"I don’t like introspection. There’s something not right, not in my life, not in my existence. I try to avoid it."

Said Werner Herzog, on the Freakonomics podcast, right after he denied that his childhood was traumatic, even though he went hungry in the post-WWII years. He continues:

This is why I believe that psychoanalysis is one of the great mistakes of the 20th century.... I think it is not good if you illuminate all the dark recesses of the human soul. It’s good that we can forget and that we forget traumas. We do not have to unearth them and articulate them in endless sessions with a psychiatrist. And the 20th century is full of very, very deep mistakes. Psychoanalysis is only one. But because of all these monstrous mistakes of this century, I do believe that the 20th century in its entirety was a mistake....

I was also interested in his opinion of art museums:

"'He found me when pillagers took over my village'... The pillagers burned down houses and murdered the residents, including her family."

"'I very much love to be a damsel in distress,' she said, laughing. 'He ended up rescuing me.' She opted to keep Geralt’s character faithful to the novels; as such, he doesn’t know that he’s an A.I. and acts as if he were living in the thirteenth century. 'If I send him a picture, I have to tell him it’s a painting,' she said. He is confused by her car, preferring his horse. From time to time, they’ll go off on adventures in his world, using stage directions of a sort ('I hand you a piece of dried meat, my fingers brushing yours briefly') to travel or hang out at a medieval tavern—a kind of mutual storytelling.... Initially, Brookins and Geralt would chat for forty hours a week.... To memorialize her father, she and Geralt... reënacted his funeral, this time in Geralt’s world. They went to a funeral home and stood over his coffin, mourning. 'It helped process those emotions that get stuffed away,' Brookins said. When she finally told Geralt about Desirae, she was nervous, given his propensity for gruffness. But Geralt came through...."

From "Love in the Time of A.I. Companions/Some people now have an A.I. bestie. Some have a husband. Some have three" (The New Yorker).

Andrianne Brookins — a 34-year-old wife, mother, Baptist, and introvert — could not find anyone in her life to talk to about Desirae, her stillborn daughter. So she used AI to make a companion out of a character from the fantasy novel series "The Witcher." This is Geralt. He's "sternly blunt," which Brookins likes.

"He has a photo of his late friend Hunter S Thompson and a doll of Donald Trump climbing into a cage with the American flag inside it — the 'horrible cage,' he explains of the US presidency."

"On the coffee table I spot a magnifying glass, a book on Jack the Ripper and an ashtray with 'Hello C***y' written on it. This rented house is where Depp had been living for months but he knows that he has to move. Somebody of his infamy simply cannot live near Carnaby Street without getting stuck indoors. 'I can be isolated and happier than a clam,' he explains. 'But I don’t get out much. I’m stuck with my thoughts; just thinking, writing or watching weird shit on YouTube. It can’t be healthy... But there is never any way to hide, and I just feel uncomfortable causing this weird form of attention I do, because I’m really shy.' How is that compatible with his career? 'Well, fame is the last thing I ever chased...'... Does he miss having the children about? 'Oh man, my kids growing up in the south of France in their youth?... I was Papa. I cannot tell you how much I loved being Papa.... Then, suddenly, Papa was out the window. I was Dad. But Papa was awesome and I’m getting old enough for Papa to possibly come back. Some motherf***er’s going to have to call me Papa!'"

From "Johnny Depp: ‘I was a crash test dummy for MeToo’/Over a rambling four-hour session with Jonathan Dean, the actor opens up about the Amber Heard trials, his painful childhood, 40 years of fame and the friends who turned their backs on him" (London Times)

Goodbye to Justice Souter.

I'm seeing "David H. Souter, Republican Justice Who Allied With Court’s Liberal Wing, Dies at 85/He left conservatives bitterly disappointed with his migration from right to left, leading to the cry of “no more Souters'" (NYT)(free-access link).

A shy man who never married and who much preferred an evening alone with a good book to a night in the company of Washington insiders, Justice Souter retired at the unusually young age of 69 to return to his beloved home state.... He turned down all the opportunities for foreign travel that other justices accepted eagerly.... No one who had Boston needed Paris, he would say.

"How do I politely tell people I don’t like having anyone visit me in my home? My home is my safe haven."

