"And, for all Haberman’s success in demystifying Trump, at times she seems to vest him with eerie power."

"In interviews, she has often invoked the children’s book 'Harold and the Purple Crayon' to illustrate Trump’s peculiar blurring of fact and fantasy. The tale concerns a boy named Harold who goes for a walk in the evening and draws things from his imagination, including an entire city, with his enchanted crayon. 'What Trump tries to do,' Haberman told me, 'is create realities for himself and everyone else.'... Toward the end of our meeting, Haberman told me that she is superstitious. She was wearing an evil-eye bracelet. Another evil eye was in her pocket. 'I just have totems,' she said..."

From "Maggie Haberman, the Confidence Man’s Chronicler/During the Trump era, Haberman became an avatar of journalism’s promise as well as of its failures. She sees herself as a demystifier" by Katy Waldman (The New Yorker).

"I was accustomed to thinking of most novels the way Nabokov wanted me to, or as Flaubert did—he once wrote that the most beautiful books depend 'on nothing external . . . just as the earth, suspended in the void, depends on nothing external for its support.'"

"Then something happened to change my thinking. I realized that the real world is full of people who, presumably, have feelings about being appropriated for someone else’s run at the Times best-seller list.... Is moving someone down the existence scale from 'human person' to 'character' anything like murder?... I thought that I recognized my past in a stranger’s words... Yet perhaps I was exaggerating the similarities, getting paranoid, self-absorbed.... Who owns a story? In writing my original piece, I lifted the lives of my parents and sister.... If Hall did use my text in some way, perhaps she only turned me from a superpowered narrator back into a character... 'My'... ends up a desiccated, unlovable, insect-like creature; her twin sister dies young.... Interrogating [my] anger now, I find it fascinating. It scans as an authorial fury. My essay was not just a personal history; it was an attempt to reckon with literary and societal representations of anorexia..."

From "Who Owns a Story? I was reviewing a novel. Then I found myself in it" by Katy Waldman (in The New Yorker). This article is from 2019. It came up in a search I was doing this morning (about a book that's mentioned in a different part of the essay).

In asking "who owns a story," Waldman isn't asking for a discussion of copyright. It's about art and ethics. Personally, I've been somebody else's fictional character. More than once. It's a complex matter to be used like that. You may enthusiastically support it, at least some of the time. You might want your story told... but perhaps not quite like that. And if it's told once, is it still there for you to tell it? 

"His book is in love with the toothsomeness of language... 'Hyphenated vulgarities,' such as blow-job, 'are comically dainty'..."

"... Dreyer says. Novels can 'shimmy.' Parentheses have elbows. The author’s delight in his tool kit is palpable, as when he enthuses about ending a sentence shaped like a question with a period rather than a question mark. ('It makes a statement, doesn’t it.') Defending the semicolon, Dreyer quotes at length the opening of 'The Haunting of Hill House,' by Shirley Jackson, breathlessly celebrating the passage’s 'tightly woven, almost claustrophobic ideas . . . a paragraph that grabs you by the hand.' He takes a tinkerer’s joy in breaking apart syntax and putting it back together. Restrictive clauses are like Legos to him. 'There’s something bracingly attractive,' he declares, 'about a sentence that brims with parallelism.' It is as if he has thrown open a window on a starry night in winter and stuck his face outside...."

From "The Hedonic Appeal of 'Dreyer’s English'" by Katy Waldman (in The New Yorker). and here's “Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style" by Benjamin Dreyer.

The horror of efforts to connect the Pittsburgh massacre to Trump.

I will just give one example of the kind of commentary that feels like an immoral elevation of politics over humanity: "Trump’s Response to the Pittsburgh Synagogue Shooting and His Obsession with the Word 'Frankly'" by Katy Waldman in The New Yorker. First, overuse of a word, a verbal tic, is not an "obsession." Second, 11 people were shot to death; who cares about Trump's repetition of a word? I like to do language analysis, but 11 people were murdered. What seems like an "obsession" here is the desire to get after Trump with anything and everything that comes up. Can you just stop for one day?

I'll just quote the fifth of the five paragraphs in the linked piece. Was this worth saying? Does it even make sense?

Before opening fire on the Tree of Life congregants, Bowers posted a message to Gab, a right-wing social network that, like other online forums for extremists, casts itself as an embattled bastion of free speech. “Trump is a globalist, not a nationalist,” Bowers complained on the site. “There is no #maga as long as there is a kike infestation.” The gunman’s accusation evoked a riff-cum-vocabulary lesson from Trump’s rally in Houston on Monday. “A globalist is a person that wants the globe to do well, frankly, not caring about our country so much,” the President explained, before asserting, “I’m a nationalist.” The “frankly” in this case—meant to expose the dirty truth about globalists, and to preface Trump’s oath of fealty to tribal politics—reads as far more honest than anything the President said on Saturday. He is frankest at his rallies and on Twitter. There is a difference, of course, between saying what you mean and saying what is true. Trump is not practicing frankness when he deplores hatred. He is being frank when he foments resentments that are phantasmal. For him, falsehoods carry the weight of facts, whereas reality is “truly unimaginable.”

