"Born in 1943 to a New York family of tactile pragmatists (her father helped invent the X-Acto knife), Glück, a preternaturally self-competitive child..."

"... was constantly trying to whittle away at her own perceived shortcomings. When she was a teenager, she developed anorexia — that pulverizing, paradoxical battle with both helplessness and self-control — and dropped to 75 pounds at 16. The disorder prevented her from completing a college degree. Many of the poems Glück wrote in her early 20s flog her own obsessions with, and failures in, control and exactitude. Her narrators are habitués of a kind of limitless wanting; her language, a study in ruthless austerity. (A piano-wire-taut line tucked in her 1968 debut, 'Firstborn': 'Today my meatman turns his trained knife/On veal, your favorite. I pay with my life.') In her late 20s, Glück grew frustrated with writing and was prepared to renounce it entirely...."

From the NYT's annual roundup of short essays about people who died in the past year — "The Lives They Led" — I've chosen a bit of Amy X. Wang's essay on the Nobel Prize-winning poet Louise Glück.

I loved the X-Acto/exactitude theme — the whittling away, the meatman and his trained knife, and the potential to end up with nothing.

ADDED: I wondered if — in 20 years of blogging — I had ever before used the word "exactitude." It's a great word, and I thought, perhaps I'd never used it. But I see I've used it twice, both times in 2018.

Just how vogue is "just how"?

It slammed me in the face today. I was glancing at "So, Just How Violent Is Lars von Trier’s The House That Jack Built?" (New York Magazine) and clicked to my next tab and the first headline I saw was "Just How Fragile is Trump’s North Korea Diplomacy?" (The New Yorker).

Now, that I've noticed, I predict I will see it everywhere. I'm making a tag for it.

Why does it matter to me? Because it's a silly promise of exactitude that I know will not be met. And because it speaks of our aimless yearning for specific knowledge. I feel a little wistful about it.

Let's search Google News for some recent "just how" headlines... "Just how hot is 'hot as balls'?" Oh, well, my question is: Just how hot is 'just how'?

"Royal wedding quiz: Just how well do you know the royal family?," "Just How Much Business Can Batteries Take From Gas Peakers?," "Just How Common Is Salmonella Poisoning?," "Instagram will soon show you just how addicted you are to the app," "Just How Clean Are Pillows and Blankets On Airplanes?," "Why doesn't anyone ever tell you just how much your kids' teeth will cost you," "Just how did Matt Lauer's famous desk button work?," "Just How Catholic Is the Met's New Fashion Exhibit?," "'As it is in heaven': And just how is that?," "Just how bad is America, really?," "Just How Unethical Is Trump's Legal Team?", "This close-up of Kim shows just how much make-up you need for the Met Gala."

It is bizarre, this notion that we need to know the precise workings of the mechanism whereby Matt Lauer closed his door, that a clicked-to article could contain the tantalizing details of what it's like in Heaven, that the dirtiness of all those pillows on all those planes could be expressed with fine-grained accuracy, that the aspect of your use of Instagram that's categorizable as addiction could be rigorously quantified.

Notice how often "just how" is paired with "you" and "your." The absurdity of promise of specific knowledge is magnified by the pretense of making it information about you: your children's teeth, your addiction to Instagram, your make-up at the Met Gala, your knowledge of the royal family.

"Lars von Trier Denies Bjork’s Sexual Harassment Allegations."

Variety reports.

“It was extremely clear to me when I walked into the actresses profession (sic) that my humiliation and role as a lesser sexually harassed being was the norm and set in stone with the director and a staff of dozens who enabled it and encouraged it,” she wrote in a Facebook post. “When I turned the director down repeatedly, he sulked and punished me and created for his team an impressive net of illusion where I was framed as the difficult one. Because of my strength, my great team, and because I had nothing to loose (sic) having no ambitions in the acting world, I walked away from it and recovered in a years time.... the director was fully aware of this game and I am sure of that (sic) the film he made after was based on his experiences with me. Because I was the first one that stood up to him and didn’t let him get away with it.”

The film von Trier made with Bjork was "Dancer in the Dark." The next one — which Bjork believes was based on Von Trier's experiences with her — was was "Dogville." I saw the harrowing "Dancer in the Dark," because I'd been led to believe it was a significant work of art. I avoided "Dogville" however. The description in Variety is enough to remind me why: "Nicole Kidman’s character was repeatedly raped after being accused of betraying the townspeople of a small American village."

"Sex: The Terror and the Boredom."

Title of an article in The New York Review of Books about the Lars von Trier movie "Nymphomaniac." Sample text:

However lumpy and tasteless it may be, his gruel is not without its raisins. There is a very funny montage in which young Joe tells a succession of lovers that they have given her her first orgasm; a tumultuous sequence in which an abandoned wife... accompanied by her young children, confronts the home-wrecking young Joe, volubly and at great length; a charming religious vision that, among other things, satirizes von Trier’s erstwhile model, Andrei Tarkovsky; and a scurrilously farcical scene in which mature Joe is sandwiched between two squabbling slices of male bread.

Gruel with raisins... squabbling slices of male bread...

The chances that I'll ever bother to see "Nymphomanic" are close to zero, but I know who Andrei Tarkovsky is, and I have my DVD of "Andrei Rublev," and even if I would get its being satirized, I don't really need that any more than I need to see sex made terrifying and boring.

"Ultra-violent, demented, plotless, creepy, meat-headed and boring, this is nothing more than a depraved travesty of abstract expression..."

"... that wastes the film it’s printed on. Get to the point, you say. What is it about? Absolutely nothing, really."

Ryan Gosling, looking dangerously anaesthetized, is an American thug who runs a brutal boxing club that doubles as a drug den in the slums of Bangkok. When his sub-mental brother rapes and slaughters a teenage whore, her father slices his head off.... 

I'll slice off the rest of the plot line and go right to:

What on earth is going on here? Was Drive a fluke, or is [Nicolas Winding] Refn just another no-talent from the Lars von Trier school of Something Rotten in Denmark flummery?

Years ago, it used to seem necessary to take in these Danish movies. Life is so much easier now.

"I think I understand the man. He's not what you would call a good guy, but I understand much about him and I sympathize with him a little bit."

What Lars Von Trier said about Hitler, after Kirsten Dunst tries to stop him from stream-of-consciousness talking. He brushes her off with "There will come a point at the end of this..." as if he's being shocking at this point in his riff, but he's going to bring it all in for a landing in some way that's going to be quite brilliant and good. Later, he says that he ran his mouth off and that he was "egged on by a provocation."

Is it possible that von Trier really does sympathize with Hitler? I find it so hard to believe that, even though I don't much like him as a director, but perhaps that is true. Assuming it's not true, it's a PR blunder. And it's terribly insensitive to get people wound up over the subject of Hitler because you have some clever "point at the end of this."

But I can see why a movie director would think he could speak like this. At the movies, the viewers sit still while the entire 2-hour narrative unfolds, and only after the "point at the end" arrives do they begin talking about what they think it meant. In the meantime, the director can take them through all sorts of twists and misdirections. There are disturbing fears and ambiguities along the way. The viewer is supposed to take it all in, to feel and to think on the fly, as the next thing and the next thing is thrown in their faces.

But the press conference did not work like that. People did not sit still and wait for the end of von Trier's narrative arc. And now, he's being punished, and he's abjectly apologizing. Fine. But could he please tell us what "the point at the end of this" was going to be? That would be more useful than an apology. Where was he going? He is a man whom people have cared about as an artist. I want to hear what he was going to say.