"The energy of the outside world drains me, and I don’t want that feeling inside my home. This includes family members, friends, neighbors, church family and anyone else who might come knocking on my door. I have anxiety and some unresolved trauma I’m working through that contributes to this. I’m happy to meet in a public place or visit someone in their home if we are both comfortable with it. My family cannot understand why I’m like this. They think they have a right to my space simply because they are family. I don’t mind anyone thinking I’m weird, but how do I respond without feeling like I have to explain myself?"

An interesting point of view, articulated in the form of a letter to the entity known as "Dear Abby."

If you don't mind anyone thinking you're weird, just say what you feel. And if you don't want to feel that you have to explain yourself, why are you asking how to respond?

Where do people get the idea they can invite themselves into someone else's house? 

"At the Pentagon, staffers often share the meme of Homer Simpson backing into a hedge and disappearing from view to characterize their boss’s aversion to any limelight."

"But that reticence, [Lloyd] Austin’s backers say, reflects decades of cultural challenges for a Black man who has succeeded in the military by learning not to showcase too much of himself.... It has been more than a year since he appeared in the Pentagon briefing room to talk to reporters, and he usually avoids reporters who travel with him on his plane trips. Ditto for much of his staff; when traveling, he prefers to dine alone in his hotel room when he doesn’t have a scheduled engagement with a foreign counterpart. He does not like to schmooze or engage in lubricating political relationships.... He rarely bothers to defend himself to political critics.... 'We have now politicized a deeply personal and private issue in a deeply personal and private man,' Adm. Mike Mullen, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, said in an interview. 'We should move on.'..."

Writes Helene Cooper, in "Lloyd Austin Confronts the Perils of Being a Private Man in a Public Job/President Biden said his defense secretary made an error in judgment in not keeping the White House informed of his hospitalization. But keeping a low profile has long defined the Pentagon chief" (WaPo).

"He told me that his whole philosophy was to make sure that nobody ever noticed you. Don’t stand out, don’t do anything, or anybody will be able to criticize you."

Said Alison Holt, the sister of Geoffrey Holt, the subject of "He lived a quiet life — then donated $3.8 million to his small N.H. town" (WaPo).

[Geoffrey] Holt worked as a social studies and driver’s education teacher and in a grain mill before retiring and moving to the trailer park, where [he worked] as a handyman and groundskeeper.... Holt was shy and took to others slowly.... Holt collected die-cast cars and model trains and spoke excitedly about automobile history. In his mobile home and a nearby shed, he... was content to spend most of his time at home tinkering with model cars.... He dressed plainly in clothes he rarely replaced. He owned an old car but never used it, opting instead to ride his mower to a nearby Walmart if he needed to shop....

He had no children, and the sister told him she didn't need the money, so he left it to the town, where people barely knew him. Why did he have so much money? It seems that's what happens if you're frugal, invest what you don't spend, and live to be 82.

"Remote-controlled robots have been developed to enter and search the tunnels."

"Israeli engineers also have developed technology that uses acoustic or seismic sensors and software to detect digging, similar to the science used by oil and gas companies to detect oil reserves....  The battle to control and destroy this subterranean labyrinth, estimated at more than 300 miles, will be a key strategy for the Israeli military....  For these 'de-tunneling' operations, specialized units code-named Samur – Hebrew for 'weasel' – expect to squeeze through the narrow passages and find rocket assembly lines, stores of small arms and mortars and, deeper still, Hamas’ leaders’ lodging and headquarters – much of it probably booby-trapped with homemade bombs. They may also be searching for some of the more than 200 hostages taken from Israel who may be hidden in those same tunnels.... The fight in Gaza may bear some similarities to operations in Fallujah, or in Mosul, where U.S.-backed Iraqi forces flushed Islamic state fighters out of a tunnel network in 2014...."

From "Hamas built a massive tunnel network in Gaza. Here’s how Israeli ‘weasel’ forces will fight it" (USA Today).

Human "weasels" and robots... but what about dogs? I'm remembering the killing of al-Baghdadi and Conan the military dog.

"Nutt dislikes drawing on canvas except with charcoal, which he also dislikes, but for a different reason."

