Equality? Ridiculous!

There's no way in the world that 7 of the top 14 novels here were written by women.

In fact, there's only one really great novel written by a woman in the past 200 years and that's Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchel.

I'd rate it as the greatest American novel of all time. https://t.co/6OJWFjTDk9

— Ted Joy (@TedJoy71) May 16, 2026

Here's the Guardian's explanation, "Who’s in, who’s out, and how many have you read? The story behind our 100 best novels list":

"Our model of social change is still rooted in midcentury clichés. Younger Americans imagine that starting a family and owning a home was much easier..."

"... for previous generations than it really was. They buy the broad outlines of the boomers’ nostalgia and take it to mean they are inheriting a desiccated society. Confronting injustice, they almost unthinkingly re-enact the outward forms and symbols of college protests of the 1960s, generally to no effect.... The vacuum of middle-aged leadership is palpable. There are some politicians of that middle generation... They have not made this moment their own, or found a way to loosen the grip of the postwar generation on the nation’s political imagination. A middle-aged mentality traditionally has its own vices. It can lack urgency, and at its worst it can be maddeningly immune to both hope and fear, which are essential spurs to action. But if our lot is always to choose among vices, wouldn’t the temperate sins of midlife serve us well just now?"

Writes Yuval Levin, in "Why Are We Still Governed by Baby Boomers and the Remarkably Old?" (NYT).

This gets my "gerontocracy" tag, which you can click to read what I've said about it. Hint: I don't like it. But Levin is making the additional point: It's not just that the old Boomers are clinging to power. It's that the generation after them is terribly weak and empty: "The vacuum of middle-aged leadership is palpable."

I was sad but also amused by the notion of a palpable vacuum. Can you palpate a vacuum? It reminds me of the old childhood revelation: Nothing... is... something.

"I like what one touches, what one tastes. I like rain when it has turned to snow and become palpable" — Virginia Woolf, "Waves" (1931).

"As with previous months, higher prices oozed into just about every sector of the economy, leaving households to feel the strain at the deli counter, shopping mall and just about everywhere else."

Oozed! 

It's getting nasty. WaPo is saying "oozed" in "Prices climbed 7.5% in January compared with last year, continuing inflation’s fastest pace in 40 years/High inflation is undermining a robust recovery, testing policymakers at the Federal Reserve and White House." 

The White House has been touting its actions to lower prices, including targeting corporate consolidation to help create product markets that are more competitive. But inflation has proved a blistering political handicap for Biden, and a litmus test for how many Americans judge the economy. Republicans largely blame Democrats’ $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan for overheating the economy, and the GOP is set to hammer on inflation going into the midterm elections this fall.

ADDED: The word "ooze" — according to the OED — comes from the same line as the Old Frisian word wāse, which means mud, the Old Icelandic word veisa (wetness, mud, marshy ground), the Norwegian veis (marshy soil), and the Danish regional vejs, which means something that is more fun to say in English: oozy bottom. As a noun meaning wet mud or slime, "ooze" goes back to early Old English. The verb "ooze" is more recent, and I can see that the earliest uses had to do with bodily fluids. Example: "Ulcers that lye deep, and ouze out their Matter thro'..winding Passages" (1737). 

Some of the greatest wordsmiths have deployed the verb "ooze":

"When the snow melts in the spring, fields can get so muddy in the plains of Eastern Europe that Russians have a word for it: Rasputitsa, or 'the season of bad roads.'..."

"If Russian President Vladimir Putin orders his forces to invade, analysts believe it would come before the spring thaw. 'The best time to do it is winter because it's going to be a mechanized advance and the mechanized divisions need hard frozen ground'... At a news conference Wednesday marking his first year in office, President Joe Biden warned Putin against an invasion, threatening a strong response by the US and NATO, but waffled over what would happen if Russia made a 'minor incursion,' in an awkward statement he sought to clarify afterward. 'The Russian dictator has not been subtle or secretive about what he wants. He might as well make the national anthem the Beatles' "Back in the U.S.S.R.,"' wrote Max Boot, in the Washington Post. 'He definitely wants to resurrect the Soviet empire, thereby undoing what he has called "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe" of the 20th century. And that requires bringing back into the fold the second-largest former Soviet republic (by population) — the independent state of Ukraine.'"

From "Putin confronts the mud of Ukraine" (CNN).

*** 

From a 2011 post of mine, collecting mud quotes: 

"We sit in the mud... and reach for the stars." — Ivan Turgenev 

"I have tried to lift France out of the mud. But she will return to her errors and vomitings. I cannot prevent the French from being French." — Charles de Gaulle 

"Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance..." — Thoreau 

"My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring, diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?" — Virginia Woolf

Russian, French, American, British.

