"It is impossible to avoid slop these days. Slop is what we now call the uncanny stream of words and photos and videos that artificial intelligence spits out...."

"'Slop bowl'  is the term many use for the nebulous mash of ingredients served up at fast-casual restaurants.... TikTok feeds, meanwhile, are overtaken by streams of 'fast fashion slop.' Thousands of users have embraced the genre of the 'Shein Haul' reveal.... Kyla Scanlon, an economic commentator who coined the term 'vibecession,' notes that across different kinds of consumption... people are choosing to minimize thought and maximize efficiency, even when the outcome is a little less expressive (your outfit is the same as everyone else’s), a little less satisfying (your lunch bowl tastes just like yesterday’s) or a little less human.... Some psychiatrists say it makes sense that being confronted with nonstop online slop comes with cognitive downside.... So now some posters and shoppers are trying to edge away from it...."

Writes Emma Goldberg, in "Living the Slop Life/Slop videos. Slop bowls. Slop clothing hauls. When did we get so submerged in the slop-ified muck?" (NYT).

Sometimes a word helps us perceive and understand and react to a problem. A word can shape or change the problem. Is "slop" accurate? Is it propaganda?

What are the words that have worked like that?

"Now I don’t know what brought this up but I have no intention of hopping around the world ogling natives and peasants or whatever you had in mind."

Said Benjamin Braddock, the main character in the novel "The Graduate," which I read after reading the obituary of the author Charles Webb. I picked out that quote because of my longstanding critique of travel. The character says that after his love interest, Elaine, tells him, "Before you tie yourself down to being married you should do other things... But wouldn’t it be exciting?... To see all the different lands and the different peoples and so forth?"

I wanted to read "The Graduate" to prepare to read another book by Webb, "Home School," in which he tells what he and his wife (≈ Ben and Elaine) did with their life.

Here's the note, "About the Author," that's in "The Graduate":

Charles Webb seems to have taken the message of his book very seriously and has spent his adult life avoiding the sort of traps that materialism lays for people. Since the success of The Graduate, has shunned the limelight. Both he and his wife have sought to avoid the celebrity and the expectations that success could have brought them. Webb gave away most of the money he made from the novel and reportedly sold the film rights to the book for a mere $20,000.

The novel "The Graduate" is very close to the movie, which I've seen twice, though not recently. It's a very quick read, full of dialogue, but it does help you understand the characters a bit more than in the movie. The main difference is that the huge laugh line from the movie, "Plastics," is not in the book, and in the book Benjamin converts his sports car to cash as soon as he gets to Berkeley, so he's not chasing Elaine in that cool car.

Anyway. Travel. I thought the translation of the bourgeois view of travel into "hopping around the world ogling natives and peasants" was very nice. The character never knows what he wants to do (other than marry Elaine), but other people keep wanting him to do things, and you get the message that he's more advanced just having eliminated all their bad ideas from his life. Traveling is just one of them.

"There's never been a film before about a family that home educates its kids. Very few people in the movie world have had that experience..."

"... so I don't think it's a subject that would be treated objectively. It's a runaway, underground, counter-culture kind of thing - that's why it hasn't been done," said Charles Webb, quoted in "What happened next? (the author will let you know after he dies)," a 2005 article in The Guardian, which I'm reading this morning after blogging the NYT obituary for Charles Webb yesterday.

Webb, the author of the novel "The Graduate," signed away the rights to the characters in his story when he sold the movie rights, and the characters were based on himself and his wife. Webb did write a book about their later life, called "Home School." I was able to purchase this book at Amazon by paying a hefty shipping charge to have it sent from the UK. The 2005 Guardian article says that Webb didn't want the book published until after his death, because he had long ago signed a contract that would allow a film to be made without his consent.

"He had a very odd relationship with money. He never wanted any. He had an anarchist view of the relationship between humanity and money."

Said Caroline Dawnay, who was, for a while, the literary agent to Charles Webb, quoted in "Charles Webb, Elusive Author of ‘The Graduate,’ Dies at 81/His novel was turned into an era-defining movie, but he was never comfortable with its success, and he chose to live in poverty" (NYT).

At his second wedding to [Eve] Rudd — they married in 1962, then divorced in 1981 to protest the institution of marriage, then remarried around 2001 for immigration purposes — he did not give his bride a ring, because he disapproved of jewelry. Ms. Dawnay, the only witness save two strangers pulled in off the street, recalled that the couple walked nine miles to the registry office for the ceremony, wearing the only clothes they owned....

Shedding their possessions became a full-time mission. They gave away a California bungalow, the first of three houses they would jettison, saying that owning things oppressed them. Mr. Webb declined his inheritance from his father’s family but was unable to decline the money from his mother’s; so they gave that away, along with artwork by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Rauschenberg....

In the late 1970s the couple moved back to the West Coast and took their sons out of school, choosing to home-school them, which was not sanctioned at the time.... Charles Webb worked menial jobs: clerk at a Kmart, itinerant farmworker, house cleaner. The couple were caretakers at a nudist colony in New Jersey, earning $198 a week....

In case you were wondering what happened to Elaine and Benjamin after that bus ride they're taking in the end of "The Graduate."

ADDED: One of the sons is "a performance artist who once cooked a copy of 'The Graduate' and ate it with cranberry sauce."

AND: Eve Rudd's brother was the jazz trombonist Roswell Rudd:

"Their cleverest scene together is the one in which Benjamin asks Mrs Robinson if they can't, for once, talk about something."

"Conventionally, that would make him the 'sensitive' one - the one who wants a meaningful relationship, rather than just uncomplicated rutting. But it comes across as cruel and heartless: He's too insensitive to sense her vulnerability, and too uncaring to try to figure it out. So, even in the New Hollywood, Benjamin is a traditionalist - opting for romance and conversation over sex and compartmentalization. Mike Nichols' genius was in finding the sweet spot where edgy sells, providing you smooth out all the rough stuff."

Writes Mark Steyn (on the occasion of the return of "The Graduate" to theaters on its 50th anniversary). (Can you see it in Madison? Yes. But only at 2:00, and it's a beautiful, warm day here. To go to the movies this afternoon would be like taking Elaine to a strip bar, no?)