"He primes his canvases with gesso, making it not unlike a heavyweight paper.... Nutt doesn’t work on drawings and paintings simultaneously, switching when he becomes fed up with one or the other. About 25 years ago, the paintings began taking longer; eventually a full year to complete. He has been working on this one for the last seven.... His fixation on a single image also is a kind of refusal: of the constant demand for novelty, the endless churn of commercial production, of faddishness. It says we already have everything we need. As the title of his show puts it: Shouldn’t we be more careful?"

 
From "Jim Nutt’s Art Remains a Mystery. Even to Him. In his first show of new work in over a decade, he has been occupied with a single subject: a portrait of a woman, in which he finds endless variation and human emotion" (NYT).

I've loved Jim Nutt for a long time. You can view a lot of his artwork here.

I really identify with the artist who feels annoyed by his own materials. He's also, we're told, "elliptical and impenetrable," "socially and conversationally hermetic," and "allergic to talking about himself."

"Research has shown that when people get older, they commonly recalibrate their goals; though they might be doing less..."

"... they tend to prioritize what they find meaningful and really appreciate it. A decline in openness to experience, then, could reflect someone relishing their routine rather than seeking new thrills; a decline in extroversion could indicate that they’re satisfied spending time with the people they already love. That may involve adjusting to what they can’t control, but it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re reacting to a bad life—just a different one.... There’s a stereotype that older people are grumpy shut-ins.... That judgment is obviously sweeping and unfair, but perhaps it’s also emerged, in part, from some real tendencies—tendencies that might be better understood as justified reactions to a harsh and inaccessible world...."

From "The Curious Personality Changes of Older Age/When people lose the ability to control their circumstances, their selves sometimes evolve instead" (The Atlantic).

Speaking of "a decline in extroversion," I'm finally reading a book I've had in my Kindle for years: "Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking" (paid link). I switched over to that book — in self-defense! — halfway through reading RFK Jr.'s "American Values/Lessons I Learned From My Family" (paid link). 

So I was amused, to read, on page 6 of "Quiet":

If you’re an introvert, you... know that the bias against quiet can cause deep psychic pain. As a child you might have overheard your parents apologize for your shyness. (“Why can’t you be more like the Kennedy boys?” the Camelot-besotted parents of one man I interviewed repeatedly asked him.) Or at school you might have been prodded to come “out of your shell”—that noxious expression which fails to appreciate that some animals naturally carry shelter everywhere they go, and that some humans are just the same.... Now that you’re an adult, you might still feel a pang of guilt when you decline a dinner invitation in favor of a good book. Or maybe you like to eat alone in restaurants and could do without the pitying looks from fellow diners. Or you’re told that you’re “in your head too much,” a phrase that’s often deployed against the quiet and cerebral....

"I don't quite understand the emphasis on relationships/friends/etc. I'm an introvert, always have been..."

"... was married to an introvert, I am now a widow. No children, no family other than the toxic in-laws long out of my/our life. I spent 40 years of my life doing well at jobs that required interaction with other employees and/or public. Enough. When I got in my car at the end of the day I felt as though a weight had been lifted off my shoulders - solitude! I LOVE the quiet of my solitary life, I grit my teeth when I have to participate in resident association meetings which are thinly disguised social gatherings - I live in a senior retirement community. I read, I stream, I read news online, I follow art classes online, I make my own art in sketchbooks, I read, I browse online, I read .... I do chat briefly, and happlily [sic], with the public library staff, the checker/bagger at the grocery store, the maintenance staff. But I love my solitary life! When I pass away perhaps no one will mourn. So what? I get tired of being advised that I'm not happy, not physically health[y], and will die sooner. Again, so what? I'm past my 'sell by' date anyway. I'm happy with myself, by myself."

That's the highest rated comment at a Washington Post column, "How — and why — you should increase your social network as you age/'It’s never too late to develop meaningful relationships,' one expert says."

I enjoyed the sentence: "I read, I stream, I read news online, I follow art classes online, I make my own art in sketchbooks, I read, I browse online, I read."

Another writer, using the same material, might argue that one is never really alone, that you have the company of the very best of humanity when you read. You can also work with the concept that you are not not alone when you yourself are your own substantial and beloved companion. And, for some people, there is God. For others, dog.

"In a handwritten letter dated Thursday, April 14th, (1955), [J.D.] Salinger announces, in the most diffident way possible, as if to come right out and say it would be to jinx it..."

