What, really, does Donald Trump have to do with Thomas Mann's "Magic Mountain"?

I'm prepared for this. I read "The Magic Mountain"... 50 years ago. And right now I'm reading "It’s Time to Talk About Donald Trump’s Logorrhea/How many polite ways are there to ask whether the President of the United States is losing it?" by Susan B. Glasser, in The New Yorker). '

So let's see:

[I]n rambling on so much, Trump reveals just about everything one could ever want to know about him—his lack of discipline, his ignorance, his vanity, insecurity, and crudeness, and a mean streak that knows no limits. “It is remarkable how a man cannot summarize his thoughts in even the most general sort of way without betraying himself completely,” Thomas Mann wrote a century ago, in his novel “The Magic Mountain,” set in a sanitarium perched above the Swiss mountain town of Davos, where Trump spent the better part of this week proving to the stunned attendees of the annual World Economic Forum the continuing relevance of Mann’s observation....

[W]hen Trump reached the fulsome self-praise section of his speech, he explained that he was such an incredible peacemaker that he had even managed to end wars in places where he had not known they were happening. Imagine admitting this about yourself. Another quote from “The Magic Mountain” sprang to mind: “I know I am talking nonsense, but I’d rather go rambling on. . . .”

1. It's not rambling. It's the weave. There's no acknowledgement that Trump himself has explained what he is doing. He calls it the weave. He's in control of it. You just don't like the elaborate tangles of verbiage. 

2. And yet you push "The Magic Mountain" at me! Why isn't Trump terse and to the point? Why isn't Thomas Mann!!!?

3. You don't want to follow the complex feats of language that require you to keep track of numerous threads to visualize the luminous tapestry.

4. Many a reader has gotten fed up with "The Magic Mountain," and she knows it, but I doubt that Susan B. Glasser would regard Thomas Mann as some kind of nut. I picture her denouncing the reader for not digging in, paying attention, trusting the author, and taking the time to understand. 

5. It's not as though Glasser drew upon deep literary experience to come up with material from "The Magic Mountain." It's the famous book set in the location where Trump spoke. To quote it is like quoting your last fortune cookie or scrap of litter right at your feet.

6. What does Glasser really know of "The Magic Mountain"? She's got 2 quotes, and if you go to Goodreads, you'll find both quotes within the top 6 quotes from the book. They are #5 and #6.

7. ##1-4: "Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil"/"It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death"/"Laughter is a sunbeam of the soul"/"There are so many different kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst." I'm tempted to ask Grok to write a pro-Trump essay using those 4 quotes.

"I used to read like a fiend, but I’ve given it up because it took up my time. I paint and draw all the time now..."

"... and watch films and read reviews in the paper. The last book I read was Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, 15 years ago."

From "Rose Wylie: I haven’t read a book in 15 years/The artist on why she had to put down Ulysses, the films that make her cry— and the fellow artist she would invite to dinner" (London Times).

Reading a book takes up time, so it's something to do if you have time that needs filling. You can fill time with other things too. How is reading a book different from those other things, and why do so many people seem to think that it's better than those other things? It's refreshing to hear Rose Wylie announce without shame that she hasn't read a book in 15 years. She prefers other things.

Here's her favorite poem.

"Over the years, Rushdie’s friends have marvelled at his ability to write amid the fury unleashed on him."

"Martin Amis has said that, if he were in his shoes, 'I would, by now, be a tearful and tranquilized three-hundred-pounder, with no eyelashes or nostril hairs.' And yet 'Victory City' is Rushdie’s sixteenth book since the fatwa.... During the pandemic, Rushdie... was already toying with an idea for another novel. He’d reread Thomas Mann’s 'The Magic Mountain' and Franz Kafka’s 'The Castle,' novels that deploy a naturalistic language to evoke strange, hermetic worlds—an alpine sanatorium, a remote provincial bureaucracy. Rushdie thought about using a similar approach to create a peculiar imaginary college as his setting. He started keeping notes...."