ADDED: Thank God we have a mentally competent President. He understands the seasons — "First comes spring and summer, but then we have fall and winter. And then we get spring and summer again.... Yes, there will be growth in the spring!"

At long last in the public domain: "The Great Gatsby"!

New York Magazine on the books — from 1925 — that just entered the public domain:

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time, Sinclair Lewis’ Arrowsmith, Aldous Huxley’s Those Barren Leaves, Agatha Christie’s The Secret of Chimneys....

More here, at Duke's Center for the Study of the Public Domain:

The BBC’s Culture website suggested that 1925 might be “the greatest year for books ever,” and with good reason. It is not simply the vast array of famous titles. The stylistic innovations produced by books such as Gatsby, or [Kafka's] The Trial, or Mrs. Dalloway marked a change in both the tone and the substance of our literary culture, a broadening of the range of possibilities available to writers....

From that BBC article: 

I stumbled into the NYT review of Virginia Woolf's first novel.

I'm working on a little research project — results later — that got me into the June 13, 1920 issue of the paper. The short review ends delightfully:

The New Yorker introduces a crossword puzzle.

David Remnick describes it like this:

Five constructors will take turns crafting the puzzles; they are crossword experts whose answers and clues exhibit the same qualities we aim for in all of our writing: wit, intelligence, a wide-ranging interest in the world, and a love of language....

The great Richard Wilbur, who died last fall, once published a poem in The New Yorker about doing a crossword—“a ghostly grille / Through which, as often, we begin to see / The confluence of the Oka and the Aare”—on a train. “It is a rite / Of finitude,” he wrote, “a picture in whose frame / Roc, oast, and Inca decompose at once / Into the ABCs of every day.” Even if you find that you have to look up a few words (oast: “a usually conical kiln used for drying hops, malt, or tobacco”), we hope that the ritual provides you with some pleasurable procrastination.

Oh! He's giving us the go-ahead to look up words. Well, I did the puzzle, and I didn't look anything up to complete it, though I'd have to look up 42 down to know what it referred to. I'm not doing any spoilers here, but having looked it up, I see why I couldn't read what I had.

It's only a weekly puzzle, so there won't be the kind of predictable changing levels of difficulty that you see in a week of NYT puzzles. But it took me about as long as my average for a NYT Friday puzzle, so I'm going to say it's at what we NYT puzzle-solvers call the Friday level. Friday is my favorite level of NYT difficulty, so I'm happy with the New Yorker puzzle so far.

It was nicely literary in a few places: "'Champion Literary Phallocrat,' per Foster Wallace" (which took me a few crosses to see was not Mailer, though DFW names Mailer as one of the "famous phallocrats of his generation" in the "Champion Literary Phallocrat" essay). And "1928 Virginia Wolf 'biography'" (which I got right on first guess, though I doubted myself for a while).

I liked seeing Camille Paglia ("Group that embodied 'a new kind of feminism,' per Camille Paglia”). And Germaine Greer is in there too ("'A ludicrous invention,' per Germaine Greer").

Anyway, nice start for the New Yorker crossword!

"Reading insecurity. It is the subjective experience of thinking that you’re not getting as much from reading as you used to."

"It is deploring your attention span and missing the flow, the trance, of entering a narrative world without bringing the real one along. It is realizing that if Virginia Woolf was correct to call heaven 'one continuous unexhausted reading,' then goodbye, you have been kicked out of paradise."

But you won't read the whole thing. You've just enjoyed this juicy morsel, and who wants Virginia Woolf's heaven anyway? Maybe my next morsel is better than reading that whole thing, that whole thing that's about reading the whole thing. I might satisfy you with something sharper and clearer, like: If Virginia Woolf really thought heaven was sitting around reading continuously, why didn't she stay in her room reading instead of heading out to drown herself?

Enough! That's all I want to say here. I've got another blog post to write. Up there, above this. It's a better place, I'm sure.

"'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.

Stephen King weighs in on Dylan Farrow's statement: "There’s an element of palpable bitchery there."

Full quote: "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...."

Palpate any bitches lately, Steve?

What does "palpable" add? Is it just verbiage — meaningless padding — or is it a way to say that he feels it — he senses it? (It's his truth.) Or does it mean there's some substantial bitchery?

And what's with "bitchery" and "element... of bitchery"? That seems like a way to avoid saying that the woman is a bitch. There's some bitchery in the letter she wrote.

"Speaking crudely, football and sport are 'important'; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes 'trivial.'"

Wrote Virginia Woolf — "it is the masculine values that prevail."