You can connect anything to anything if you want, and when it's that hard to do, you must really want it. Did Katy Waldman look back on that paragraph and think, God, am I smart. What a language master I am, unlike Trump who keeps saying "frankly"?

"He is being frank when he foments resentments that are phantasmal" — I can't believe she didn't get out the thesaurus and find a synonym for "resentments" that began with an "f" sound. Let me try... He is being frank when he foments fuckeries that are phantasmal.

IN THE COMMENTS: Amadeus 48 said:

A frank assessment of the functional flim-flam of this over-exposed flunky writing for that fortress of fatuousness, fripperies, and follies, the New Yorker, fatigues and, frankly, frightens me, fragile flower of fortune that I am.

A frank fermentation of the functional flim-flam of furious florid flunky Flair flicks...

"'Be best' at what?"

"The First Lady’s spokeswoman, Stephanie Grisham, casts the blurriness of the Be Best campaign as a strength, 'something unique.' 'She has not narrowed her platform down to just one topic, as has been done in the past,' Grisham said, on CNN. 'Mrs. Trump wishes to help the next generation by creating change through awareness on a variety of issues.' Be best: Is it a competitive challenge to kids? (Yikes!) A benediction? A Yoda-esque mantra? It has a Trumpian tinge, a view of life as a competition divided into winners and losers.... Donald Trump’s emptiness revealed itself over decades in the media glare. But Melania, a former model, has long embraced vacancy as an aesthetic. She has the creepy, objectified opacity of a doll, or a robot—a shimmer of the uncanny valley. Her willed passivity may be the strongest expression of her agency. She is an avatar of blankness, a mute queen. Standing behind a podium in the Rose Garden, her husband in the audience, Melania spoke slowly, with practiced inflections; she sounded like an actor reading from a script that she didn’t quite understand...."

From "The Childlike Strangeness of Melania Trump’s 'Be Best' Campaign" by Katy Waldman at The New Yorker.

I haven't read the "Be Best" booklet. Is it a booklet? A website somewhere? But I can honestly say I haven't a clue what it means other than some idea of striving for excellence. What's weird about it is the absence of "your" before "best." We can't all be best, even if lots of us are tippy-top excellent and we work really, really hard. That's not enough if we aren't the best? I'd say it's "best" to give up and not play that competition.

But if "your" were there, "be" would seem wrong. The colloquial expression — not that Melania has any feeling for colloquial English — is "Do your best." But I guess that didn't seem strong enough. I did my best is something we often say lamely. And it seems to provoke the response, "Sometimes your best is not good enough." Isn't that a famous quote? The internet seems to credit Winston Churchill with the line, "Sometimes doing your best is not good enough. Sometimes you must do what is required."

Do what is required. Maybe some future first lady will use that. No, of course not. In America, you'd get a first lady going with "Do your own thing" before "Do what is required." We prefer freedom to being told what to do. And yet, you could have your own personal goals, and "Do what is required" would be nothing more than a prod to figure out the means to that end — your end — and get it done.

But Melania's mystifying slogan doesn't have the action word "do." Her verb is "be." Maybe it's not about achieving at all. Just "be." Maybe it's more hippie that "Do your own thing." It's "Be here now." We can have a Be-In. The notion of "best" melts away. It's all best.

And that's how to be best at blogging.

"Almost every journalist has met people like Mr. McLemore, sources who email you under pseudonyms with tips a little too good to be true."

"Often they seem to mostly want someone to talk to, and to have their experiences validated by a journalist, whose job, after all, is to decide what’s important and true. Most reporters would stop taking those calls when the story ideas don’t bear fruit, but not [Brian] Reed. He finds [John B.] McLemore’s life important in and of itself, and a whole world opens up to him."

Writes Amanda Hess (in the NYT) about the new podcast "S-Town." She avoids spoilers. You can listen to all 7 episodes here.

I highly recommend it. I listened to the whole thing in 3 days and immediately went back to Episode 1 to relisten (and am up to Episode 3). I consider it a work of art — perhaps a great work of art. The second go-round will tell. The first time through, you're pulled along by wanting to figure out who all these people are and what happened. There are layers of revelations. On re-listen, you see the first hints of what is to come. You see the repetitions of themes — such as time (McLemore is a restorer of clocks, sundials have sad inscriptions about time). You know as characters show up and start speaking in their own way from their own perspective what part they will play in the whole story. If it is a great work of art, it will be better the second time. That's my test.