From "The Defiance of Salman Rushdie/After a near-fatal stabbing—and decades of threats—the novelist speaks about writing as a death-defying act" by David Remnick (in The New Yorker).

"I believe that nothing living can avoid the political today. The refusal is also politics; one thereby advances the politics of the evil cause."

Wrote Thomas Mann (to Hermann Hesse) in 1945, quoted in "Thomas Mann’s Brush with Darkness/How the German novelist’s tormented conservative manifesto led to his later modernist masterpieces" (The New Yorker). 

The author of the article, Alex Ross, continues:

If artists lose themselves in fantasies of independence, they become the tool of malefactors, who prefer to keep art apart from politics so that the work of oppression can continue undisturbed. So Mann wrote in an afterword to a 1937 book about the Spanish Civil War, adding that the poet who forswears politics is a “spiritually lost man.”... 

[During] the time that the novelist spent at [Princeton U]niversity between 1938 and 1941... Mann called for “social self-discipline under the ideal of freedom”—a political philosophy that doubles as a personal one. He also said, “Let me tell you the whole truth: if ever Fascism should come to America, it will come in the name of ‘freedom.’ ”

That's a great quote — "if ever Fascism should come to America, it will come in the name of 'freedom'" — and I googled it to see if today's anti-freedom leftists had used it against conservatives. 

Looking for Mann, I got Ronald Reagan: "If fascism ever comes to America, it will come in the name of liberalism." 

But it would be a mistake to think Reagan nicked it from Mann and that Mann was the originator of the "if fascism comes to America" clause. In the 1935 Sinclair Lewis book, “It Can’t Happen Here,” there's: “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying the cross.” 

You get the picture. There's a lot of If fascism ever comes to America, it will look like my opponents.

The "conservative manifesto" referred to in the New Yorker article title is "Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man." That book was recently reissued — here — and Ross is displeased by the new introduction, which he says "trivializes" Mann, putting him at "the level of an op-ed columnist":

"Indeed, a number of exiles fell to scowling under the palms.... The composer Eric Zeisl called California a 'sunny blue grave.'"

"Adorno could have had Muscle Beach in mind when he identified a social condition called the Health unto Death: 'The very people who burst with proofs of exuberant vitality could easily be taken for prepared corpses, from whom the news of their not-quite-successful decease has been withheld for reasons of population policy.'... Such doleful tales raise the question of why so many writers fled to L.A. Why not go to New York, where exiled visual artists gathered in droves? ... [T]he 'lack of a cultural infrastructure' in L.A. was attractive: it allowed refugees to reconstitute the ideals of the Weimar Republic instead of competing with an extant literary scene.... Thomas Mann... lived in a spacious, white-walled aerie in Pacific Palisades... He saw 'Bambi' at the Fox Theatre in Westwood; he ate Chinese food; he listened to Jack Benny on the radio; he furtively admired handsome men in uniform; he puzzled over the phenomenon of the 'Baryton-Boy Frankie Sinatra,' to quote his diaries. Like almost all the émigrés, he never attempted to write fiction about America...."

From "The Haunted California Idyll of German Writers in Exile/Wartime émigrés in L.A. felt an excruciating dissonance between their circumstances and the horrors unfolding in Europe" by Alex Ross (The New Yorker).

Alan Dershowitz says, "I think the [Mueller] report is going to be devastating to the president and I know that the president's team is already working on a response to the report."

On ABC's "This Week Today."

Devastating, really? It depends on what the meaning of "devastating" is:

"When I say devastating, I mean it's going to paint a picture that's going to be politically very devastating. I still don't think it's going to make a criminal case."

I looked up "devastating" in the OED and thought it was funny that it said "Frequently fig., esp. in trivial or hyperbolical use: very effective or upsetting; astounding, overwhelming, ‘stunning’...."

