"Are we just alternating between weird and normal — perceptions of weird and normal? If so, then 2024 is Trump's turn again."

That's the last line of a post I wrote on May 23, 2023 — "DeSantis uses Warren G. Harding's word, 'normalcy': 'We must return normalcy to our communities.'"

That was back when DeSantis was endeavoring to replace Trump by being essentially Trump minus the weirdness. Yes, there was talk of weird-versus-normal just like there is today. I said:

I myself am hungry for normality, but I don't trust people who keep saying "normal." I always think of Peter Sellers as Clare Quilty in "Lolita" — "It's great to see a normal face, 'cause I'm a normal guy. Be great for two normal guys to get together and talk about world events, in a normal way...."

"When I was 20 and a junior at Harvard College, a series of great ironies began to mock me."

"I could study all I wanted, prove myself as exceptional as I liked, and still my fiercest advantage remained so universal it deflated my other plans. My youth. The newness of my face and body. Compellingly effortless; cruelly fleeting.... I could diligently craft an ideal existence, over years and years of sleepless nights and industry. Or I could just marry it early. So naturally I began to lug a heavy suitcase of books each Saturday to the Harvard Business School to work on my Nabokov paper. In one cavernous, well-appointed room sat approximately 50 of the planet’s most suitable bachelors.... I could not understand why my female classmates did not join me.... Why ignore our youth when it amounted to a superpower?..."

Writes Grazie Sophia Christie, in "The Case for Marrying an Older Man/A woman’s life is all work and little rest. An age gap relationship can help." This is from a series in New York Magazine called "The Good Life," which is "about ways to take life off 'hard mode,' from changing careers to gaming the stock market, moving back home, or simply marrying wisely."

"In perfect sync with his much-hyped generation, Keith... adored the Monkees more than the Beatles and was briefly a Jesus freak...."

"Haring may have out-Warholed Warhol, a mentor and collaborator, in enjoying celebrity friends.... But he was less cool than hot, eager and earnest: handing out free buttons and selling cheap merch at his prescient Pop Shop but fretting about his place in the canon and firing off indignant letters to editors. Time magazine’s influential critic Robert Hughes emerges here as a particular Joker to his Batman, likening Haring and his friend Jean-Michel Basquiat to 'those two what’s their names on "Miami Vice"' and calling them 'Keith Boring' and 'Jean-Michel Basketcase.' (Good lord!)..."

From "A New Keith Haring Biography Draws the Most Complete Picture Yet/In his thoroughly researched 'Radiant,' Brad Gooch considers the short, blazing life of the ’80s artist, activist and man about downtown" (NYT).

ADDED: The New Yorker article is "Keith Haring, the Boy Who Cried Art/Was he a brilliant painter or a brilliant brand?" Excerpt:

"Music, I regret to say, affects me merely as an arbitrary succes­sion of more or less irritating sounds."

Wrote Vladimir Nabokov, quoted in "Who Doesn’t Like Music? Nabokov, For Starters On the Odd Case of the Musical Anhedonic" (via Metafilter).

The article is by Michel Faber, who says:

Musical anhedonics are thought to account for up to 5 percent of the world’s population....  The syndrome is often discussed in the same articles that pon­der the mysteries of autism.

"There is also a peculiar effect whereby different books read by the same narrator can seem to agglutinate into a single mongrel super-book."

"The audiobooks of Norman Mailer’s 'Miami and the Siege of Chicago,' Steven Pinker’s 'The Sense of Style,' and Nabokov’s epic 'Ada' are all read by Arthur Morey, and I’ve begun to hear his circumspect and world-weary enunciation meld into an imaginary work in which the 1968 Republican convention is satirized between bouts of hectoring the reader about sentence construction, all in Nabokov’s wildly over-frosted late prose. Many of my beloved science-fiction audiobooks are read by Robertson Dean, whose voice sounds like a glob of pomegranate molasses falling off the edge of a spoon. It’s a good fit for techy near-future dystopias, at once hal-ishly flat and resonantly mellow, saying things like, '[she] lay staring up at a dim anamorphic view of the repeated insectoid cartouche' (that’s from William Gibson’s 'Zero History')."

Writes Paul Grimstad, in "Confessions of an Audiobook Addict/It’s both strange and enlightening to move through the world with an author’s voice filling your ears" (The New Yorker).

