"It makes a weird kind of sense that 'The Apprentice' is arriving in theaters Friday, a week after 'Joker: Folie à Deux.'"

"Both movies are set in New York in the 1970s and/or ’80s. Both are about larger-than-life antiheroes perceived as monsters by many and lionized by others. And both seem perversely designed to disappoint audiences on either side of the aisle...."

Wrote Ty Burr, in "Trump biopic ‘The Apprentice’ avoids taking sides. Good luck with that. Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong star as the young Don and his soulless mentor, Roy Cohn" (WaPo)(published last Tuesday).

At the Rabelais Café...

... have a taste of conversation.

The engraving is from the 1870s, by Gustave Doré, illustrating "Gargantua and Pantagruel" — written in the mid-1500s by Rabelais, who is under discussion in this earlier post today. That picture is used — in a recent issue of The Paris Review — to introduce an essay by Robert D. Zaretsky, who "argues that we’ve lost sight of the grotesque—and of the immense floodgates of laughter that it alone can open":

Laughter that upends hierarchies and undoes centuries of moral self-seriousness, leaving no one unscathed as it washes over the masses. Looking at Rabelais... Zaretsky wonders how we lost our way—and why we can no longer mock ourselves along with those in power: “Grotesqueness was not an insult, but instead an insight into the human condition. More than half a millennium later, in a world dominated by indignation and outrage, and largely abandoned by laughter, a dose of the grotesque might help to better digest events, if only by having a good—and right kind of—laugh... For medieval man, laughter was the great leveler. Preceding Martin Luther’s priesthood of all believers was Rabelais’s priesthood of all belly-laughers. Inclusive and communal, laughter left no one untouched; no less universal than faith, it was a bit more subversive...”

So sit down and, with a dose of the grotesque, digest the events of our self-serious time.

"He looks a little like you. Maybe you should get a hat like that."

The quote is from me, talking to Meade. The painting is of Rabelais. We've been talking about Rabelais since yesterday. What have you been talking about for the last 2 days? Anything? Topics come and go, but sometimes the same topic recurs within new conversations. Yes, this fits with that thing we were saying, yesterday, as we crossed Monroe Street, and the subject was Salman Rushdie's new novel with a Donald Trump character, and then again, today, as we're discussing the Harvard plaque-on-a-rock memorializing the contributions of slavery in a text written by a law professor who has written a book about Sally Hemings.

Wikipedia on Rabelais:

François Rabelais (/ˌræbəˈleɪ/; French: [fʁɑ̃.swa ʁa.blɛ]; between 1483 and 1494 – 9 April 1553) was a French Renaissance writer, physician, Renaissance humanist, monk and Greek scholar. He has historically been regarded as a writer of fantasy, satire, the grotesque, bawdy jokes and songs. His best known work is Gargantua and Pantagruel. Because of his literary power and historical importance, Western literary critics consider him one of the great writers of world literature and among the creators of modern European writing. His literary legacy is such that today, the word Rabelaisian has been coined as a descriptive inspired by his work and life. Merriam-Webster defines the word as describing someone or something that is "marked by gross robust humor, extravagance of caricature, or bold naturalism."

But you don't get credit as Rabelaisian just by using gross robust humor and extravagant caricature. You must wield literary power or you're just obscene and exaggerating.

Here's the Rabelais quote I'd excerpt for you even if I didn't think it's the one that Meade is, right now, adding to the comments in the previous post (the one about the Harvard plaque-on-a-rock and Sally Hemings):

All their life was spent not in laws, statutes, or rules, but according to their own free will and pleasure. They rose out of their beds when they thought good; they did eat, drink, labour, sleep, when they had a mind to it and were disposed for it. None did awake them, none did offer to constrain them to eat, drink, nor to do any other thing; for so had Gargantua established it. In all their rule and strictest tie of their order there was but this one clause to be observed,

Do What Thou Wilt;

because men that are free, well-born, well-bred, and conversant in honest companies, have naturally an instinct and spur that prompteth them unto virtuous actions, and withdraws them from vice, which is called honour. Those same men, when by base subjection and constraint they are brought under and kept down, turn aside from that noble disposition by which they formerly were inclined to virtue, to shake off and break that bond of servitude wherein they are so tyrannously enslaved; for it is agreeable with the nature of man to long after things forbidden and to desire what is denied us.

Yes, here's the Meade comment, using that quote, with the added statement "Place making, plaque making...." "Place making" goes back to another post, about Madison's effort to stave off murder in local disaffected communities by enlisting a New York firm to bestow its expertise in a mysterious process called "placemaking" — the creation of "vibrant public spaces at the heart of their community."