Especially in trivial or hyperbolical use.... From the OED's historical examples:

1925 New Yorker 8 Aug. 4/2 Not since the Tango provided luscious livelihoods for many svelte youths has so devastating a dance agitated the town....
1927 H. T. Lowe-Porter tr. T. Mann Magic Mountain (London ed.) I. v. 378 Everything, whether in jest or earnest, was ‘devastating’, the bob-run, the sweet for dinner, her own temperature.
1933 E. Shanks Enchanted Village ix. 133 Oh yes, poor old Julian—I think, to be honest, that he's a devastating bore.
1936 R. Lehmann Weather in Streets i. 11 Oh, darling have you got to go? How devastating.

"'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.

"I think the books I read as a child made me want to write..."

E.L. Doctorow says, giving a quick list of things makes me feel this is exactly what a kid should read... for starters:

Stevenson’s “Treasure Island” and “Kidnapped”; C. S. Lewis’s “Out of the Silent Planet” and “Perelandra”; Mark Twain’s boy books, and his “Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court”; Jack London’s “Call of the Wild” and “White Fang”; Dickens’s “David Copperfield,”  “Great Expectations” and “A Tale of Two Cities”; Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories; Victor Hugo’s “Hunchback of Notre Dame” and “Les Misérables.” Poe’s detective and horror stories; the Horatio Hornblower sea novels of C. S. Forester; all the “Oz” books; and in middle school, “Mario and the Magician,” by Thomas Mann, and Kafka’s “Metamorphosis.” For starters.

Could they package these all in one nice ebook anthology?

Your Morning Slime Mold.

1. Great title for a newspaper, don't you think?

2. What did you wake up to this morning?

3. We've discussed slime mold on this blog before, remember:

Oh, it's slime mold. Dog Vomit Fungus! Remember? I mentioned it here once, you know, that day when I deliberately vomit-blogged. But I've never seen it in my yard before, even though I have seen -- and photoblogged -- some pretty impressive fungus, fungus that makes you think not of vomiting, but of one of those other bodily activities.

4. Meade says he remembers and claims to have participated, and I said it was before his time. (If you click the first link at #3, you'll see it was 2006, 3 years before I met Meade.) He says: "In the comments." I look. "Ah, yes! You're the first commenter":

Meade said...

Is that fresh mulch? Might have come with that. Could be worse - you could have stinkhorn mushrooms... you know - Phallus impudicus.

5. "In Thomas Mann's novel The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg), the psychologist Dr. Krokowski gives a lecture on the phallus impudicus:"

And Dr. Krokowski had spoken about one fungus, famous since classical antiquity for its form and the powers ascribed to it -- a morel, its Latin name ending in the adjective impudicus, its form reminiscent of love, and its odor, of death. For the stench given off by the impudicus was strikingly like that of a decaying corpse, the odor coming from greenish, viscous slime that carried its spores and dripped from the bell-shaped cap. And even today, among the uneducated, this morel was thought to be an aphrodisiac.

6. What did you wake up to this morning? Are your spores dripping from your bell-shaped cap?

It's Kurt Vonnegut's birthday, the first since his death.

So let's read this 1992 Playboy Interview with him and Joseph Heller, who is also dead. There's some talk of Norman Mailer, and he's dead now too.

PLAYBOY: What are you working on, Kurt?

VONNEGUT: On a divorce. Which is a full-time job. Didn't you find it a full-time job?...

VONNEGUT: It seems to me divorce is so common now. It ought to be more institutionalized. It's like a head-on collision every time. It's supposed to be a surprise but it's commonplace. Deliver your line about never having dreamed of being married.

HELLER: It's in Something Happened: ''I want a divorce; I dream of a divorce. I was never sure I wanted to get married. But I always knew I wanted a divorce.''

VONNEGUT: Norman Mailer has what--five divorces now?...

PLAYBOY: Do either of you read any contemporary writers?

VONNEGUT: Well, it's not like the medical profession where you have to find out the latest treatments. I've been reading Nietzsche.