"The 5,000-square-foot Insectarium... features a slew of digital exhibits and maps, along with artfully pinned butterflies and beetles, oversized models of bees and mosquitos..."

"... and an 8,000-pound resin model of a beehive. It also houses 18 different species of live creatures, including giant cave cockroaches and spiny flower mantises. Visitors also can pass under a transparent sky bridge to see 500,000 leaf-cutter ants transporting pieces of blackberry bramble to create their colony’s fungal food.... On three of the four floors open to the public at the new center, floor-to-ceiling glass displays reveal a slice of the 4 million specimens that are housed in the building — from butterflies collected by 'Lolita' author Vladimir Nabokov to 'cleared and stained' sea horses in jars....."

From "New $465M American Museum of Natural History center is crawling with bugs" (NY Post).

This post was written for good luck!

By the way, what's the stupidest argument you ever got into with a smart person? I won't name the person, but he objected to my categorization of butterflies as insects. I couldn't believe I had to argue about this. I remember, at what point, saying, "Well, what do you think they are? Birds?!"

"When Polka Dots Signal Both Optimism and Disquiet/The motif has long been associated with a certain brand of American cheeriness but, as its recent ubiquity attests, is most visible during times of turbulence."

A headline in T, the NYT Style Magazine, for an article by Nick Haramis.

The history of polka dots. This is the article I want to read. I feel some pressure to write about Biden's 2-hour news conference yesterday, which I watched, but I'm loath to blog it without a complete transcript. I have seen the "5 takeaways" pieces and the "utter disaster!!!" stuff, and it's propaganda on top of propaganda. Until I find a transcript, I'm holding off, I'm in the ellipsis... and therefore: polka dots!

Haramis writes delightfully:

"In a fast-moving world of first impressions, where conversations have been replaced by 'likes,' our relations with others are governed by the skin."

"We speak with the skin: We get tattoos, we sit in the sun for a nice, deep tan, we cover up or show ourselves off, we get piercings or smear ourselves with expensive creams or go for Botox treatments in an attempt to remain eternally young. ...  And yet, at the same time, we pretend we don’t care about it. Skin-related issues — apart from those that affect politics, like racism — aren’t generally deemed worthy of writerly reflection.... Nobody cares about the feelings of shame experienced by those with skin conditions.... I never considered writing about my psoriasis because I resisted the very idea that it was a problem. It wasn’t part of me. My body wasn’t part of me; I existed purely in what was noncorporeal, in my writings, my intellect. All the itching, the patches of peeling, flaky skin — these were private problems....  I would sometimes come across historical figures and writers who suffered the same illness as I do. Joseph Stalin, for example. And Vladimir Nabokov. Their biographies would barely mention it.... But... the skin problems of these people had a considerable influence on their lives and work. Their skin was instrumental in shaping their ways of perceiving, understanding and relating to the world, which was almost always from a position of shame and rage. Studying Stalin’s life, I began to entertain the notion — I’m a writer, it’s my job to exaggerate — that the gulags were a kind of revenge for all the intolerable itching."

Writes Sergio del Molino, the author of "Skin," in "What Makes Me a Monster" (NYT).

I thought of Marat...

Not discussed in the column, but here's a bit — an itchy flake — from the book "Skin":

"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? 

"Senators, America we need to exercise our common sense about what happened.... Let's not get caught up in a lot of outlandish lawyers theories here. Exercise your common sense about what just took place in our country."

Said Lead Impeachment Manager Jamie Raskin, quoted in a February 11th Wall Street Journal piece — "In Closing, Raskin Quotes Thomas Paine: 'Tyranny, Like Hell, Is Not Easily Conquered'" — by Lindsay Wise. Thomas Paine's 1776 pamphlet was called "Common Sense."

Quoted in response to Raskin, Senator Josh Hawley: "I was really disappointed they didn’t engage much with the legal standards. This is a legal process after all. Very little engagement."

When do we get to bypass studying the factual details and legal standards and all the links in a chain of reasoning? When is it okay to just look at the whole thing and rely on instinct and just know that something is right or wrong? 

The answer can't be: When it helps my side win. 

People who liked Raskin's appeal to "common sense" — as opposed to "lawyers theories" — need to realize it's also the way Trump argued that he won the 2020 election. You just look at what you can see and feel what you feel. 

And that's how Trump has been talking to his people all along. In your heart, you know he's right... or, in your guts you know he's nuts. 

Bias has become the preferred form of reasoning. Better not get bogged down in lawyers theories. The other side is off and running. 