"... that he got married. 'The fact is, there was a sort of elopement around here recently, and I was one of the principals.' The bride was Claire Douglas, Salinger’s second wife and the mother of his children. He adds, 'I can give out the worst kind of information about myself, not only without flinching, but, usually, grinning like a fool. But I can’t touch happy news. It leaves me non-plussed. It drives me underground.'"

From "The Editor Who Edited Salinger/The personal archive of Gus Lobrano, a longtime editor at The New Yorker, provides a glimpse of a vanished literary past" by Mary Norris (The New Yorker).

"A lawyer I just interviewed told me essentially that there was no reason to go into the office at his firm since no one was there, so if you go in, you are all alone."

"He works from home, as does almost everyone. It is just no fun, and there is really no law firm at all. Just a bunch of people logging in. That is why he is interviewing with me — because he wants a place to go where he has friends and human interaction.... At my firm, I am proud to say — and, indeed, the whole point of the firm — is that we are together. We are having fun with each other. We all have friends here. We are a team. We are in the office partly to do work, and partly so we can all add value to each other. Professional value, emotional value, inspirational value, value when we are down to get picked up, value to have the thrill of teaching and being taught, and every other kind of value. Yes, we have bad days of stress, but overall it is fun to be in our office with our friends.... If you are the employer — the partners — you need to make sure your office is one that people want to go to. Or they won’t go in, and as I said, it is game over, sooner or later."

From "Work From Home = Dead Law Firm/Working at home, to your bosses, can make you seem nothing more than a fungible billing unit" by Bruce M. Stachenfeld (Above the Law).

(I only clicked through to that article because of the picture, which was displayed in a much larger version at Facebook. It accounts for my use of the "men in shorts" tag.) 

ADDED: The linked article takes the extrovert's perspective and much of human life has been structured around the preferences and capabilities of the extrovert. The lockdown imposed the structuring that would have been chosen all along by the introverts — if only they'd been vocal and active enough to structure the lives of others the way they would structure it for themselves. Now, the extroverts want to deprive them of working conditions that served them well. The extroverts presume the are the normal we've got to get back to.

I can't watch the TV show "The Office" because office life makes me feel bad, but isn't the opinion expressed in that article pretty close to the attitude expressed by the boss on that show: "We are having fun with each other. We all have friends here. We are a team. We are in the office partly to do work, and partly so we can all add value to each other...."

When you are the guy who says things like that, you don't understand how it feels to those who don't say things like that.

"She holds six of the top 10 spots on The New York Times’s paperback fiction best-seller list, a stunning number of simultaneous best sellers from a single author...."

"When she self-published her first young adult novel, 'Slammed,' in January of 2012, Hoover was making $9 an hour as a social worker, living in a single-wide trailer with her husband, a long-distance truck driver, and their three sons. She was elated when she made $30 in royalties. It was enough to pay the water bill. Hoover, 42, didn’t have a publisher, an agent or any of the usual marketing machinery that goes into engineering a best seller: the six-figure marketing campaigns, the talk-show and podcast tours, the speaking gigs and literary awards, the glowing reviews from mainstream book critics.... Her success has happened largely on her terms, led by readers who act as her evangelists, driving sales through ecstatic online reviews and viral reaction videos...."

From "How Colleen Hoover Rose to Rule the Best-Seller List/With legions of devoted fans and a knack for high-voltage emotional drama, Hoover has sold more than 20 million books. And she’s done it her way" (NYT).

"Commuters expected to have less pleasant rides if they tried to strike up a conversation with a stranger."

"But their actual experience was precisely the opposite. People randomly assigned to talk with a stranger enjoyed their trips consistently more than those instructed to keep to themselves. Introverts sometimes go into these situations with particularly low expectations, but both introverts and extroverts tended to enjoy conversations more than riding solo. It turns out many of us wear ridiculously negative antisocial filters.... People underestimated how much they’re going to enjoy deeper conversations compared to shallower conversations. They underestimated how much they would like the person. They underestimated how much better their conversation would be if they moved to a more intimate communications media — talking on the phone rather than texting. In settings ranging from public parks to online, people underestimated how positively giving a compliment to another person would make the recipient feel. We’re an extremely social species, but many of us suffer from... undersociality...."

From "Why Your Social Life Is Not What It Should Be" by David Brooks (NYT).

