"And just so you know, because all Biden does is talks about COVID. Right? He doesn’t call it the China virus. You know why?"

"Because China has him paid off. He can’t use that term. They gave his son one and a half billion to manage. He makes millions of dollars a year, I assume. Right?... He walked in, he walked out with one and a half billion. Hey, maybe he’s not so stupid after all. Right? That’s the only thing. I thought he was so dumb. Maybe he’s not as dumb as we think.... The biggest story, no, the second biggest story, the worst was when they spied on my campaign and they got caught. That’s the biggest political corruption story in the history of our country, but this could very well be second. And we have what’s called the laptop from hell, the laptop from hell. From what I’ve understood, you only have seen a tiny portion of it, but you know what the press is now doing? They’re blaming Russia. It’s Russia did it. Russia is the one that created the laptop. And Russia brought it into that little shop to have it fixed. Russia. I think Russia’s looking at us, they’re saying, 'Those people are stone cold crazy. This is…' No, it was Russia’s fault. They said it. Loud and clear. It was Russia, Russia, Russia. Aren’t we tired of this crap? I saw a Schiff the other day, two days ago, watermelon, he looks like a watermelon head. Right?"

Just a little sample of what your President said in Tampa, Florida yesterday.

Do the people understand that kind of talk? It made me think of that sentence from a New Yorker article about French poets that I saw fit to quote for you yesterday: "Rimbaud’s 'A Season In Hell' gave the idea that poetry should be, first of all, a journey into extreme experience, evidenced not by a coherent evocation of a story but by subversive images and sensual evocations that subvert logic and language itself."

Trump's Tampa speech gave the idea that politics should be, first of all, a journey into extreme experience, evidenced not by a coherent evocation of a story but by subversive images and sensual evocations that subvert logic and language itself.

Me, I get it. It's thoroughly poetic.

"I will have gold: I will be idle and brutal. Women nurse those fierce invalids, home from hot countries. I’ll be mixed up in politics. Saved. Now I am an outcast.... Forward! The march, the burden and the desert, weariness and anger. To whom shall I hire myself out? What beast should I adore? What holy image is attacked? What hearts shall I break? What lies should I uphold? In what blood tread?" — Arthur Rimbaud, "A Season in Hell." 

Running is right wing.

The President should walk -- "like Socrates, Arthur Rimbaud, the poet, and other great men..."

Western civilisation, in its best sense, was born with the promenade. Walking is a sensitive, spiritual act. Jogging is management of the body. The jogger says I am in control. It has nothing to do with meditation.

MORE: From the WaPo:

The British press is having a wonderful time with all this.

"The Sarkozy jog, say his critics, is a sad imitation of the habits of American presidents, and a capitulation to 'le défi Américain' (a phrase that was the title of a book published here as 'The American Challenge') as bad as the influx of Hollywood movies," writes Boris Johnson, a British member of Parliament and confirmed jogger, in the Telegraph.

"I am not deterred . . . by the accusation that jogging is right-wing," he says. "Of course it is right-wing, in the sense that the facts of life are generally right-wing. The very act of forcing yourself to go for a run, every morning, is a highly conservative business. There is the mental effort needed to overcome your laziness.

"Charles de Gaulle . . . moved with the stately undulation of a giraffe, and never broke into so much as a trot."

"Bad for You" books.

The NYT Book Review this week has a theme: "Bad for You." I don't think the individual books are anywhere near as interesting as collecting them together like this makes them seem. For example, one book is about email -- don't you know you can get yourself in trouble via email? -- and even with Dave Barry writing the review, email is a dull topic. Don't tell me, let me guess. People hit the "send" button hastily, writing lacks the emotional cues of a face-to-face conversation, and blah blah blah. NYT writer Gina Kolata has written a book about our fatness -- "Rethinking Thin" -- that is reviewed by Slate writer Emily Bazelon:

Kolata ends on a quixotic note, by wondering if perhaps Americans weigh more for the same reason that we’re taller on average than we were a century ago — because we’re in better health. Maybe the extra pounds even help contribute to this well-being.