Here's an article in by Sophia Rosenfeld in The Nation from 2017, "The Only Thing More Dangerous Than Trump’s Appeal to Common Sense Is His Dismissal of It":

Trump began his quixotic campaign for president as the embodiment of a familiar kind of right-wing, common-sense populism. Instead of deference to well-trained scientists, academics, journalists, and even governmental authorities, he touted the true wisdom of “the people.” In place of fancy studies built on research, data, and modeling, he promised plain-spoken, off-the-cuff reports on the state of our world and obvious, practical solutions to our problems. 

That is, Trump suggested politics was actually quite simple if only one would rely on the kind of basic reasoning which emerges from just going about normal, everyday business using one’s senses and instincts and which—surprise, surprise—tends to run counter to “establishment” conclusions.... 

Here's the post that is the reason Ayn Rand is trending on Twitter right now.

Top 7 Warning Signs In a Man's Bookshelf:
1. A Dog-eared copy of Infinite Jest
2. Too Much Hemingway
3. Any amount of Bukowski
4. AYN. RAND.
5. Goethe
6. "Lolita is my favorite book."
7. "'Fathers and Sons' Is my favorite book."

— Jess McHugh (@MchughJess) August 24, 2020

I'm sure many of you can write better "Top 7 Warning Signs In a Man's Bookshelf" lists!

"Trump is going to try dampening black voter enthusiasm for Biden by contrasting the two men’s criminal justice records."

"The framing will be simple: Trump signed a bipartisan criminal-legal reform bill, the First Step Act, and has been generous with his pardon powers toward unjustly imprisoned black people, like Alice Marie Johnson.... ...Trump’s status as a self-styled reformer is laughable, [but] Biden’s record is grotesque. Most of its lowlights occurred in the 'tough on crime' 1980s and 1990s... [when] he viciously characterized people who commit crimes as sociopathic 'predators' who are beyond rehabilitation. He cast then-President Bush’s escalation of the War on Drugs as lacking 'enough police officers to catch the violent thugs, enough prosecutors to convict them, enough judges to sentence them, or enough prison cells to put them away for a long time.' He authored the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act [that]... expanded the death penalty, eliminated education funding for imprisoned students, created harsher sentencing guidelines for a wide range of crimes, and increased funding for local police departments and corrections departments....  Perhaps more than any other official of the era, he embodied the Democratic impulse to outflank Republicans from the right by locking more people in jails and prisons. He helped catalyze the most dramatic expansion of the carceral state in the history of the country with the highest incarceration rate in the world. He said he was 'not at all' ashamed of his involvement as recently as 2016...."

From "On Criminal Justice, Biden Has No Moral Standing Over Trump" by Zak Cheney-Rice (New York Magazine).

... the most dramatic expansion of the carceral state in the history of the country... — I don't think I'd ever seen the word "carceral" before — "the most dramatic expansion of the carceral state in the history of the country." But it's a word that the OED traces back to the 1500s. It means what you can easily see it means — relating to prisons. Nabokov used it in "Invitation to a Beheading" (1960), describing the opening of a prison door: "... suddenly the key scraped in the lock and the door opened, whining, rattling and groaning in keeping with all the rules of carceral counterpoint." That is, opening the prison door sounded exactly like opening a prison door.

ADDED: This magazine essay is larded with assurances that Trump is awful on criminal justice too, so it's only that Biden will have trouble gaining an advantage here. Biden can't get "moral standing over Trump," but why doesn't Trump have moral standing over Biden?

"Some 800 girls were said to have sought the part. When Ms. Lyon was cast, Mr. Nabokov, employing the word he used in the novel, called her 'the perfect nymphet'..."

"Ms. Lyon accumulated more than two dozen film and television credits from 1959 to 1980, but she was known primarily for one: Mr. Kubrick’s 1962 film of the Nabokov novel ['Lolita'], which was adapted for the screen by Mr. Nabokov himself.... The novel was scandalous when it was first published in English in 1955; the film, made when the restrictive Motion Picture Production Code still governed Hollywood, was less so — in part, some critics thought, because Ms. Lyon, whose character was aged slightly for the movie, seemed too mature. 'She looks to be a good 17 years old, possessed of a striking figure and a devilishly haughty teenage air,' Bosley Crowther said in his review in The Times. 'The distinction is fine, we will grant you, but she is definitely not a "nymphet."'"

