomparable, victorious."

That's the "deathbed prayer," offered by a character in the novel "Vigil," by George Saunders, which Ezra Klein quotes to Saunders to begin the discussion "George Saunders on Anger, Ambition and Sin" (NYT).

That was a pretty strong way to begin the interview, and I'll bet Klein — as well as Saunders — thinks of himself unique, one of a kind, incomparable, and victorious. Surely, they're not little squirming powerless nincompoops.

"Nincompoop" seems like a word that would be examined in "Why Kids Are Starting to Sound Like Their Grandparents/The strange resurgence of words like 'yap' and 'skedaddle,'" (a NYT article blogged at that link). And it also reminded me of that George Will column blogged yesterday — "JD Vance vies for the gold medal in coarseness and flippancy" — the one that took umbrage at Vance's deployment of the insult "dipshit." If only Vance had been in on the kids' new trend and cared a little more about the problem of coarseness and flippancy, he could have said "nincompoop." Note how the excrement is discretely included.

The word "nincompoop" is, the OED says, first seen c1668 in the form of this title, which will give you lots of ideas for old words that could resurge: "The ship of fools fully fraught and richly laden with asses, fools, jack-daws, ninnihammers, coxcombs, slender-wits, shallowbrains, paper-skuls, simpletons, nickumpoops, wiseakers, dunces, and blockheads."

The first use of the word "nincompoop" in The New York Times came in August of 1861, recounting the statement of then-Congressman John Sherman: "[Congressman Samuel Sullivan 'Sunset'] Cox called [Sherman's] own constituents 'Nincompoops, intelligent baboons dressed up as Wide-Awakes, Gump-heads, mutton-heads, blabber, Dogbanes, toadies, and bloats, Suppose he [Sherman] should speak thus of [Cox's] Democratic constituents, would they not set him down as unfit to represent decent people?'"

"In his nonfiction book 'A Swim in a Pond in the Rain”' (2021), about reading the Russian masters, he described 'people who’ve put reading at the center of their lives because they know from experience that reading makes them more expansive, generous people.'"

"This is pleasant to imagine, and I suppose it’s true up to a point, but who doesn’t know a lot of big readers who are jackasses from head to toe? One thing’s certain: The writers who insist on the morally improving nature of fiction, and who robe themselves in the folds of wisdom or beneficence, tend to be the ones to avoid. 'If there is any test that can be applied to movies,' Pauline Kael wrote — her test applies to books, too — 'it’s that the good ones never make you feel virtuous.' Saunders’s new novel, 'Vigil,' is slim, about the size of Mitch Albom’s memoir 'Tuesdays with Morrie' or Richard Bach’s novella 'Jonathan Livingston Seagull.' It’s not as soft and shallow and saccharine and strenuously earnest as those books, but it’s not impossibly far off. It’s a hot-water bottle in print form. It’s going to be an enormous best seller for depressing reasons.... [I]t’s about an angel named Jill who presides at the deathbed of an oil tycoon and determined planet despoiler named K.J. Boone...."

Writes Dwight Garner, in "George Saunders Serves a Heavy Helping of Virtue in a New Novel/In 'Vigil,' an oil tycoon on his deathbed receives a visit from an angel" (NYT).

"Imagine you are about to have a political argument with a close friend or family member. You are on opposing sides of the left-right rift...."

"Doesn’t it sometimes feel that it would be simpler if you each just brought over a small TV and left it running in the kitchen, tuned to your respective network, while the two of you went into the yard and talked about something about which you possess some original knowledge? Once you’re out there, talking like that, won’t it be nice to feel your pre-formed 'political' carapaces drop away? And won’t it be discouraging and alarming when, as soon as one of you slips up and utters a triggering word or phrase ('immigrant' or 'Trump' or 'politically correct' or 'eating cats and dogs,' for example), you veer back into your canned 'political' jargon, like actors suddenly aware that the scripts you’ve been given must, at all costs, be honored?"

Writes George Saunders, in "Five Thought Experiments Concerning the Underlying Disease/Our civic wells are poisoned. Why?" (The New Yorker).

Saunders is a fine writer, but I'll be cruelly neutral and give him the "civility bullshit" tag he deserves. If Kamala Harris had won, would he be urging us to abandon political speech and get back to the little life of the backyard about which we possess "original knowledge"?

"The audience was great because they were very quiet, although I think 90% of them were quiet because they couldn't figure out what they were seeing."

"Basically, 2,700 people are sitting in one place pretending what they are watching is normal, when it is anything but. It's hard to explain, and if you are only listening to the concert audio you're not going to get it—it's entirely a live manifestation.... [T]his is Dylan in the Bardo. The shows have gotten much more tenuous and ethereal and for the first time I realized that this is a very old person on stage.... [H]e is very much a part of our collective consciousness (much of which he legitimately created), so it is hard to know where this artist ends and reality begins. Only by radically destroying what he has created does Dylan exist in the moment: It's now or never, more than ever.... For me, going to see Dylan has always been like consulting the oracle. The set lists always seemed designed to tell you something about where you are in your life at the moment....  Ending the show with 'It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry' was brilliant, because it's not remotely a show-ender, like 'Watchtower' or 'Like a Rolling Stone.' I got the sense that Bob was aware he might be winding down.... 'I came to tell everybody, but I could not get across.'... When I left the theater at 10pm there was a vast caravan of trucks pulling the giant floats and deflated balloons for the Macy's Thanksgiving day parade.... Don't say I didn't warn you, when your train gets lost."

