"The Democrat Congresswomen have been spewing some of the most vile, hateful, and disgusting things ever said by a politician in the House or Senate, & yet they get a free pass..."

"... and a big embrace from the Democrat Party. Horrible anti-Israel, anti-USA, pro-terrorist & public..... .... .....shouting of the F...word, among many other terrible things, and the petrified Dems run for the hills. Why isn’t the House voting to rebuke the filthy and hate laced things they have said? Because they are the Radical Left, and the Democrats are afraid to take them on. Sad!"

Tweeted Trump, just now.

1. He's a master of Tweet-talk — he's tweet-talking us — but he makes language mistakes that I would edit out. He writes, "the petrified Dems run for the hills," but if you are petrified — the dead metaphor is turned to stone — you can't move, so you can't run. (The OED gives this example from Jack London's "White Fang": "The cub was in a frenzy of terror, yet he lay without movement or sound, frozen, petrified into immobility, to all appearances dead.")

2. But "petrified" is a slightly unusual word, so it works as a stimulant.

3. The implicit subject is that Nancy Pelosi is going forward with a vote to condemn Trump for his "Why don't they go back..." tweets (which we discussed here yesterday). Trump is certainly not backing down. He doesn't do that, and how could that possibly work? If he ever withdrew a remark and apologized, his antagonists would react by demanding another concession. So he plunges forward, in attack mode: "Why isn’t the House voting to rebuke the filthy and hate laced things they have said?" You don't like what I said, look at what you said. And on and on.

4. A return of the iconic "Sad!"

5. The key line is: "Because they are the Radical Left, and the Democrats are afraid to take them on." He's tying all the Democrats to a small, vocal group that the Democrats don't want as their brand. He's taunting them: You can't even distance yourself from this small group, within your own party, for your own sake. Implied: How can you be trusted to defend America?

6. Look at the arc of emotion in Trump's brief statement: It begins with hate (the "spewing" of "vile, hateful, and disgusting things") and proceeds to love ("a big embrace") and then to anger ("shouting of the F...word") and then to fear ("petrified Dems... afraid to take them on"), and finally sadness ("Sad!"). The hate and anger are projected outward from the small subgroup of Democrats. The love and fear are experienced within the fragile body of mainstream Democrats. And the sadness is Trump's idea of the appropriate reaction from anyone watching.

7. Look at the narrative of action: the small subgroup of Democrats spews. The more sensible Democrats have one strong action — the big hug — and the rest is weakness — frozen into immobility or running. Yes, there's that implied activity, voting to condemn Trump, but he doesn't mention it. His defense is to go on the offense. Yet he assumes the position of standing back and observing and finding it sad.

"Day had broken cold and grey, exceedingly cold and grey..."

That's from the first text that I ran across looking for evidence to support my theory — stated in the comments to "A Gray Walk" — that "grey" is a better spelling than "gray":

I like the spelling "grey" because it expresses the meaning better. The letter "a" looks happier to me — maybe just because of my name — and "e" looks dreary. 

As the commenter who raised the subject observed, "grey" tends to be preferred in the U.K. and "gray" is the American preference. The important thing, for blogging purposes, is to pick one and stay with it. The key is consistency within a single work, and I picked "gray" early on in this 12-years-and-counting project — probably under the influence of Crayola. And looking for a photo of "gray" on a crayon label, I see that I've blogged about this before, in a post with the evocative title "50 Shades of Gary."

Anyway, the quote in the post title is the beginning of "To Build a Fire." Wouldn't it seem less foreboding if Jack London had written "Day had broken cold and gray, exceedingly cold and gray..."?

And test this one, from "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" by Edgar Allan Poe (whose middle name should have been Allen).

"On a chair lay a razor, besmeared with blood. On the hearth were two or three long and thick tresses of grey human hair, also dabbled in blood, and seeming to have been pulled out by the roots."

or

"On a chair lay a razor, besmeared with blood. On the hearth were two or three long and thick tresses of gray human hair, also dabbled in blood, and seeming to have been pulled out by the roots."

"I think the books I read as a child made me want to write..."

E.L. Doctorow says, giving a quick list of things makes me feel this is exactly what a kid should read... for starters:

Stevenson’s “Treasure Island” and “Kidnapped”; C. S. Lewis’s “Out of the Silent Planet” and “Perelandra”; Mark Twain’s boy books, and his “Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court”; Jack London’s “Call of the Wild” and “White Fang”; Dickens’s “David Copperfield,”  “Great Expectations” and “A Tale of Two Cities”; Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories; Victor Hugo’s “Hunchback of Notre Dame” and “Les Misérables.” Poe’s detective and horror stories; the Horatio Hornblower sea novels of C. S. Forester; all the “Oz” books; and in middle school, “Mario and the Magician,” by Thomas Mann, and Kafka’s “Metamorphosis.” For starters.

Could they package these all in one nice ebook anthology?

A life made out of reading.

From an early obituary for Susan Sontag, who has just died of leukemia:

Sontag was reading by 3. In her teens, her passions were Gerard Manley Hopkins and Djuna Barnes. The first book that thrilled her was "Madame Curie," which she read when she was 6. She was stirred by the travel books of Richard Halliburton and the Classic Comics rendition of Shakespeare’s "Hamlet." The first novel that affected her was Victor Hugo’s "Les Miserables."

"I sobbed and wailed and thought [books] were the greatest things," she recalled. "I discovered a lot of writers in the Modern Library editions, which were sold in a Hallmark card store, and I used up my allowance and would buy them all."

She remembered as a girl of 8 or 9 lying in bed looking at her bookcase against the wall. "It was like looking at my 50 friends. A book was like stepping through a mirror. I could go somewhere else. Each one was a door to a whole kingdom."

Edgar Allan Poe’s stories enthralled her with their "mixture of speculativeness, fantasy and gloominess." Upon reading Jack London’s "Martin Eden," she determined she would become a writer. "I got through my childhood," she told the Paris Review, "in a delirium of literary exaltations."

At 14, Sontag read Thomas Mann’s masterpiece, "The Magic Mountain." "I read it through almost at a run. After finishing the last page, I was so reluctant to be separated from the book that I started back at the beginning and, to hold myself to the pace the book merited, reread it aloud, a chapter each night."

Sontag began to frequent the Pickwick bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard, where she went "every few days after school to read on my feet through some more of world literature — buying when I could, stealing when I dared."

I have never heard of anyone loving reading that much. Say what you will about Sontag and her various political ravings, the woman did truly love reading.