From "Sue Lyon, Star of ‘Lolita,’ Is Dead at 73/She was 14 when she was cast in the title role of Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 film of the Nabokov novel. It remained her best-known credit" (NYT).

"It was around this time that I started separating the alphabet into good letters, V as well as M, and bad letters, S, F and T, plus the terrible vowel sounds..."

"... open and mysterious and nearly impossible to wrangle. Each letter had a degree of difficulty that changed depending upon its position in the sentence. Much later when I read that Nabokov as a child assigned colors to letters, it made sense to me that the hard G looked like 'vulcanized rubber' and the R, 'a sooty rag being ripped.' My beloved V, in the Nabokovian system, was a jewel-like 'rose quartz.'"

From "My Stutter Made Me a Better Writer/At times it caused suffering, but it also gave me a passion for words and language" by Darcey Steinke (NYT).

The day the NYT crossword gave "Teases, in older usage" as a clue for "LOLITAS"...

... and Rex Parker limited his usual write-up of the puzzle to:

Lolita was 12 years old.

She was extensively sexually abused by her stepfather.

I guess she shouldn't have "teased" him?

See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. if you want something more to read, try this.

And "this" goes to "Why Is the New York Times Crossword So Clueless About Race and Gender?," a Slate article from June 28th, provoked by Tuesday's puzzle that had the clue "Decidedly non-feminist women’s group" for "HAREM" (which was "was unnecessary and awful while also managing to be demeaning to both sex workers and women in sex slavery").

"For the more mortal among us, there is cold comfort in the idea that even Nabokov could not coax two entire vocabularies out of reckless passion."

Writes Stacy Schiff in a biography of Vladimir Nabokov's wife Véra. The quote appears in a New Yorker piece by Judith Thurman titled "Silent Partner/What do Nabokov’s letters conceal?" Nabokov and his wife had a long, extremely close relationship, and he wrote many letters to her, praising her in terms that, as Thurman puts it, are "hard to distinguish from self-infatuation ('It’s as if in your soul there is a prepared spot for every one of my thoughts')." But he cheated on her and, at one point, "Nabokov is enjoying torrid sex with his worshipful mistress while lying to his wife about ending the affair," and:

He suffers not a little shame, yet tells Irina he can’t live without her. He even hints that he will leave Véra—given time. And, in letters that might have made a fascinating appendix, he extolls his and Irina’s uncanny compatibility in suspiciously familiar prose. “For the more mortal among us,” Schiff observes, “there is cold comfort in the idea that even Nabokov could not coax two entire vocabularies out of reckless passion.”

"Many of the op-eds and articles on trigger warnings published this week have argued on behalf of the sanctity of the relationship between the reader and the text."

"For the most part, I have agreed with them," writes Jay Caspian Kang in The New Yorker.

A trigger warning reduces a work of art down to what amounts to plot points. If a novel like José Saramago’s “Blindness” succeeds because it sews up small yet essential pockets of human normalcy against a horrific backdrop, a preëmptive label like “Trigger Warning: Violence and internment” strips it down to one idea.

I relayed these thoughts to [Alexandra Brodsky, an editor at the Web site Feministing], along with the anecdote about my professor and “Lolita.” 

His professor had proclaimed: "When you read ‘Lolita,’ keep in mind that what you’re reading about is the systematic rape of a young girl."

“What a delight it must be to read a book full of graphic accounts of sexual violence and still have the book not be about sexual violence to you!” she said. “Why is the depersonalized, apolitical reading the one we should fight for?” I admit, this was an angle I had not yet considered, and I recalled the severe annoyance I’d felt in college seminars and coffeehouse conversations whenever a white person would say a bit too ringingly that a book written by a person of color somehow “transcended race,” as if that was the highest compliment that could be paid to a work written by one of us poor, striving minorities. Every reliable figure, whether from academic study or from the Obama Administration, says that somewhere between one in four and one in five women are sexually assaulted during their time in college....

Every reliable figure?! That sentence really undercut Kang's credibility for me. I note that he says "sexually assaulted" and not "rape" (a word that appears 7 times in his article), and depending on what the meaning of sexually assaulted is — does it include getting grabbed? — the number is up for grabs. But we're seeing that notoriously spurious statistic in a paragraph that's in the middle of Kang's essay. It's a sop to the feminists, a place on his narrative arc before he ultimately delivers us back where he started and agrees with his own original orientation against trigger warnings.