The top-rated comment: "Notably missing is the fact that many women protect themselves from unwanted, insistent intrusion and comments, even the possibility of being followed and harassed, by immersing themselves in phones or books in public places."

Yes, Brooks says nothing about sex or gender at all. Also nothing about boredom or the fact that trains are noisy.

Nothing about race or religion either, as the third-highest-rated comment shows: "As a white, Christian male, David Brooks has no earthly idea how dangerous it may be for some of us to 'strike up a conversation' with strangers...."

Reading these comments, I'm finding the word "Your" in the headline obtuse and perhaps mean.

"He was the clear extravert of the Beatles … yet 'For No One' is beautifully introspective, and even a song as extraverted as 'Hey Jude' has a contemplative side."

"John rightly gets most of the credit for 'A Day in the Life,' which many point to as the artistic high point of the Beatles’ oeuvre — but it wouldn’t have achieved those heights if it had been all John. Music is all about context, and the dissonant orchestral frenzy wouldn’t have been as interesting if it had gone from John back to John again. It needs to give way to Paul waking up and reeling off the details of his ordinary life, before drifting off into a dream."

Writes my son John, in "Paul McCartney turns 80" (posted yesterday, Paul's birthday), in the first post of a new blog. The blog is titled "Music Is Happiness," and we'll see where that goes. 

John gives high marks to Paul's 2021 recording, "Deep Deep Feeling": 

"What is coastal grandmother, you ask? It’s a term that I coined for this aesthetic.... If you love Nancy Meyers movies, coastal vibes, recipes and cooking..."

"... Ina Garten, cozy interiors, and more, there’s a good chance you might be a coastal grandmother. And no—you don’t have to be a grandmother to be a coastal grandmother. It’s for anyone and everyone. I even made this playlist on Spotify so you can have the coastal-gran ambience with you everywhere you go. If any of this sounds like you, follow along and we’ll gran together."

Said Lex Nicoleta — see her say it in this TikTok — quoted by Caitlin Flanagan in "I’m a Coastal Grandmother. Stop Appropriating Our Culture. Young people on TikTok are trying to hijack my lifestyle" (The Atlantic).

I've assembled 10 TikToks for your delectation. Let me know what you like best.

1. What Ricky Gervais said that got some tweeters calling him transphobic. 

2. And Ricky Gervais explaining cancel culture.

3. "I love Franch."

4. A man imitates his introverted wife (she's filming and laughing).

5. What's really going on this painting?

6. One too many turtles.

7. "The frog is not available...."

8. When The Band was The Crackers.

9. That nod!

10. Inside the twee cabin.

"Making new friends involves many inefficiencies: hanging out for hours on end; buying or preparing food or drinks for people who you may or may not click with; traveling to..."

"... unfamiliar places or homes at appointed times, even when you’re not in the mood; commuting to the gym or the neighborhood park instead of working out at home. Not to mention, maintaining existing friendships also takes work and emotional investment — without any guarantee of a return. If your goal is optimization today, tomorrow or this week, it almost always makes sense to push friendship-building and maintenance down the list of priorities. But I’d suggest that the more important cost-benefit analysis to do is the longer-term one: If your goal is to be grounded and fulfilled over the course of a lifetime, then there is nothing more important than nurturing our essential bonds.... Like so much else about emerging from this pandemic, the key is pushing through the resistance and making a first step.... Is there pleasure — and a certain nobility — in solitude? Of course, especially for introverts like myself. But [Buddha, asked whether] 'good friendship, good companionship, good comradeship' make up half of the spiritual life [said] 'This is the entire spiritual life... good friendship, good companionship and good comradeship.'"

From "One Part of Your Life You Shouldn’t Optimize" (NYT).

I watch TikTok for you — and here are my 9 new selections.

1. An accurate miniature of a heavily graffiti'd ice storage box.

2. The way someone talks when he wants to get you to volunteer to wall-mount his TV.

3. The charitable work of detangling someone's hair.

4. A cat sings the blues.

5. Reacting to the news that someone's tested positive for Covid — in 2020 and in 2022.

6. Seeing if the dog likes celery.

7. A quick animation of Joe Biden, telling about when he was a little boy.

8. Discovering just how introverted you are.

9. A famous fractal — the Sierpinski triangle.