I'm reading some other articles about "S-Town." Aja Romano has a piece in Vox with a headline that overstates the argument: "S-Town is a stunning podcast. It shouldn't have been made." The text says: "I’m not sure it should have been made." One might say that Reed invested so much of his time — speaking of time — gathering audio and got such great material that he just had to use it, and he processed it brilliantly. It may be so good because Reed, et al, were so desperate to justify using what they had. And McLemore's vivid raving is so wonderful, so fascinating, that it's hard to say it should be suppressed for the reason that you will know if you get to the end of episode 2.

Here are links to the Reddit threads discussing the show episode-by-episode. The top comment at the linked page is:

I wish I had a cousin like Tyler's uncle Jimmy to be my own personal hype man whenever I talk.

"Yeah!"

"Yes sir!"

"You goddamn right!"

Is there an ethical problem or are we free to enjoy Uncle Jimmy? Here's how Hess in the fit-to-print NYT referred to him: "Uncle Jimmy, who communicates exclusively through shouted affirmations." Jimmy is a man with a bullet lodged in his head.

Katy Waldman in Slate says that McLemore "embodies rightwing fantasies about the judgmental elitism of the left." Don't misread that. McLemore is obsessed with everything that's wrong with the world, especially global warming. He rants about it continually, enlarging talk on just about any subject into all the terrible things that are happening in the world. That is, he seems to be a lefty that popped out of rightwinger's fervid caricature. But "S-Town" isn't making a hero of him because he's into lefty issues. In fact, the show lets it become clear that his ravings on these subjects is symptomatic of his devastating personal problems.

Beyond clocks, McLemore also tended to his garden — lots of flowers and an elaborate circular hedge maze. People have found the maze on Google maps, and you can see photographs here.

Despite all the horror at the troubles of the world and the refuge in gardening, the show never mentions Voltaire's "cultivate your garden" resolution of "Candide." But the show does have literary references, notably the William Faulkner story "A Rose for Emily," which I was motivated to read yesterday. The story is mentioned early on, and every episode ends with the beautiful recording "A Rose for Emily" by The Zombies. Listen to that here. That's from the "Odessey and Oracle" album, which came out 50 years ago. Talk about time! (The Zombies are touring, playing the music from that album, and I hear they're great. They'll be in Madison on April 15th. Get your tickets here. I've got mine.)

Kanye West is "at once a prop and, because Trump’s political calculations can’t be unsnarled from the narcissistic Trump Show playing in his mind, a bauble for the kingpin to gloat over."

Writes Katy Waldman in Slate in a piece with the drama-queen headline "Donald’s Beautiful Dark Fascist Fantasy/What do Trump and Kanye have in common? Totalitarian aesthetics and disconnection from reality."

How about all the times celebrities have appeared with Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton? Did you call them all props and baubles for a narcissist to gloat over?

Waldman goes on to talk about the "fascist undertone" of West's art. (She doesn't use the word "dark," by the way. That racially questionable adjective only appears in the headline.)

Mussolini’s favorite thinkers exalted the heroic, and curiously amoral, promise of man hurtling toward perfection; West speaks in similarly bombastic terms when he declares that, as a musician, “I can do whatever I want to do. … If I’m gonna take a stage and like, open up a motherfucking mountain I can do that.”... West and Trump’s dynamic—the artist and the strongman—evokes a traditional symbiosis between aestheticism and fascism. In the visually ravishing films of Leni Riefenstahl, the crisp goose-stepping of smartly uniformed troops, the propulsive fervor of futurism, we’ve seen politics married to the pursuit of the beautiful before.

Ironically, it's Waldman who is marrying ideas and images. If she's aware of how propaganda like Riefenstahl's films work, is she circumspect about what she herself is doing? It's not too aesthetically appealing, so there's little chance that it will sway large crowds, but it is, in its own tawdry way, propaganda.

IN THE COMMENTS: MadisonMan said:

So it's come to this. Slate writers assuming that Black entertainers are useful stooges to The Man.

Nothing racist at all about that assumption. 

It's the Clarence Thomas treatment. A black person is given less room to have opinions of his own.

"New Study Says That Lesbians Hold Hands Better."

A headline at Slate marks the emergence of a new rule in reporting on scientific studies: Where a difference is shown between gay and straight people, portray what is true of gay people to be better.

What's bad about the way heterosexual people hold hands? There's a "dominant" position, and the man takes it. That's funny. I always thought there's a more comfortable position and the man lets me take it. Am I supposed to feel all subordinated retrospectively?