HELLER: And I've been reading Thomas Mann....

PLAYBOY: What about Norman Mailer's?

VONNEGUT: That's none of your business. Norman's a friend of mine.

HELLER: I intend to read it at one sitting....

PLAYBOY: Why don't you guys write more explicitly about sex and its emotional trappings?

HELLER: More explicitly than what? You keep projecting. You keep attaching emotional reactions to sexual reactions. Earlier you used the words ''love'' and ''sex'' and now you're suggesting emotional reactions to sex. By emotional I'm sure you mean something different from the sensory responses.

PLAYBOY: Well, emotions are different from senses.

HELLER: I don't think there is a necessary correlation between emotional responses and sex.

PLAYBOY: Didn't D. H. Lawrence write about emotions?

HELLER: That was the content of his artistic or literary consciousness. I don't think writers have a choice, by the way. I think we discover a field in which we can be proficient and that's our imagination. My imagination cannot work like Kurt's and I don't think his can work like mine. Neither of us could write like Philip Roth or Norman Mailer. I know John Updike has a lot of tales of the sexual encounter. And I suppose there are writers who can do it and will do it and want to do it.

PLAYBOY: Henry Miller?

HELLER: What you get there is the raw activity.... I must say, for me, it doesn't normally make good literature. Fiction having extensive detail about the gymnastics of copulation or sexual congress--or even the alleged responses to it--does not make interesting reading to me. It's like trying to describe the noise of a subway train. There are people who can do it. Young writers go in for that type of description. But when they're finished, all they've done is described the noise of a subway train coming into a station or pulling out of a station. Is that the noblest objective of a work of fiction? To convince the reader that what you're writing about is really happening? I don't think so....

VONNEGUT: Nietzsche had a little one-liner on how to choose a wife. He said, ''Are you willing to have a conversation with this woman for the next forty years?'' That's how to pick a wife.

HELLER: If people were more widely read, there'd be fewer marriages.

VONNEGUT: I will give you all the money that's left after the divorce if you can get me a film clip of Frank Sinatra making it with Nancy Reagan. I think that is the funniest damn thing.

PLAYBOY: In the White House?

VONNEGUT: I don't care where. Those two scrawny people....

A life made out of reading.

From an early obituary for Susan Sontag, who has just died of leukemia:

Sontag was reading by 3. In her teens, her passions were Gerard Manley Hopkins and Djuna Barnes. The first book that thrilled her was "Madame Curie," which she read when she was 6. She was stirred by the travel books of Richard Halliburton and the Classic Comics rendition of Shakespeare’s "Hamlet." The first novel that affected her was Victor Hugo’s "Les Miserables."

"I sobbed and wailed and thought [books] were the greatest things," she recalled. "I discovered a lot of writers in the Modern Library editions, which were sold in a Hallmark card store, and I used up my allowance and would buy them all."

She remembered as a girl of 8 or 9 lying in bed looking at her bookcase against the wall. "It was like looking at my 50 friends. A book was like stepping through a mirror. I could go somewhere else. Each one was a door to a whole kingdom."

Edgar Allan Poe’s stories enthralled her with their "mixture of speculativeness, fantasy and gloominess." Upon reading Jack London’s "Martin Eden," she determined she would become a writer. "I got through my childhood," she told the Paris Review, "in a delirium of literary exaltations."

At 14, Sontag read Thomas Mann’s masterpiece, "The Magic Mountain." "I read it through almost at a run. After finishing the last page, I was so reluctant to be separated from the book that I started back at the beginning and, to hold myself to the pace the book merited, reread it aloud, a chapter each night."

Sontag began to frequent the Pickwick bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard, where she went "every few days after school to read on my feet through some more of world literature — buying when I could, stealing when I dared."

I have never heard of anyone loving reading that much. Say what you will about Sontag and her various political ravings, the woman did truly love reading.