In his final paragraph, he announces that "In a good novel... every word matters." So: "Any excess language—in the form of a trigger warning—amounts to a preëmptive defacement." The author should control the roll-out of shocks — lulling and luring you into a dark alley where — if it's his way — he can rape you mentally assault you.

"'My mouth is full of decayed teeth and my soul of decayed ambitions'..."

"... James Joyce wrote in a letter to his brother at the beleaguered age of 25.... Martin Amis... and Vladimir Nabokov... suffered 'catastrophic tooth-loss' while in their 40s... Virginia Woolf['s] teeth were pulled on the bizarre theory that they caused her mental disorders.... Dostoevsky's Underground Man masochistically glories in the 'malignant' pain in his mouth. Handsome Count Vronsky is deformed by toothache after Anna Karenina's [SPOILER ALERT] suicide. Abscesses and botched extractions mark the decline of the Buddenbrook clan. John Updike's 1955 short story 'Dentistry and Doubt' places a seminary student in the dentist's chair and carries out a primer on theodicy. 'Even his toothbrush,' thinks the young cleric, his mouth filled with metal instruments, 'which on good days presented itself as an acolyte of matinal devotion, today seemed an agent of atheistic hygiene, broadcasting the hideous fact of bacteria. Why had God created them . . . ?'"

The beginning a Wall Street Journal piece about a novel where the main character is a dentist.

"When Nabokov started translating [his memoir] into Russian, he recalled a lot of things that he did not remember when he was writing it in English..."

"It came out in Russian and he felt that in order to represent his childhood properly to his American readership, he had to produce a new version. So the version of Nabokov's autobiography we know now is actually a third attempt, where he had to recall more things in Russian and then re-translate them from Russian back into English."

From Alan Yu's "How Language Seems To Shape One's View Of The World," via Metafilter's "If Inuit have 100 words for snow, linguists must have many for this idea."

Stephen King wants you to "Just know my heart is where it’s always been: in the right place."

So ends his apology for his attention-grabbing Tweet — "Boy, I’m stumped on that one. I don’t like to think it’s true, and there’s an element of palpable bitchery there, but...." — which we were talking about here last night. My post is pretty much only about the instant-classic, unforgettable phrase "Palpable Bitchery."

I pause for a few moments at this point to create a blog called Palpable Bitchery. Feel it, read it.

Now, all I want to say in this new post is: Isn't it funny, the big horror writer, caring so much about our knowledge of his good heart — heart in the right place — when we know that his writerly master mind would — in an instant — take a phrase like heart in the right place and mutate it into some crazy story about hearts in little children turning alien and evil and melting everything within their lovely little communities that he would imagine and describe just so you'd feel awful to see them destroyed?

But Stephen King would like to remind you of the 4 books he wrote — Carrie, Dolores Claiborne, Rose Madder, and Lisey’s Story — that demonstrate that "I have plenty of respect for women, and care about the problems and life-situations they face."  And he has the life story to reinforce this reputation for respecting women: "My single-mom mother faced plenty [of the the problems and life-situations that women face], believe me." Plus, he has "no sympathy whatever for those who abuse children." Can you really write novels about child abusers without inhabiting their innards and seeing it from their point of view? Leave that to the Nabokovs.  This is Stephen King. His evil is pure evil and his good is pure good. "I wrote about such abuse — and its ultimate cost to the victim — in Gerald’s Game." And presumably Gerald['s abuser] is nothing but a monster down to his core. Is there some reason why anyone would read that book?

Here's something Tyler Cowen said in a TED talk:

As a simple rule of thumb, just imagine every time you’re telling a good vs. evil story, you’re basically lowering your IQ by ten points or more. If you just adopt that as a kind of inner mental habit, it’s, in my view, one way to get a lot smarter pretty quickly. You don’t have to read any books. Just imagine yourself pressing a button every time you tell the good vs. evil story, and by pressing that button you’re lowering your IQ by ten points or more.

Consider the palpable foolery of Stephen King. He needs you to know he's a good person. He detected bitchery, and The Grand Bitch Internet struck back. He's cowed. He wants to be loved. And that's why he cannot be a great writer. So give him the love he craves. Apology accepted. You are forgiven, Mr. King, you tiny little man.

It's 4:50 in the morning here in Madison, Wisconsin. Are you feeling the palpable bitchery? It exists, and it is real. And spectacular.