An old quote, echoed here by fashion writer Robin Givhan:

I always compare fashion to sports, and when you think about some of the issues that have come up in sports, particularly in baseball, with steroid use and all of that, you wonder, “Why is Congress having hearings and calling Barry Bonds? What does that have to do with anything?” And you realize it’s because we as a culture, or at least some people in our culture, take sports really seriously, and they believe that it represents something about who we are, about our belief in fair play, and they recognize that that has an impact on younger people. I don’t think that fashion will really change until that same sort of recognition happens. 

I agree with the proposition that sports and fashion are exactly equally important and that it's helpful to keep that in mind even as you personally feel more drawn to one than the other. I hate to think that the essence of being taken seriously is that Congress holds hearings, but I don't think Givhan is saying she wants congressional hearings into the problems of the fashion industry. The baseball hearings are evidence that sports are taken seriously, too seriously maybe.

Keep the equation of sports and fashion in mind and use it to test whether we're taking something more seriously or less seriously than we should. This is similar to the way we analyze reactions to Obama by asking what if Bush had done the same thing.

ADDED: Sports are as related to maleness as fashion is related to femaleness, and the 2 things are equally important. You can get by with 0% of your interest in sports as you do your sports/fashion allocation, but you can't get by with 0% of your interest in fashion, since you must wear clothes. Set your percents however you want other than that.

The total amount of time that is your 100% varies from person to person. I'll bet my 100% fashion/sports time is less than yours!

Mud.

"Life is made up of marble and mud." — Nathaniel Hawthorne

"Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud... And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud. " — Shakespeare

"I made all my generals out of mud." — Napoleon Bonaparte

"We sit in the mud... and reach for the stars." — Ivan Turgenev

"I have tried to lift France out of the mud. But she will return to her errors and vomitings. I cannot prevent the French from being French." — Charles de Gaulle

"Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance..." — Thoreau

"My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring, diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?" — Virginia Woolf

"They teach anything in universities today. You can major in mud pies." — Orson Welles

"POLITICIAN, n. An eel in the fundamental mud upon which the superstructure of organized society is reared. When he wriggles he mistakes the agitation of his tail for the trembling of the edifice. As compared with the statesman, he suffers the disadvantage of being alive." — Ambrose Bierce (from "The Devil's Dictionary")

"'As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.' Having said these things, he spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva.' Then he anointed the man’s eyes with the mud and said to him, 'Go, wash in the pool of Siloam" (which means Sent). So he went and washed and came back seeing." — John 9:5-7

"The broad-backed hippopotamus/Rests on his belly in the mud..." — T.S. Eliot

Listening to books.

Should people who read books look down on people who listen to audiobooks? Many do: "I like to read my books," they say. And the writers can be snobby about it too, like Frank McCourt, who says listening is better than nothing. But he's also snobby about the actors who record audiobooks -- they do "this phony breathing." You should read his books, he's saying, and if you can't do that, you should listen to him reading his books to you.

Well, maybe that's how writers are: Come listen to me, in my world, and see everything as I see it.

Though I don't like the book-reader's flat-out snobbery, some of the preference for reading books over listening to them is justified. If you're reading a book you're probably only reading. You're making a total experience out of the book, and your brain is more deeply engaged, generating mental pictures.

But this is not always so. Some people read a book as a way to fall asleep. They can see sleep coming on as the words blur. The toilet is a favorite place for reading. And then there are the few people -- myself included -- who will read while walking. We're being careless and looking ridiculous at the same time -- especially ridiculous if you need reading glasses.

Book-listeners can try to act superior or at least equal, I note, by emphasizing that they walk while reading. Just call those book-readers "sedentary." Couch potatoes! Why doesn't sitting around with a book come in for the same insults aimed at TV-watching? And don't tell me it's the quality. People listen to a lot of trashy books. And I might be watching "Nights of Cabiria" on my TV.

It's just a different experiece to hear someone intone the words than to look at the words. You gain something by hearing another person's inflections but you lose the ability to search for your own interpretations. A lot depends on the book. Some books yield more meaning when read by a good reader. Humor comes through really well on the audio mental channel. Other books are incomprehensible on audio. You need to control the speed and be free to think about things as you go along.

Back in the day when you had to rent a big set of cassette tapes to hear an unabridged book, I rented "Mrs. Dalloway" for a long car trip only to find that I simply couldn't understand it on tape. I kept going back and starting over, but I never could begin to grasp it. And some wonderful old English actress was doing the reading. I kept feeling as though I could see her there with the book and feeling that I wanted to grab it out of her hands. Let me see that. Even with the financial incentive of having paid too much to rent the tapes, I never got past the first five minutes. I constantly found myself thinking about something and missing the next line. It was an exasperating experience of continually losing my place.

So read books or listen to books or watch TV or listen to music or walk around in silence or have a conversation with some real live people. Whatever you want. All have potential to be sublime or worthless or somewhere in between.