What's "quixotic" about another repetition of the idea that fat people are actually healthy? I suspect this is the sort of thing you say in a book about fat to appeal to the people who would buy a book about fat. If we're getting fatter all the time for the same reason we're getting taller, why does that mean we're more healthy? It seems to mean we have steady access to food, and our bodies evolved to deal with scarcity, so we're really good at using food, loading up when we get the chance, and storing it away for a famine. When the famine never comes -- which is good -- it's bad. Nirvana! Is Nirvana -- the band -- bad for you? Benjamin Kunkel reviews Everett True's "Nirvana":

[I]t is difficult to hold on, from year to year, to all the strength and pain of being young. It is also difficult to remain quite so completely confused. Yet there is honor in confusion — since figuring out how you feel usually means abandoning one of your truths. And the adolescent, like the artist transformed into a commodity, is right to be confused: right to want to be popular; right to be contemptuous of popularity; right to hate the faults in himself that make his popularity undeserved; and right also to hope that winning a deserved popularity might actually redeem, for a time, the entire category of the popular.

There, now, does that help? Should you listen to your Nirvana records again, or do they embarrass you? Would you read a bio of the band? Camille Paglia reviews Jon Savage’s "Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture":

Savage amusingly juxtaposes the earnest social prototype of the “muscular Christian” with the capricious iconoclasm of Arthur Rimbaud and Oscar Wilde. Missing, however, is the Romantic lineage of these writers in Théophile Gautier and other aesthetes : not everything in literature should be interpreted as a direct response to current events or social conditions.

Amuse me with juxtapositions and then piss me off by failing to juxtapose something that my capriciously iconoclastic mind juxtaposed. Here's a review of "The Joys of Drinking." Barbara Holland has written a book about the history of alcohol use, and she's putting a positive spin on it. The Constitution's framers drank a lot, people socialize in bars, etc.

[Holland] can’t abide our current era of moderation. Hip urbanites, she writes, “turned drinking in moderation into a high-class avocation.” Wine tours caught on and microbreweries arrived. The devotees “aren’t drinkers. They’re connoisseurs and critics, priests of ritual, sniffers and tasters, discerning scholars scowling thoughtfully into their glass. Fun has nothing to do with it. ... In the metropolitan haunts of the highly sophisticated, the cocktail is no longer an instrument of friendship but a competitive fashion statement, or one-upmanship.”

Is that moderation? You can have different kinds of attitudes and tastes and still drink a lot. And hasn't there always been a high class and a low class approach to drinking? I don't get it. This review, by Robert R. Harris, is just not critical enough, but it is studded with tasty nuggets of information, gving me the feeling the "Bad for You" themed Book Review is just here to entertain us, to play the "most-emailed" list game to win.

The $218 Film. The LA Times reports from the Sundance Film Festival:

The fire this time was ignited by a documentary called Tarnation from 31-year-old cineaste in extremis Jonathan Caouette, who’s been filming his gruelingly intimate autobiography for more than 20 years (go on, do the arithmetic). And, oh yeah, he made his film for all of $218 (plus change) and edited it entirely in iMovie. It’s a fever dream of sorts (think Arthur Rimbaud, whom the filmmaker resembles in spirit) about the very painful, bizarre and most of all sentient life that produced the film. ... It’s the chronicle of a monumentally dysfunctional family, as if one of the Friedman kids (as in Capturing the . . .) had been preternaturally talented, arrived at a healthy perspective on everything he and his family went through — and then turned the whole thing into a musical.

(Sentient?) I love the idea that cheap technology is removing the barriers to filmmaking, so that the artform becomes as accessible as novel-writing. I'm hoping this will mean more films based on great stories. In the case of "Tarnation," though, the great story seems to be a horrible life. Ah, the sadness underneath art!