Writes Raymond Foye in "Bob Dylan In The Bardo" (in The Brooklyn Rail).

I assume the essay title is a play on the George Saunders title "Lincoln in the Bardo":

The novel takes place during and after the death of Abraham Lincoln's son William "Willie" Wallace Lincoln and deals with the president's grief at his loss. The bulk of the novel, which takes place over the course of a single evening, is set in the bardo...

Bardo:

In some schools of Buddhism, bardo... is an intermediate, transitional, or liminal state between death and rebirth.... [W]hen one's consciousness is not connected with a physical body, one experiences a variety of phenomena... from, just after death, the clearest experiences of reality of which one is spiritually capable, and then proceeding to terrifying hallucinations that arise from the impulses of one's previous unskillful actions.... [T]he bardo offers a state of great opportunity for liberation, since transcendental insight may arise with the direct experience of reality... [but] it can become a place of danger as the karmically created hallucinations can impel one into a less than desirable rebirth.

"Trump... is strangely handsome, well proportioned, puts you in mind of a sea captain..."

"... Alan Hale from 'Gilligan’s Island,' say, had Hale been slimmer, richer, more self-confident.... His trademark double-eye squint evokes that group of beanie-hatted street-tough Munchkin kids; you expect him to kick gruffly at an imaginary stone. In person, his autocratic streak is presentationally complicated by a Ralph Kramdenesque vulnerability. He’s a man who has just dropped a can opener into his wife’s freshly baked pie. He’s not about to start grovelling about it, and yet he’s sorry—but, come on, it was an accident. He’s sorry, he’s sorry, O.K., but do you expect him to say it? He’s a good guy. Anyway, he didn’t do it. Once, Jack Benny, whose character was known for frugality and selfishness, got a huge laugh by glancing down at the baseball he was supposed to be first-pitching, pocketing it, and walking off the field. Trump, similarly, knows how well we know him from TV. He is who he is. So sue me, O.K.?"

Writes George Saunders in a New Yorker piece titled "Who are all these Trump supporters?"

"The book that really made me a reader was a pretty bad book indeed: Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand."

"When I read it I was a young and hungry lunkhead who was just realizing that the world was leaving me behind: her perfect reader. I’d been a screw-up in high school and only in my senior year had started to realize that a certain train (Success) was leaving the station and that I might not be on it. Atlas Shrugged seemed to say that my being left behind was not my fault – the whole system was corrupt, and run by whiny jerks, and such an unjust system naturally discriminated against genuine and uncorrupt people like me. I also liked the idea (if Rand was to be believed) (and she was so forceful!), that all I had to do to be good was to believe very strongly/selfishly in myself – which, lo and behold, came naturally. I liked the easy way the Rand reader was encouraged to understand and dismiss suffering as the fault of the (weak, self-indulgent, handout-seeking) sufferer. This eliminated a lot of things I didn’t like: ambiguity, confusion, the struggle of ideas, the possibility that all was not known. In my defense, I hadn’t read a novel since third grade, so the very act of reading a novel was pretty wonderful – all those pages, situations, speeches! Rand’s ideas seemed to be coming to me from a world I had never been to – they seemed European, encoded, sophisticated. All that certainty! All those apparent rapes that actually were, we would later find out, pretty much consensual!"

Writes George Saunders in "The Book That Made Me A Reader..."

"You read about these Tiger Moms — that’s the opposite of the way we viewed things."

Said Aaron Swartz's father. "Our perspective was — and remains so — that our kids should follow their interests."

Swartz’s parents were quick to recognize their son’s enormous intellect and gave him space to cultivate it.... They often deferred to his judgment and ignored his quirks. If they noted his moodiness, they would do so cryptically, as if afraid to offend....

The Swartzes allowed Aaron to take control of his own education at a young age, and he officially withdrew from high school after ninth grade. Between the Web and a grueling diet of books (Swartz would consume more than 100 per year), there wasn’t much he couldn’t master on his own.

Footnote: "When he was 15, Swartz stumbled across his platonic ideal for a high school education: A Boston Globe story 'about a boy who learned while traveling the country with his father, and is now an assistant professor at MIT,' as Swartz summarized it. 'Amen to that!' he wrote."

His father recalls him holding forth passionately on abstract legal concepts as a child. As an adolescent, he became devoted to the fiction of George Saunders, a writer with strong moral commitments whose idiosyncratic style (Saunders routinely makes up words) appealed to the autodidact in him.

Footnote: "Swartz later became a die-hard David Foster Wallace fan, too. Wallace once remarked that the unwritten 'end' of his masterpiece, Infinite Jest, could be 'projected by the reader somewhere beyond the right frame,' and Swartz spent months mining the text for clues. He eventually knitted them into a plausible conclusion, which he laid out on his blog under a 'gigantic spoiler' alert."

From a TNR article by Noam Scheiber about Aaron Swartz, the computer genius who killed himself last month. Since he killed himself, it's hard to know how to take this information about how he educated himself and how his parents accommodated him, but let's look at this and the contrast to what the opposite, the notorious Tiger Mother everybody was talking about 2 years ago.